Written by Annemarie Lange

According to Google Analytics, pornography searches increase by 4,700% when kids are using the internet in the hours after school ends.

Like it or not, teens are using their devices to access pornography on a regular basis in today’s technology driven society. Where previous generations were cautious of a stolen Playboy magazine, current parents are looking for guidance on how to shield their teens from the ever available, internet pornography.

The average child is now accessing pornography at the age of 11 – and that is much younger than the legal age for viewing such material. Unfortunately, the access to adult content is easy and is available in a couple clicks. Even though most mature and pornographic sites have a pop-up warning away minors, there is nothing to stop them from clicking the ‘over 18’ button and viewing inappropriate material.

Written by Pauline Anderson

Cannabis use directly increases the risk for psychosis in teens, new research suggests.

A large prospective study of teens shows that “in adolescents, cannabis use is harmful” with respect to psychosis risk, study author Patricia J. Conrod, PhD, professor of psychiatry, University of Montreal, Canada, told Medscape Medical News.

The effect was observed for the entire cohort. This finding, said Conrod, means that all young cannabis users face psychosis risk, not just those with a family history of schizophrenia or a biological factor that increases their susceptibility to the effects of cannabis.

“The whole population is prone to have this risk,” she said.

The study was published online June 6 in JAMA Psychiatry.

Rigorous Causality Test

Increasingly, jurisdictions across North America are moving toward cannabis legalization. In Canada, a marijuana law is set to be implemented later this year.

With such changes, there’s a need to understand whether cannabis use has a causal role in the development of psychiatric diseases, such as psychosis.

To date, the evidence with respect to causality has been limited, as studies typically assess psychosis symptoms at only a single follow-up and rely on analytic models that might confound intraindividual processes with initial between-person differences.

Determining causality is especially important during adolescence, a period when both psychosis and cannabis use typically start.

For the study, researchers used random intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPMs), which Conrod described as “a very novel analytic strategy.”

RI-CLPMs use a multilevel approach to test for within-person differences that inform on the extent to which an individual’s increase in cannabis use precedes an increase in that individual’s psychosis symptoms, and vice versa.

The approach provides the most rigorous test of causal predominance between two outcomes, said Conrod.

“One of the problems in trying to assess a causal relationship between cannabis and mental health outcomes is the chicken or egg issue. Is it that people who are prone to mental health problems are more attracted to cannabis, or is it something about the onset of cannabis use that influences the acceleration of psychosis symptoms?” she said.

The study included 3720 adolescents from the Co-Venture cohort, which represents 76% of all grade 7 students attending 31 secondary schools in the greater Montreal area.

For 4 years, students completed an annual Web-based survey in which they provided self-reports of past-year cannabis use and psychosis symptoms.

Such symptoms were assessed with the Adolescent Psychotic-Like Symptoms Screener; frequency of cannabis use was assessed with a six-point scale (0 indicated never, and 5 indicated every day).

Survey information was confidential, and there were no consequences of reporting cannabis use.

“Once you make those guarantees, students are quite comfortable about reporting, and they become used to doing it,” said Conrod.

Marijuana Use Highly Prevalent

The first time point occurred at a mean age of 12.8 years. Twelve months separated each assessment. In total, 86.7% and 94.4% of participants had a minimum of two time points out of four on psychosis symptoms and cannabis use, respectively.

The study revealed statistically significant positive cross-lagged associations, at every time point, from cannabis use to psychosis symptoms reported 12 months later, over and above the random intercepts of cannabis use and psychosis symptoms (between-person differences). The statistical significances varied from P < .001 to P < .05.

Cannabis use, in any given year, predicted an increase in psychosis symptoms a year later, said Conrod.

This type of analysis is more reliable than biological measures, such as blood tests, said Conrod.

“Biological measures aren’t sensitive enough to the infrequent and low level of use that we tend to see in young adolescents,” she said.

In light of these results, Conrod called for increased access by high school students to evidence-based cannabis prevention programs.

Such programs exist, but there are no systematic efforts to make them available to high school students across the country, she said.

“It’s extremely important that governments dramatically step up their efforts around access to evidence-based cannabis prevention programs,” she said.

Currently, marijuana use in teens is “very prevalent,” she said. Surveys suggest that about 30% of older high school students in the Canadian province of Ontario use cannabis.

“I’d like to see governments begin to forge some new innovative policy that will address this level of use in the underaged,” Conrad said.

Reducing access to and demand for cannabis among youth could lead to reductions in risk for major psychiatric conditions, she said.

A limitation of the study was that cannabis use and psychosis symptoms were self-reported and were not confirmed by clinicians. However, as the authors note, previous work has shown positive predictive values for such self-reports of up to 80%.

Unique Research

Commenting on the findings for Medscape Medical News, Robert Milin, MD, child and adolescent psychiatrist, addiction psychiatrist, and associate professor of psychiatry, University of Ottawa, said the study is at “the vanguard” of major research investigating cannabis use in adolescents over time that is being carried out by that National Institute on Drug Abuse in the United States.

“The study is at the forefront because it is specifically looking to measure psychosis symptoms and cannabis use in adolescents, and the model they are using strengthens the study,” said Milin.

That model uses “refined measures or improved measures to look at causality, vs what we call temporal associations,” he said.

The fact that the study investigated teens starting at age 13 years is unique, said Milin. In most related studies, the starting age of the participants is 15 or 16 years.

He emphasized that the study examined psychosis symptoms and not psychotic disorder, although having psychotic symptoms increases the risk for a psychotic disorder.

