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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."
4 times a week, not 4 times a day.
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?
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.
It affects reading comprehension also....
Propaganda by whom, and for what purpose? How do you identify it as propaganda instead of legitimate science? You have to answer these basic questions and support your answers with evidence before anybody is going to buy into your conspiracy theories.
Propaganda by whom, and for what purpose? How do you identify it as propaganda instead of legitimate science? You have to answer these basic questions and support your answers with evidence before anybody is going to buy into your conspiracy theories.
Propaganda; n. Any material which proposes to sway a reader to form a conclusion that conflicts with your own.
It was a longitudinal study. First assessment was before anybody had smoked anything, and it was the change in IQ that was tracked.
I noticed the article talked about people who kept on smoking pot until they were 35. I though I'd be a counter-example to this study, but I only smoked pot heavily in 9th grade. Before that I was universally called the "space cadet", and was infamous for getting lost on the way to the bathroom. I managed to get a D- in 8th grade, which is incredibly hard to do, especially in a school with low standards and easy teachers who hate giving F's. My IQ never tested particularly high as a kid. In 9th grade, I got all A's, and mostly A+'s. Going to school stoned was great. I even joyed spelling tests! By 10th grade, I'd smoked so much pot I burned out on it. I could get high just going for a jog. I gave it up and never started again. School was a lot harder while not stoned, but I still managed a respectable 3.85 average (9th - 12th, back when 4.0 was the max).
My memory remains a leaky can, and I've wondered if smoking pot in 9th grade degraded it any. Thanks for the link to that article about pot improving memory. It does make me feel a bit better. I haven't been officially tested lately for my IQ, but on a dumb on-line quiz that my friends were all taking, I got 100% right, far higher than any of them, and most of them are pretty sharp. If there's a negative impact of heavy smoking for one year in the early teens, I don't know what it is.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Teenagers who are in the "I know everything" stage can be very frustrating when you try to explain the dangers.
Probably because you're an adult in the "I know everything" stage, and think you know the dangers. Funnily enough, teenagers with internet access can easily learn more about a given subject than you know offhand, and it may surprise you that some of them actually research marijuana before smoking it. Which is often more than their parents can manage before laying down the law to them about it.
In fact your entire attitude stinks, and teenagers can smell that a mile away. The teenager doesn't actually think he knows everything, but he has learnt that his parents don't. Yet many of them still insist on being treated as unquestioned authorities. Hence your "frustration" when you're not treated that way. It's a parenting problem, not a growing up problem.
I'll bet $100 all you know is what you've uncritically read in the sensationalist media. For instance, you seem to think marijuana addiction exists. There is no scientific basis for this idea, as you should know if you want to engage in a serious discussion with your teenager about what you believe the risks to be. Talking about marijuana addicts just makes you look ridiculous, I'm afraid, and that is why you fail.
But pot use after age 18 doesn't have long-term affects on IQ, only for the time immediately after consuming the drug. This was an important point lost in the summary. So, marijuana should be illegal for young kids to smoke. If marijuana were legal and regulated like alcohol, we would see less young people abusing the drug.
Does smoking pot as a teen lower your IQ, or are stupid teens more likely to smoke pot?
From the abstract; "Impairment was concentrated among adolescent-onset cannabis users, with more persistent use associated with greater decline. Further, cessation of cannabis use did not fully restore neuropsychological functioning among adolescent-onset cannabis users. Findings are suggestive of a neurotoxic effect of cannabis on the adolescent brain and highlight the importance of prevention and policy efforts targeting adolescents."
A randomized controlled trial is by far the best means of proving causality, but a strong dose-response curve is a good secondary indicator. In this case, the data don't seem to support the contention of the abstract very well. Here they are from Table 1 in the paper:
Persistence of regular cannabis use
Never used | 242 | 38.84 | 99.84 (14.39) | 100.64 (15.25) | 0.05
Used, never regularly | 508 | 50.59 | 102.27 (13.59) | 101.24 (14.81) | â'0.07
Used regularly at 1 wave | 47 | 72.34 | 101.42 (14.41) | 98.45 (14.89) | â'0.20
Used regularly at 2 waves | 36 | 63.89 | 95.28 (10.74) | 93.26 (11.44) | â'0.13
Used regularly at 3+ waves | 41 | 78.05 | 96.00 (16.06) | 90.77 (13.88) | â'0.35
Where the columns are: MJ usage category, # of people in category, %male, Avg(SD) IQ at 7- 13 years old, Avg(SD) IQ at 38 years old, size of effect.
