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Study Shows Marijuana Use In Teens Correlates To Decreasing IQ
retroworks writes "The BBC reports on a paper published in the U.S.'s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing a correlation between persistent, regular cannabis use and risk of lower IQ. The study finds the risk particularly correlates use of cannabis by teenagers who use the drug "four times a week year after year." The more people smoked, the greater the loss in IQ. Reviewers of the study at King's College Institute of Psychiatry states that the data and methodology are exceptional, but she also cautions that there may be another explanation, such as depression, which could lower IQ while stimulating marijuana use. The study does not mention or rule out 'nocebo' effects, i.e. just feeling stupid for spending your teens hanging out with potheads."
Tag news article 'Propaganda'
Drinking Wine or Beer 4 times a day year after year will reduce your IQ. Over use of ANYTHING will cause problems.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I was gonna go to class, before I got high
I coulda' cheated and I coulda passed, but I got high
I'm taking it next semester and I know why, (why man) 'cuz I got high
Because I got high
Because I got high
I'd say the biggest drawback to pot smoking in teenage years is a lack of ability to find and keep a job. Being a loaf isn't conducive to paying the bills, which is the skill teenagers need to learn first and foremost. Self-sufficiency is paramount to heading off to college, or work, or simply moving on in life and I'd wager is more important than grades, social status, or if they are pot-heads or not. Its possible to smoke weed and still have a reasonable income, but the desire to be self-sufficient needs to come first or the stoner mentality wins over.
I know what you're thinking. Did I forward 65,535 packets or 65,536 packets?
Does smoking pot as a teen lower your IQ, or are stupid teens more likely to smoke pot?
Those who started after the age of 18 did not have the same IQ decline.
"It's such a special study that I'm fairly confident that cannabis is safe for over-18 brains, but risky for under-18 brains."
-King's College professor Terrie Moffitt.
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
I think all things should be free to use as long as you're not significantly interfering with someone else's enjoyment. For example, the government should stop telling us e.g. that we can't use that empty house + land over there because it "belongs" to someone else.
People are free to kill their IQ, but should be discouraged. Putting potheads in jail is wrong because no-one is at risk of harm from potheads, not because being a pothead is somehow a grand expression of freedom. If they fail and harm themselves as a result, the state should treat them - with group freedom comes group responsibility.
Of course, your libretardian argument leads to the conclusion that drink driving is OK as long as you don't cause an accident - because, after all, money solves all problems, including the problem of dying or becoming a paraplegic.
Breaking the law on a regular basis with a decent chance of being caught and treated harshly by the system probably correlates with a low IQ too, doesn't it?
Or you could stop being a busybody twat.
"Do you think you should be free people, even free to kill your IQ or do you think you should be controlled by the state, told what to do, what not to do, thrown in jail if you refuse to comply?"
A free society doesn't mean you have freedom to do as you damn well please no matter what and screw everyone else. If you hadn't smoked so many joints you might understand this basic fact of human civilisation which has been true since probably before we came down out of the trees since even animals don't tolerate anarchy in their packs or herds.
How far does that go? Can I invite all my friends into your house while you're at work? After all, why can't we use that empty house? It doesn't matter that it "belongs" to someone.
I'd argue the psychedelics specifically can actually broaden your perspective on the world. "It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain. Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used, " said Herbert, 42, an early employee of Cisco Systems who says he solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead -- who were among the many artists inspired by LSD. "When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing," said Herbert who intervened to ban drug testing of technologists at Cisco Systems.
But what about all the alleged positive effects like eating a whole bunch and becoming a lazy fast ass and getting arrested...oh wait...
"at work"?
No sig today...
IQ tests are incredibly subjective anyway, and have innate cultural biases. Essentially all an IQ test calculates is how good you are at the test. It has very little to do with "intelligence", however loosely defined.
(same guy here, my first account is limited because of trolls, like you)
That's good, because I come from a fairly rich family and - since it's not a governmental issue - I can just take over the land I want.
- it's not a government issue, it's a private matter. Just because 'you come from a rich family' doesn't change that fact that government shouldn't be involved in private disputes of this type.
That's good, because without group responsibility there is no government, and see above.
- quite the contrary, there is no such thing as 'group responsibility', there is only individual responsibility. The very idea of 'group responsibility' should be immediately taken with all sorts of prejudice. Should you pay a fine for somebody else's transgressions? Should you be thrown to jail for somebody else's crime?
