Everyone knows that guy or gal who's super smart, and can play soccer while reciting
Yeats backwards who also happens to be a SUPER HUGE POTHEAD WHATSUPWITHDAT?!
Hey y'all, Trace here for DNews.
This week a new 30 year, 39,000 person Canadian study came out comparing tobacco smoking teens
with pot smoking teens.
Researchers learned the popularity of pot and cigarettes in 1981 was the opposite of
today.
Back then cigarettes were the norm and pot was the strange habit; now it's swapped!
On top of changing of social norms, the study ALSO found, pot smokers do better in school
than their tobacco smoking peers!
This got us asking: is the smart pothead a stereotype?
Well, it doesn't make you dumber, at least, not for long.
A study from Australian National University found the belief of the dumb pothead is based
on an accidental statistical bias!
Once the researchers began to control for intelligence, income and social ability science
found people who smoke pot aren't dumber.
And a 2001 study by Harvard found long-term heavy pot users DO mess up their short-term
memory, but if they quit for a month, it comes back.
We know IQ can be controversial, but a long-term study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community
Health took the IQ of 8,000 British children aged 5 and 10 years old in the 1970s.
Then they went back to those same people and asked them about their psychological distress
and drug use at ages 16 and 30.
The researchers controlled for anxiety and depression as a teen, parental social class,
and lifetime income levels.
By the time the subjects were 30, one in three men and one in six women had used pot!
Turns out, men and women with high IQ scores at age 5, were 50-percent more likely to be
in the using population at 30; with the brainy ladies using more than the dudes!
The researchers decided these smartypants were using either as a coping mechanism, from
years of bullying and social exclusion, or perhaps because smarter people crave novel
experiences and sensations.
They're going to dig deeper with more research.
But with all these studies there is no evidence that pot can make us smarter.
I did find a study from 2010 which found cannabis users performed better at some semantic memory
tests.
Basically, the brain connects related words more easily, but that's really it.
It does appear to make you less motivated, though.
There is new evidence that marijuana makes it hard to activate the brain's reward system.
Their brains are awash with dopamine, but the reward system is blunted by cannabinoids
in the herb and fails to give you the get-up and go.
And new studies show marijuana can be psychologically addictive and require psychotherapy and medication
to treat dependency.
Bottom-line: there's NO causation for pot MAKING HUMANS SMARTER.
But chances are the honor roll is totally rolling.
This makes sense, because the smart kids usually WORK HARDER, so they probably party harder
too.
How do you feel about this?
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