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Cannabis Smoking Makes Students Less Likely To Pass University Courses
Bruce66423 writes: A large scale European study shows that students who were unable to buy cannabis legally were 5% more likely to pass their University courses. Below-average students with no legal access to pot were 7.6% more likely to pass their courses, and the effect was five times more pronounced when dealing with courses involving math. One of the study's authors said, "We think this newfound effect on productivity from a change in legal access to cannabis is not negligible and should be, at least in the short run, politically relevant for any societal drug legalization and prohibition decision-making. In the bigger picture, our findings also indicate that soft drug consumption behavior is affected by their legal accessibility, which has not been causally demonstrated before. ... Considering the massive impact on cognitive performance high levels of THC have, I think it is reasonable to at least inform young users much more on consequences of consuming such products as compared with that of having a beer or pure vodka."
So, the 5% of people who smoked weed at university, and realized university is a RE-EDUCATION CAMP where special educational tools are used to break the most dangerous young minds and prepare them for a life of productivity in service to the Man. *bong smoke floats out of my stained beanbag nest.*
And say that availability of alcohol has a vastly higher effect than 5%.
Television, video games, beer, and anything else potentially distracting to poorly performing students should be illegal too!
Does this mean that even though I never bought it, just because I had legal access to it, I was 5% less likely to pass?
Is this some special "flawed studies" day on slashdot?
playing too much unreal took way more than 5% off of my grades.
i didn't start using cannabis regularly until after college, it's vastly superor to alcohol in the "how functional am i at work the next day if i overindulge" department.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Its hard to make a slave out of the enlightened.. Its also hard to make the enlightened out of slaves.
Wasn't it already obvious that pot makes people lazy and perform lesser than those that don't smoke?
Ok, what am I missing? I mean, this seems obvious.
Being stoned, just like being drunk, has kind of an obvious affect on your current cognitive abilities. For both drugs, you are looking a a time-frame of hours where you cannot study or work effectively. TFA even notes that the magnitude of the effect on grades is similar.
If you drink alcohol or smoke pot on nights when you need to be studying, your grades are going to suffer. If you restrict yourself to times when you really don't have any obligations, then there won't be a problem. Young adults being, well, young adults, they may not always have the necessary self-awareness and self-discipline - hence, their grade may suffer while they are learning this life lesson.
Make sure people are aware of the effects of the drugs. Encourage self-control and self-discipline. Prohibition is, and has always been, a non-solution.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I find it quite surprising.
Sure being a pot head is going to have a detrimental effect on your grades.
But given my experiences with university in a place where marijuana was not legal I can't believe there are enough students who would not smoke when it is illegal but would when it is legal to swing the overall grade by 5%.
In these days of ever-increasing volumes of information being thrown about it's important to be clear and unambiguous in the first few sentences of writing. I, for one, don't have the time to not not figure out the negative-reverse implications of failing to undisclose previously inversely unhidden assertions. Not.
I wonder if chewing bubble gum would also impact a below average student's exam scores. Seems like minimize the distractions from sex, alcohol, and cannabis would tend to help most below average students.
Also, if you can only smoke in these Dutch coffee shops, and spend all your time there instead of in your apartment or dorm, then less studying might explain away some of the exam scores.
But despite the above concerned, I think most of us all assumed that there is some cognitive impact while someone is using cannabis. The debate has always been if this is temporary or is the impact long term. I tend to find a lot of holes in research that shows the negative impact to be long term. I have a hunch that there could be some neutral impact that is long term (changes but not detrimental), but that has been rather tough to measure.
(researching comfortably from my armchair)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Perhaps we should view the study's results with 5% extra skepticism.
One complaint that I've heard of from people who claim to smoke weed is that it can severely shrink one's gonads. I've overheard people at the mall and on the bus talking about how their testes and scrotum shrunk significantly after repeated use of marijuana, for example. I've read the same claim online, too, and I think I even heard a caller to a radio show mention it once.
I'm a competitive swimmer. Does marijuana use affect the size of a man's testes and scrotum?