Are not everybody paying for the other people's mistakes because of this ridiculous idea of 'group responsibility' at the very moment when the government steals from everybody to bail out the failed companies, like banks? What about all the subsidies that are given to corporations to do whatever they do, just because they have good access to the power in the government, isn't everybody made responsible 'as a group' for their behavior? You are a troll, though the moderators don't understand it.
If you hit somebody with a car, it's a private matter. People don't need government to have working competing criminal and judicial systems.
As to mass transit - the very concept of it was destroyed in USA with the government subsidizing the auto, gas and road building companies, when they stepped in to create that giant network of unprofitable (and thus unsustainable and unmaintainable in the long run) system of highways, that in reality was just a power grab and a huge heist.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
If you leave it as you found it and make good on any damage, I couldn't give a fuck what you do with my stuff.
There are small communities (from traditional English villages to new age communes) which have open door policies like this. But capitalism with its modern cities and covetousness has pretty much fucked up this philosophy.
I mean you would get the same result with various drug or even alcohol : active regular consumption of psycho active product during the formative years until adulthood has a chance to lower your IQ. So that does not seem very special.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
You do realize that we (the netherlands) have a much lower percentage of regular cannabis users than, say, the US, right?
I don't know if you knew this or not but it's actually illegal. Oh and by the way, no, getting high to make yourself feel better about all your problems and pretending that it makes them go away is not healthy at any usage frequency.
It's not illegal where I live.
But I agree that "getting high to make yourself feel better about all your problems and pretending that it makes them go away is not healthy at any usage frequency".
Just that there're lots of people who don't do this to make problems go away at all. It's basically a harmless bit of fun and relaxing to wind off after a day of work. What's wrong with that? It's the same with having a bit of wine or beer or whatever in the evening.
It's not about individual intelligence, it's about herd intelligence. If individuals lower their intelligence, the intelligence of the group goes down, and in a democratic society that is devastating. It's actually a problem in any society (except maybe a tyranny or dictatorship), but it's worse when individuals have the ability to influence society directly. Unless, of course, drug users would be willing to give up their vote, which I don't imagine is going to happen anytime soon (nor, indeed, would it be enough to counteract the effects completely.)
By lowering your intelligence, you aren't hurting other individuals, you are hurting your entire culture and their ability to make prudent and intelligent decisions, which in a way is worse than harming individual people, since the effects can last for generations.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Mod you down -- oh, but why?
When you use such generalizations as "...they're all completely drug-fucked wastes of space..." and respected scientific terms such as "the not being a complete cunt part of your brain" why would we think you unworthy of notice? Why would we not wish to bask in such measured delivery of your wisdom? When you proclaim the devil's weed will "...destroy your mind..." why would we think that to be hyperbole and scare mongering? Oh good sir, taunt us not with your desire to be unheard -- to be banished from our eyes and minds. You do us great injury to suggest such a thing -- even in mockery.
Mod him up! Mod him up, my friends. We must all see what "not being a dickhead" looks like. We must all learn from this shining example.
Thought thinks itself.
- it's not a government issue, it's a private matter. Just because 'you come from a rich family' doesn't change that fact that government shouldn't be involved in private disputes of this type.
It changes a lot: it means I can pay security guards to stop you getting back into the house you thought was yours. Government's not involved, so good luck raising your own army.
Should you pay a fine for somebody else's transgressions? Should you be thrown to jail for somebody else's crime?
Communities and whole countries are made worse off all the time because of the actions of a few. This will always happen for as long as the actions of one person has an indirect effect on more than one other. Welcome to reality, and I'm sorry you're having such trouble coping with it.
Prison is a way of stopping those dangerous to society from causing harm to society. Fines are usually a dumb idea as implemented, although I guess they could be used to rein in the abusively powerful. Using either for mere punishment is fairly ineffective, as America should have learnt by now.
Are not everybody paying for the other people's mistakes because of this ridiculous idea of 'group responsibility' at the very moment when the government steals from everybody to bail out the failed companies, like banks?
I have no problem with the socialisation of losses. My issue is with the capitalisation of profit.
You are a troll, though the moderators don't understand it.
You are probably mentally ill, and the moderators do understand it. But this is irrelevant - what matters is that you make a crap argument.
If you hit somebody with a car, it's a private matter. People don't need government to have working competing criminal and judicial systems.
So, like I said, when I get drunk and hit you with a car, good luck stopping me before I do it again to your family.