There are a couple of striking things: the percentage of males jumps markedly as the regularity of cannabis use goes up, and the initial IQ drops. So this study shows that young men with slighlty lower than average IQ are more likely to engage in regular cannabis use, and this may or may not result in a further decrease in their IQ over time.
Also, the numbers in the regular use categories are quite small: a few dozen.
I've not read the paper in detail, but superficially this looks exactly like the kind of research that led to hormone replacement therapy being touted as a good thing for post-menapausal women. Selection effects amongst the population of HRT users in the early days resulted in apparently dramatically improved health outcomes, whereas when applied to the general population the results were just the opposite.
While the data are plausibly suggestive that cannabis is bad for the adolescent brain, it is also plausibly suggestive that the lower-IQ male adolescent is more at risk for cannibis use and IQ decline.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
In my experience most of those in favor of cannabis legalization aren't blind to the adverse effects, it's just that they're sick to death of seeing time and time again how some study proclaims "Teenagers who are genetically predisposed to end up with severe mental illness may have slightly earlier onset of their condition if they smoke marijuana on a daily basis" and how the media and those who fervently hate cannabis turn that into "POT MAKES YOU CRAZY!".
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Short form: If you admit it, you're addicted. If you don't, you're in denial.
Any behavior can become an addictive behavior. Some people become physically addicted to exercise and the endorphin rush that comes from pushing their bodies to the edge. Some become addicted to tobacco and the stimulation that nicotine gives them. Some are addicted to food. To say that marijuana addiction doesn't exist is to discount that the human body and mind can become addicted to almost any stimulation. That's not to say that all individuals who consume marijuana will be addicted but some do. So don't fully discount the potential for addiction. Some portion of the population when exposed to the ongoing stimulation will become addicted to it.
It is impossible, and this is scientifically proven, to become physically addicted to marijuana. It's just not made of physically addictive stuff. There are no chemicals which give rise to physical dependency. Now as to the question of psychological dependency, that's a different matter however when you compare a psychological addiction to the chemical dependencies such as the endorphin rush or nicotine you are just building yourself a badly constructed argument. Also btw you will find that the actual mechanics(the movement of the hand to mouth to take a draw of a cigarette), the behavioural aspect of tobacco , is one of the habits hardest to break. Such as recent ex-smokers being out, beer in one hand and thinking it's weird not having a cigarette....
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
You should study the history of anti-drug research. One of the original studies that claimed marijuana caused severe brain damaged basically put face masks on monkeys and had them inhaling nothing but smoke for a significant period of time. The cause of the brain damage was CO poisoning and general hypoxia, which should have been obvious to anyone with half a brain. No one breathes nothing but smoke when they smoke. That's what a lot of studies do, they give a subject 100x the dose that is used, or use some unusual delivery method, and perform the study on it, drawing absurd conclusions that aren't event remotely scientific.
The purpose? Funding, plain and simple. Studies that are anti-drug get lots of funding, and those that aren't, don't get approved (by the DEA when performed on humans) or funded. Why? Because the government funds the studies and the drug war is a political tool that they need evidence to support. A huge amount of science is shaped and steered through funding, and it absolutely biases the results.
If you are reasonably intelligent, this shouldn't surprise you. We've had quacks for the entire history of science and medicine, and many of them have used science to explain what is clearly a politically motivated status quo. Just look at all the studies that assumed minorities were inferior, and proposed to find out why (by measuring brain volume and other anatomical characteristics), without first checking the assumption that minorities were inferior.
That kind of rationalization and twisting of the use of the word "addiction" is both deceptive, and counter productive to any discussion on marijuana use. By using that definition, you must acknowledge that "addiction" is not a bad thing, and is often a really good thing. (e.g. I am addicted to living a healthy lifestyle, I am addicted to being happy, I am addicted to being a good parent.)
When discussing marijuana "addiction", there is a clear attempt to imply an addiction to chemicals a drug which is bad, while, when being called out on the myth, declaring it to mean an addiction to chemicals that your body produces when you are happy which is not bad.
They get defensive because results like this can be used as a reason for keeping pot illegal.
This study can be used as evidence that it should be legal. If you have teenagers, ask them if it's easy to get pot in school, then ask them if it's easy to get a beer in school. I asked my kids that when they were in high school, and they said "of course you can buy pot in school." When I asked about beer, they laughed and said "don't be silly, of course not."
See, it's easier for a teenager to buy pot than it is an adult. A dealer will be paranoid of an adult, because he could be the secret police, but there are no teenaged police officers.
If you want to keep pot out of teenaged hands (and I certainly don't want kids smoking anything at all), legalize it and sell it like alcohol.
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