Smoke weed + swim in cold water = devastating combination :-P
This article needs a soundtrack.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Maybe the medical reason that has made marijuana legal for them is the underlying reason that they did worse in school.
> who would not smoke when it is illegal but would when it is legal to swing the overall grade by 5%.
Grocery stores know that they sell a lot more candy of they put it at the checkout counter. People buy a lot more if it's within arms reach than if they have to walk down the aisle to get it. For pot we talking about much more than walking an extra 30 feet, you have to call and wait for a pot dealer, andbpot dealers are notoriously unreliable and rarely punctual. Vs stepping inside the store you're walking by across from campus.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if many people who used to smoke a few hits once a week now walk by the pot store and decide to take a few hits TWICE per week. Even the guy who used to smoke most nights may well do more lunchtime tokes if carrying it isn't going to send him to jail. So the people who would smoke anyway could easily smoke 5% MORE.
Also, there are a few law abiding citizens who don't illegal drugs. Particularly young people haven't yet firmed up their own beliefs as much, so they look to others for validation of their potential decisions . Having the entire population vote that pot is okay will influence some young people's decisions.
In other news, party animals who spent their time on drugs, cannabis, or alcohol instead of studying were more likely to fail their courses.
The prohibitionists touted the study as a great victory for prohibition. The legalizers touted the study as proof that responsible use was necessary.
And the parents raged that their stupid kids were wasting all their time on parties instead of doing some actual work.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Harmless in a medical sense, sure. I don't think anybody is going to say that smoking all day isn't a potential huge distraction, just as getting drunk all day is.
When in VietNam you had two groups, the drinkers (ropers) and the stoners (those who smoked marijuana); there may of been those who did neither but I never ran into one.
I had a joint rolled so it was ready when I woke up the next morning, everyday was the same. Stoners never missed work, the drinkers did, when I left Nam I quit marijuana with no want or need for it, drinker were different. And I never saw marijuana as being a distraction, the ropers had a tendency of being drunk by the afternoon.
No, legalization of marijuana is less harmful than criminalization
In a long term study in Australia, comparing the effects of marijuana use in colonies that legalized and criminalized marijuana it was found that there was far worse long term outcomes int he colonies that criminalized marijuana
This is because they lost opportunities such as education, faced poor job prospects and turned to life as petty criminals to earn a living.
These effects were not seen in colonies that legalized marijuana, where users were able to gain education, jobs and go on to lead a normal life
Criminalization is more harmful than legalization
It is the prohibitionists that want to hold up the straw man argument of 'harmless' because it is easier to poke holes in
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Don't know about gonads...
But Michael Phelps was photographed smoking marijuana, and he holds the most records for Olympic swimming gold medals
Wherever You Go, There You Are
From a medical point of view, sure. From a medical point of view a lot of things that can easily distract you and hence lower your test scores by keeping you from studying are much better.
Certainly not from an academic point of view.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But but but but but....they get free tuition at Stanford et al.
Yawn. A. Ppl/gov needs to consider the cognitive impairment effects more? I'm pretty sure that's exactly what is being considered and sought out when smoking weed. B. Study performed in europe. Lots of confounding issues due to borders, geopolitics, and a range if other factors. C. Causal? Mmmm that's a stretch. They've got 2 out of 3: 1 a relationship and 2 the ban came in time before the increase in passing classes. However, the big one, accounting for other possible causes, is (at least in tfa's write up) is not addressed. Methinks there are several more impactful events that could account for a rising course completion rate. Generation size, increased competition, a recognition of greater skill needs for a more technical job market, reduced standards, reconfiguration if classes to address a slump in graduates/grades, increasing political/economic stability, etc. Etc.
Smoking dope makes you stupid (at least while you are high). Drinking makes you stupid (at least while you are drunk). Etc, etc. If you can admit this and 'get stupid' occasionally, no problem. But when people start to justify some drug's use as being beneficial, mind opening concious raising, etc. that's the addiction talking. Time to stop and check into NA or AA.
Have gnu, will travel.
Whats the percentage on those who have functioning sex organs passing classes, and those who do not?
