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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!
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.
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
This article needs a soundtrack.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
If you include the fact that you never bought it, that's more information that affects the probabilities. It's just like in the Monty Hall problem where revealing a goat behind one door changes the probabilities of what's behind the other doors.
Given the fact that cannabis was recently made legal where you live, you may be 5% less like to pass a class. Given the additional fact that you chose not to use cannabis, you may be 5% more likely to pass a class due to the curve being lowered by those who do smoke.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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
Studies don't prove things. Studies fail to disprove things. Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it certainly is consistent with a theory of causation. It's also consistent with the theory that the purported effect is actually the cause, and the cause is the effect.
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