Bad Reporting, Not Email, Worse Than Marijuana

MoNickels writes "Turns out, those endless news reports and blog entries in April about "texting makes you stupid" were inaccurate. As linguist Mark Liberman at LanguageLog now reports by way of apologizing to Wilson, it wasn't Wilson's fault, but that of "rotten science journalism." Psychologist Glenn Wilson was reported to have done a study said that chat and email, as the Guardian put it, "are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis." But Wilson says, "This...is a temporary distraction effect—not a permanent loss of IQ. The equivalences with smoking pot and losing sleep were made by others, against my counsel, and 8 [subjects] somehow became '80 clinical trials.'" The original Slashdot story was covered back in April."

Comments

Re:Holy crap

[arose]

Mozilla has built in Flash playback now?

Pot use and intellectuals

[totallygeek]

Uh, Berkeley Software Distribution! BSD, LSD...coincidence?!?!? Damn fine projects came from lids of herb. Get over it!

Re:Holy crap

[Afrosheen]

I have the latest Quicktime installed and every codec I can think of, and on Windows, I STILL can't watch h.264. It's not really 'there' yet so don't sing it's praises. I even tried it with the Windows version of Mplayer thinking something magical would happen but nope...no dice.

  Maybe I'll give it a shot if I can find a Mac.

Re:Email vs. Marijuana

[bogado]

If marijuana is or isn't addictive is a no issue, it is a fact that alcohol and nicotine are both addictive and they are perfectly legal in most countries. Some people feel that we should persecute those who smoke or drink and phase those two products into illegality, but I do fell otherwise, I think we, by we I mean my country, your country and every other one, should prefer freedom over prohibition.

I particularly don't use marijuana or nicotine, but I do drink and have friends that do smoke, and guess what? As long as they respect me and don't "smoke me" in closed places I don't really mind. It's bad for them, and I would be happy if they would stop, or in some cases slow it down, but it is their choice after all, I sure as hell don't want to stop drinking, I like it, and do it occasionally with my friends (you call social drinking).

In the light of those I think marijuana should be legal, be it addictive or not. Maybe even harder drugs should be legal, maybe with a better medical accompaniment or some kind of insurance added to the market price. Fact is that what makes the drug market so good and profitable is the fact that it is forbidden and the creation of legalized ways to acquire drugs would hurt this market that is associated with violence and many problems.

Just to be on the safe here, I don't think that all should be magically liberated tomorrow, but a studied phase out of the underworld can make things better.