I always figured that result had pretty much been established by the efforts of thousands of college students with their own unfunded studies over more than the last fifty years.
I guess this guy just found a way to get someone else to pay for his pot.
Just a reminder, needs to go along with all of such studies. Who knows what affects are going on, take it with a grain of salt.
Dude, I'm far from being against weed, but if you're talking "illumination", smoking weed is like putting a frosted glass lamp on. Yeah, it doesn't glare anymore, but everything's getting fuzzy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Since it supports an agenda. Duh. Where've you been those past 15 years?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And for all those researches that failed Introduction to Statistics - what you utterly failed learn is Correlation does not imply (and sure as hell does not prove) Causation.
I don't do any drugs legal or otherwise. But I do so despise disingenuous douchebags spraying their political agenda all over the internet.
Smoked pot in school?
5% was the magnitude of the effect. The statistical significance is determined (roughly) by taking the magnitude of the effect and dividing it by the standard error, then applying the appropriate scaling factor.
Pot tends to disable the critical faculty. You think you have more creativity because you fail to quickly discard inferior ideas.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
but what you're seeing here is the same effect that makes test scores lower in America. We test _everyone_ for college at one time or another, including people who are just plain not smart enough. Other countries have programs to train those people to be plumbers and what not and skip the testing.
Now, I think what we do is actually better. There are plenty of folks who can make it through college and will be better for it, and we give them opportunities they don't have in other countries. But it does skew our test scores in a way folks like to ignore. I'm guessing you're seeing that here. People who don't smoke pot are more likely to make it through a course at the U.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Any % is relevant. 5% drop in economic output and a countries can sway from economically stable to chaos. 5% increase in mortality rate is a hell of a lot more dead babies. 5% more cases of cancer, 5% swing easily chooses the next American president, etc... Your lack of care to any statitistical measure is rather short-sighted. I hope you're not employed somewhere where your decisions matter.
Now the quesiton which you tossed away with your drivel: Does a 5% drop in student graduations cause material harm to society?
I would actually say that its probably a lot less worrisome than it represents. The fact that they couldn't hack post-secondary with easy access to (an admitently low severity) drug probably means they weren't cut out for school to begin with.
I'm sure there were plenty of failures that could've gone on to better careers if they had just hung on, but I believe a lot more would've found little opportunity for just-marginal post-secondary education entering a now very constrained jobs market.
Bye!
By not investigating the motivations why the students are somking cannabis, they have omitted the far stronger correlation of social and personal stress factors in relation to success in exams, that is farm more impacting than the actual use of cannabis. Fail studies are fail.
I just realized it doesn't matter if weed "causes" lower grades or if students with lower abilities are attracted to smoking and so on. What matters is the pattern: if you find yourself being at a university and happen to be smoking weed regularly, you are a bit likelier to have lower grades. That is all.
That is, assuming the study is done properly, this one kind of looks so.
But then there were the 10,000 or so people that are estimated to have been killed by poisoned liquor during prohibition...
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Candy is an impulse buy and something that children will whine and beg for in a checkout line. I don't think pot is really that similar. Plus if it isn't legal chances are you still only gave to walk 30 feet - we are talking about a location where it is available legally for some people. I recall cigarettes and alcohol being easily available in high school because there was always someone old enough to get it and resell it.
I also doubt that smoking 5% more is going to drop your grades by 5%. Smoking double isn't going to drop your grades by 100% after all.
If they have the numbers then they have the numbers (I haven't actually read the study or methodology or anything) I'm not trying to say they are wrong. I'm just saying I don't find it "not surprising".
If we'd taken the $1 trillion dollars wasted in the war on drugs and had instead invested that into research to find safe and effective recreational drugs that also have positive side-effects on cognition and motivation, where might we be today?