The study was supported by grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Dr Conrod and Dr Milin have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

JAMA Psychiatry. Published online June 6, 2018. Abstract

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**Caution: Not For Younger Readers**
Includes Some Graphic Content and Links

Before the dust has settled on a school sex ed controversy in Chicago, another outrageous sexuality “education” scandal has erupted, this time in Oregon.

School personnel and students as young as 11 years old from 16 school districts were invited to the annual Adolescent Sexuality Conference in Seaside, Oregon.

Available material included handouts and pamphlets that encourage adolescent “dry humping” to save lives, “cyber and phone sex…bathing together, shaving each other, wearing each other’s underwear, role playing, buying an extra-large pair of pajama bottoms to sleep in together, lap dances and strip teases…” and discuss meth use for having “lots of sex with lots of partners for long periods.”

There was also “a workshop where the speaker brought students to a porn website and taught them to program virtual women….When you press a certain command, it tells her to perform various sexual acts.”

Interestingly, when interviewed, Brad Victor, the director of the conference (which receives government funding), arrogantly and stubbornly refused to answer questions about the controversial content. Ironically, he characterized questions about the controversial materials as “inappropriate.” Click here to watch the illuminating news report.

Sex “educator” or perverse porn purveyor?

Keynote speaker Cory Silverberg shared that “Teledildonics basically refers to the control of sex toys over the Internet; the remote use of sex toys.” Silverberg is a Canadian sex educator and former founder of the “anti-capitalist, egalitarian” sex toy co-op called “Come As You Are.”

Silverberg wrote the book What Makes a Baby, a picture book for children from preschool to age 8 that teaches them about the ways homosexuals and “transgenders” acquire children.

Homosexual activists become unhinged about any social science research that comes to conclusions they don’t like, applying standards to these studies that they would never apply to studies whose conclusions they like. Well, sexpert Cory Silverberg wrote in one of his articles that “some activities… (like using vibrators) are more popular among observant Christians.”

Surprised by such a claim, I pursued it a bit further, following the link Silverberg provided and found the source of this peculiar statement. In another article about vibrators,  Silverberg wrote this: “According to Xandria Collection’s ‘Toys in the Sheets’ survey, the most common vibrator user was a white Christian married woman, in her thirties, who votes Republican.” The website Xandria Collection has been selling “sex toys and adult accessories for an amazing 40 years.” Yes, folks, the source for his dubious claim was a survey conducted by an online sex toy website.

Silverberg has also written multiple articles for Huffington Post’s “education” section. Here are two titles:

• “What Gender Doesn’t Have to Do With Making Babies,” in which he says that in his book on how babies are made he explains that “some bodies have eggs and some don’t. Some bodies have sperm and some don’t. Some bodies have a uterus and some don’t.” But he emphasizes that he does not “gender the bodies” or “gender their parts.” He refuses to identify male body parts with men or female body parts with women because some people who claim to be men are in reality women, and some people who claim to be women are in reality men. And these are the bizarre notions that comprehensive sex “educators” want taught to even our youngest children in public schools funded by taxpayers.

•  “We Need a New Orientation to Sex” in which he complains that “Embedded in this idea of sexual orientation is the (false) notion that there are two sexes, and two genders, and that gender is the central focus and most important aspect of sexual desire.”

Twenty years ago, most Americans would have viewed adults who would expose other people’s children to the kind of perversity that children were exposed to at this conference as, well, perverts. But now this kind of person is being invited into and paid by our schools. Their arguable notions about human sexuality and flourishing are informing or rather deforming curricula. Teachers are taking the befouling ideas, values, and beliefs they pick up from these conferences into the classroom to twist the minds of other people’s children and undermine both innocence and modesty.

What parents can and should do

• Parents in every community in America should be asking their elementary, middle, and high school administrators to see all curricular and supplementary sex ed resources that may be presented to students or that teachers are being exposed to in professional development seminars, workshops, and conferences. And they should ask to be informed of any speakers who will be invited to speak to students.

• Parents should inform their public school administrations and their children’s teachers that under no circumstance are their children to be exposed to any resources or activities that address homosexuality, gender confusion, sexual fantasy, or masturbation.

• Parents should insist that the only information teachers should convey to middle and high school students about pornography is that there is an abundance of research suggesting that pornography use affects the neurochemistry of the brain resulting in addiction, low libido, and erectile dysfunction in young men. Physiology teacher and TED Talk speaker Gary Wilson, writes that “In May 2014, JAMA Psychiatry published a study by the Max Planck Institute. It found that years and hours of porn use correlated with loss of grey matter in the brain’s reward system. Lead researcher Kühn stated that study results ‘could mean that regular consumption of pornography more or less wears out your reward system.’” This is what educators who truly care about the health and welfare of children would teach them.

• Parents should insist that teachers share with middle and high school students the most current research from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on the health risks for the group the CDC designates “men who have sex with men” (MSM):

1.)  [Men who have sex with men] represent approximately 2 percent of the United States population, yet are the population most severely affected by HIV. In 2010, young gay and bisexual men (aged 13-24 years) accounted for 72 percent of new HIV infections among all persons aged 13 to 24, and 30 percent of new infections among all gay and bisexual men. See source here.

2.)  In 2012, 75 percent of the reported [primary and secondary] syphilis cases were among men who have sex with men (MSM). See source here.

Parents and Concerned Taxpayers: Be pro-active. Insist on the research about MSM and porn use be taught to middle and high school students, and insist that all pornographic, inappropriate material and ideas  be prohibited from being presented to students. Trying to remove malignant materials from public schools is much more difficult than preventing them from getting a muddy foothold in the first place.

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