Looking at roman_mir's posting history, I'm fairly sure that a dictatorship is his preferred choice. Except he will call it "The Corporation" instead of "The Government".
Mod you down? If pot heads are the complete fuck ups you describe I doubt there are legions of them moderating at slashdot.
So? The chances are, you are not "destined for greatness" no matter what you do. Why waste your life chasing for a winning lottery ticket rather than simply relax and enjoy what you can have? Besides that the lottery company - the 1% - have a harder time exploiting you if you don't buy into the lie, I mean.
Most people can never be great, because great means exceptional, and most people are average by definition. You are not exceptional and will never be great. And there's no shame in that, no matter how much you're trying to evoke it.
The stereotypical stoner mentality - "relax, take it eeeeasy" - is the antithesis of the rat race mentality, and almost impossible to exploit, so of course the people who benefit from having all the little hamsters spin their wheels fight pot. And since they are nasty people, they use nasty methods, to the point of calling their fight a War with capital W, complete with propaganda front to complement the armed forces and prison camps. And all that should really make you wonder if you should trust them to be quite honest.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Name the drug that you think should be kept illegal, and I will explain to you why it should be legalized.
Crystal Meth.
Bath Salts.
PCP.
I don't know, smoking sugar doesn't seem like such a good idea.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
correlation does not imply.. um...
wait, wait...
Crystal Meth.
Methamphetamine is already legal by prescription and it is prescribed to both children and adults. Most of the harm caused by recreational methamphetamine is caused by toxic byproducts that are left over from poorly controlled and completely unregulated production processes, which is a direct result of prohibition; such things are not present the pharmaceutical grade methamphetamine that doctors prescribe.
Bath Salts.
You will have to be more specific, since that is a generic name for a number of stimulants that are also produced under poorly controlled and unregulated conditions. Yes, the media has been playing up the risk, but the stimulant psychosis is not news, and incidents involving caffeine seem to go unnoticed (or do you really think coffee should be illegal?):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19407709
The difference, of course, is that caffeine pills come with dosage information, their production is regulated, and you know that they contain caffeine. "Bath salts" come with no such information, and you have no idea what they contain -- it might be MDPV, but it could just as easily be caffeine, some unknown byproduct of MDPV synthesis, or something that is only known among drug researchers. Do you see the pattern yet?
PCP.
PCP is legal by prescription (same schedule as methamphetamine), for use as a painkiller. Recreational users have the same problems as recreational methamphetamine users: poor production, unknown dosage, etc. There is not much more to be said -- the problem here is not the drug, it is the law.
Palm trees and 8
Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn't gonna make you kill people, and...it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorism, but...well, son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored and...it's when you're bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or...being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything!
-Randy Marsh
Propaganda: MARIJUANA LOWERS IQ
The difference is in how this is presented. A scientific presentation cannot possibly say that marijuana is a causal factor until at least all of the following are addressed:
There are a lot of things that can cause the results the scientists saw -- which is good news for them, since it means they have plenty of questions to answer. Unfortunately, the media will see this, ignore the part about heavy users, spend no time discussing confounding factors, and jump right on the "marijuana is bad" bandwagon. Typical, unsurprising, propaganda-driven approach.
Palm trees and 8
As far as I'm concerned, this study really doesn't matter -- even if it *is* right from a methodology and execution perspective, which I'm kind of questioning based on my reading of the news article about it where the only comments were from the Partnership for a Drug Free America, and the fact that it involves self-reporting from surveys.
Regardless, at a gut level, it seems risky to *encourage* teens to use mind-altering drugs, be it pot, booze or Adderall (it's funny, we never hear these people want to run studies showing the risk of putting developing brains on anti-depressants or stimulants).
But all of this seems to miss the point -- it seems like people opposed to marijuana legalization point to studies like this with a "SEE!!! IT"S BAD FOR YOU!" attitude, as if the only result that would rationalize legalization is the impossible one (for pot or anything else), where chronic, daily smoking of pot results in nothing more serious than an urge to drink more water.
This won't happen, and it's tiresome to see these kinds of studies used as some kind of justification for continuing a criminal justice empire costing billions of dollars a year that undermines the constitutional rights of everyone that has utterly failed to accomplish its goal.
- if you're going to post AC to insult people, roman_mir, at least make your sentence style and impotence less obvious.
Whilst the under-reported initial neurotoxicity claims for MDMA were overstated, there remains evidence of problems. Wikipedia's article has a few links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mdma#Long-term_effects_on_serotonin_and_dopamine