Actually, it has nothing to do with cannabis use, just cannabis LAW. The availability of cannabis is probably about the same. The difference would be that the poor and minorities would be in jail instead of a university., and thus the selection of students is altered to reduce those demographics Whether that is because of being 'subhuman', just not having as good of a support system available, being culturally an outsider, or something else, is a different question. Let's take this one step at a time to maybe be passable in your trolling.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Are we sure it's not that "Smoking Cannabis Instead Of Stydying Makes Students Less Likely To Pass University Courses"? That said, yeah, pot can wreak havoc on a developing brain, and you're not out of that phase until well into your 20's, so I could see this being a major issue for college aged habitual users. Of course, then, there are also studies showing that it's much easier to recall memories when you're in the same mental state as when you learned them, so it could also be that students who study high should also test high, but there are numerous other reasons not to do that, as well.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
dollars -->>> doughtnuts
Homosexuality laws are even more ridiculous than drug laws. So far nobody managed to give me any good reason for any. And no, "because my imaginary buddy doesn't like them gays" is no reason.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Apparetly drugs can help a creative mind, which isnt what you want when studying logic based subjects, but if doing somethign something expressive, creative, original ...
5% is significant if you can pinpoint it directly.
5% more people with lung cancer dying is not contestable. Last year X people who had lung cancer died, this year it's 1.05*X people who had lung cancer that died, that's 5% more.
5% more deaths from lung cancer IS already contestable. Yes, they had lung cancer. But did it kill them?
The main difference being that one is an undeniable change that happened. It can easily be measured and examined. The other is a claim. The claim that a condition is the reason for the measured difference. And one can't draw that conclusion so easily.
Because only looking at one variable may skew the result. We have X people who don't take weed pass their courses. We have 0.95*X people who do take weed pass their courses. That's measurable and that's acceptable to say. What isn't acceptable anymore without a closer look at the circumstances is to claim that this change is due to the one variable we observed.
The main question here is: Is that all? Do they do something else, too? Why do they take weed? Have they been taking weed for long? Do they have any medical condition that they try to control with their weed consumption that may have more to do with their grades? A lot of people with mental problems, from depressions to anxiety problems, reach for drugs (legal and illegal) to control their problems, so could those problems rather be the underlying reason? Would these people (not some control group, people are not fungible!) have passed if they don't have access to weed?
It's hardly as clean cut as you want to make it seem, and in this case 5% is far from being so significant to actually allow this statement to stand unchallenged. As anyone who ever spent a few years in college will agree, there are a lot of things that influence not only your academic but also your personal life during these years that it is very hard to pinpoint something on one single influence without taking into account everything else.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...
The shocking violence of prohibition days was only shocking becasue there was so little violence among the non-gangster population. In comparison to the violence associated with today's drug gangs, the violence of Al Capone and friends was trivial. The "Saint Valentine's Day Massacre" (1929) only involved the death of six mobsters (NOTHING on the scale of a typical Chicago weekend these days... and a modern Chicago weekend is more likely to involve dead innocent civilians)...
There is a word for this bit of historical 'explanation' - it is politely referred to as "B.S." Here is a very interesting long term graph of American homicide rates. It shows that there has been a long term (300 year) trend toward lower homicide rates, with two interesting spikes in the 20th Century.
One of these spikes is smack-dab in the middle of Prohibition, where the overall murder rate rose to 10 per 100,000. It rose again to this same level the late 20th Century (peak was in 1991). It has since dropped to half that. So, yeah, the 20's were very violent everywhere just like the late 80's and early 90's, and today we have much lower levels of murder despite "today's drug gangs".
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
And, Slate as a source for rational argument?? REALLY?????? They're about as neutral and unbiased on this subject as Jerry Falwell on The Ten Commandments or gay marriage.
And you have nothing to refute it. Cite errors? An alternate source that refutes? Anything at all? All you've got is an ad hominem attack. Pretty cowardly even for an AC.
Are you the same one lying about homicide rates in the post above?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
What country are you from?
Here in America it is the cause of millions of arrests, up until very recently New York City used 'Stop and Frisk' as a way to target groups particularly for marijuana
In much of the rest of America, any time that a person is pulled over they and their car are searched 'to check for weapons'
Here is a piece of info from the ACLU:
"According to the ACLU’s original analysis, marijuana arrests now account for over half of all drug arrests in the United States. Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana. Nationwide, the arrest data revealed one consistent trend: significant racial bias. Despite roughly equal usage rates, Blacks are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana."
https://www.aclu.org/gallery/m...
