Psychosis patients who have used cannabis have greater premorbid social skills than patients with psychosis who have never used the drug, data from five European countries suggest.

Laura Ferraro, a PhD student in psychiatry at the University of Palermo, in Italy, and colleagues found that lifetime cannabis use was associated with significantly increased improvements in premorbid social adjustment among psychosis patients.

Moreover, the results, which were presented here at the European Psychiatric Association (EPA) 24th ​Congress, indicate that the impact of cannabis on sociability was significantly greater among psychosis patients than among healthy individuals.

Ferraro said that psychotic patients who consume cannabis are thought to represent a distinct subgroup with better cognitive and social skills, which "is necessary to engage in illegal drug consumption." Moreover, a previous study by Ferraro and colleagues showed that among patients with first-episode psychosis (FEP), those who used cannabis had a higher IQ.

Noting that the...