The Meth Hypothesis: Why Normal People Believe in Conspiracy Theories

The Meth Hypothesis

Less than 50%
We already know a category of people who hold both bizarre and persecutory beliefs – schizophrenics and schizotypal personalities. We also know that amphetamines will make a normal person start thinking like these people on GLP. Psychologists will even use amphetamine addicts to study schizophrenia and schizotypy for this reason. Could this be what is causing this increase? There may be other factors contributing to the increase in weird beliefs – the rise of the internet, increasing marijuana use, globalization and diversity, fears regarding the environment etc. But only amphetamines are proven to produce odd and persecutory beliefs (the evidence for cannabis is much weaker). So let’s look at the stats. Since there doesn’t seem to be any official statistics on the overall number of meth users, I’ve chosen treatment admissions as a percentage of the population from SAMHSA as a proxy. These are all amphetamines but they all have a similar effect and meth is the most common.

Source:
[link to staffanspersonalityblog.wordpress.com (secure)]