Here are numbers from the FBI identifying over 600,000 marijuana possession arrests a year:
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cm...
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Hide their dope and I bet the same kids are equally stupid. I guarantee it! It's a hard world out there and not everyone passes college ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
The Guardian article doesn't link to the study it describes. I'd be interested to know how the study attempts to correct for factors such as differences in socioeconomic status between the locals and the nationals from other countries. Apparently, the cited study results have not yet been published, only presented at a conference. In other news, higher crime rates are corellated with a higher number of churches per square mile.
I think all the focus on how cannabis may cause this or makes it more likely to develop that is just scare mongering. We all know that indulging in intoxication is harmful to some extent; the point is that cannabis has been demonstrated to be a lot less harmful, overall, than things like alcohol and tobacco, not to mention the so-called legal highs.
In a sensible society, we would address this differently - we would accept that people will always want to have this kind of recreational substances, and we would actively try to develop something that gave the maximum pleasure for the minimum harm. We would educate people about how to use these things safely, how to recognise danger symptoms, how to help those in trouble with some substance, and we would sell them legally under a licence and with a certain amount of taxation. There will always be people who get into deep trouble with substance abuse; but a cold, socio-economic calculation shows that the costs of using cannabis is less than the cost of tobacco and alcohol - and if better drugs were developed, the difference would be even starker.
So much of university learning in Germany and France is centered around drill*.
No wonder that people with different learning styles can have problems in this format. Those are the ones more likely to smoke weed, imo.
The authors take "passing courses" as a metric for success. But they fail to realize that there are many previously A grade students who in research positions suddenly don't know what to do since they never developed a proper creativity together with a longing to explore.
This whole mentality of "let's grow our economy by pushing people to what we think is good for growing our economy" is a big stupid fad and will lead to nothing but short-term sucess and long-term mediocrity of failure.
__
* (and I assume it's not that different in the Netherlands were the study was conducted)
> Smoking double isn't going to drop your grades by 100% after all.
It did in my case. Twenty years later, I'm trying again. So far it's. Working a lot better after reducing marijuana consumption by 100%. No doubt, getting stoned was fun. It just wasn't compatible with doing much else.
No one stopped to think that perhaps those people who has a medical or mental condition that interferes with their day to day life so much that they have legal access to medical drugs might be operating under those very same additional stressors that are the reason they've got their access, and that those stressors might even make a few percent difference to their performance?
How was it decided to attribute the lower performance to the medicine instead of the underlying condition?
I have taken a wide range of antidepressants, anti-psychotics and anti-anxiety related medication over the years. Their side effects can indeed interfere with my work, but when the underlying condition interferes with my work more, I'll use them, as overall I have an improvement, however I'm still performing under less than ideal conditions.
Should you make antidepressants illegal, because they can/might/correlate to detract from ability to concentrate? (Actually perhaps we should, but the efficacy of mental health drugs is a whole other debate), or should you recognise that those workers taking them are combatting bigger issues than their side effects?
Regardless, sounds to me like a pretty poor study, but yeah, i didn't read the full article, so feel free to slam me if there's something that addresses this.
Just read enough of the article to see that those who were given access to marijuana were a cultural selection, not a medical or random selection, but I could use those same numbers to argue that Dutch, German & Belgians tend to like to smoke more than do school work, or that they have a higher incidence of physical/mental issues that marijuana alleviates, that they generally consider worth the minor side effects, or so on.
TLDR: Bad study is bad.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
I hate "studies" like this that make unwarranted assumptions.
They are trying to draw a conclusion of the cognitive effects of cannabis based on access to the drug and graduation which is BS.
A much more likelier conclusions is that the type of people to seek out and gain access to cannabis are more prone to screwing off and not studying and applying themselves properly rather than some ill conceived idea of reduced mental capacity.
I've gone to school with enough pot heads to know that they are not stupid. Some lack motivation perhaps. You could look at the number of people that booze it up too much in school also and party themselves out of a degree. Doesn't mean that alcohol somehow diminished their mental faculties...