Cannabis Access and Academic Performance | Hacker News Reader

Cannabis Access and Academic Performance

cee.lse.ac.uk

101 pointsherendin109 comments

It appears that regular cannabis use [0] decreases dopaminergic brain-activity [1].

Dopamine is often referred to as "pleasure"-transmitter, but it's function in certain parts of the brain is better thought of as "regulating expectation", therefore influencing drive & motivation. It makes it possible to work on stuff you don't particularly enjoy by focussing on an expected long-term reward. This works by enabling your conscious thoughts to silence other, more excitatory and emotional parts of your brain via a feedback-loop. [2]

People with ADHS have trouble concentrating because this feedback-loop doesn't work well when they're not moving. Sitting still, they are constantly being flooded with inappropriate and negative emotions. They calm down when taking stimulants like Ritaline, because the "calming"-function of the brain starts working properly.

Bottom-line: Cannabis has many good effects, but it definitely blunts motivation. [3]

[0] rule of thumb: more than once weekly

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/30/E3149.abstract

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontostriatal_circuit

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeYsTmIzjkw

What you wrote is not definitive.

What is the cause of ADHD? There is no physical test for it and its cause is unknown. Some experts believe it is caused by other things, like patterns of thinking.

There is absolutely no evidence that millions of people have a physical biological issue where a stimulant effects them differently than normal people.

An amphetamine is an amphetamine is an amphetamine.

And:

A new study challenges the popular idea that dysfunction in dopamine — a chemical that controls the brain’s reward and pleasure centers — is the main cause of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/11/02/chemical-imbalance-i...

In truth, the “chemical imbalance” notion was always a kind of urban legend- - never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists. - http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/blogs/couch-crisis/psychiatr...

What makes conversations about this very confusing is the fact that neurotransmitters and "chemical imbalances" cannot be seen in isolation. What we are talking about is signalling inside particular structures. Changes in signalling over time effect changes in structure, just like different behaviour does. (actually different behaviour IS change in signalling)

Thus it's no wonder that psychiatric drugs have so many unpredictable effects. Administration of amphetamine might calm you, by exciting a down-regulating part of your brain, that is "structured correctly" (lack of a better word) and simultaneously give you anxiety by exciting the amygdala. It differs from person to person.

It's also no wonder that people and scientists interchangeably exclaim "Behaviour!", "Genes!", "Education!", "Lack of dopamine!" when trying to explain ADHD. It's a mixture of all of those things, but there is definitely a genetic component, which seems to make certain kinds of people way way less apt in controlling their impulses.

Psychiatric drugs don't change the structure of your brain, but, if administered carefully, they lower the bar to change it by behaviour and thoughts, thus being ultimately able to get rid of the medication all together.

Genuine question: has there been any study that actually measured the "levels" of neurotransmitters in the brain and correlated them with the subjects' behavior? Has there been any study that actually demonstrates what the normal levels of these chemicals are in adults and children, and what the normal range is, and what environmental and nutritional factors can influence them? I ask because I constantly hear the "chemical imbalance" explanation for behavioural issues and prescribing these drugs, but I have not ever found a paper that actually provides scientific evidence for this explanation.

> I ask because I constantly hear the "chemical imbalance" explanation for behavioural issues and prescribing these drugs,

EDIT: can I check: are you hearing that from doctors doing the prescribing?

Yes Edit: I also hear it frequently from parents of children who have been referred to psychiatrists by their schoolteachers for (in my opinion at least) fairly minor disruptive behaviour in class; they are repeating what the psychiatrists tell them. The psychiatrists also quote statistics like "half of Swedish inmates are adhd, so if you don't treat your child's adhd there's a good chance he'll end up a criminal (yes really). Here in the UK the diagnosing psychiatrist is also the one that the child must return to twice a year for a checkup at 500 pounds per visit.

So, you haven't actually heard it from the doctors? Because (especially in the UK) any prescribing doctor talking about chemical imbalance for ADHD in children is incompetent.

> Here in the UK the diagnosing psychiatrist is also the one that the child must return to twice a year for a checkup at 500 pounds per visit.

This is false. All treatment is available for free on the NHS. Once they have a diagnosis children don't have to see the same psychiatrist - or any psychiatrist.

https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg72/chapter/1-Guidance#dia...

> 1.3.1.1 A diagnosis of ADHD should only be made by a specialist psychiatrist, paediatrician or other appropriately qualified healthcare professional with training and expertise in the diagnosis of ADHD, on the basis of:

[...]

> 1.5.3.2 Drug treatment should only be initiated by an appropriately qualified healthcare professional with expertise in ADHD and should be based on a comprehensive assessment and diagnosis. Continued prescribing and monitoring of drug therapy may be performed by general practitioners, under shared care arrangements[7].

Yes, I have heard it directly from the doctors, I also hear it repeated by other parents who have kids going through this.

Unfortunately doctors don't follow the official procedures all the time. My experience in the UK does not appear to be an unusual one when I compare notes with other parents.

The treatment may be "free" on the NHS but that doesn't mean the doctor doesn't get paid, and I definitely have direct experience of the diagnosing psychiatrist being the one who is assigned to the child's follow up.

Some of this stuff is hard to measure.

Anything that doesn't cross the blood brain barrier is never going to get many samples due to the invasive procedures needed.

And for more normal blood based measurements, the protocols for measuring change over time requires a number of blood samples taken over time. The more accurate you want to be the more invasive you must become.

All the research I have read uses proxy measures, for example using PET scan and MRI techniques to measure brain activity and trying to infer the neurotransmitters based on glandular activity in the brain.

I wanted to elaborate on that point. You are completely right.

There are laboratories measuring that stuff from urine and saliva. They are expensive and the results also need to be controlled for things like normal thyroid function, so you can map properly derive levels in the brain. Also the tests need to be done at different times of the day.

The test-results include ranges. Interpreting and correlating the values and if they are problematic is the work of the few doctors who work with these labs. A bit like with cholesterol levels in the blood.

A doctor once told me that you can't tell for sure, and there are complete surprises, but normally, if she sees a result-sheet she can give a relatively accurate guess about how the person "generally feels" over the day (tired, happy, hungry, anxious, stressed, relaxed, trouble sleeping or not etc.)

What kind of things can they measure from urine and saliva? Can you point at any literature on this, would love to read more about it.

Adrenaline, Noradrenaline, Dopamine, Serotonine, Cortisol, GABA and many more...

Just google "lab test" for these.

The results all talk about tests that measure levels in the urine or blood, not the level in the brain, sorry if I'm being thick, but I don't see any actually measure brain levels.

Parent poster is responding to your question:

> What kind of things can they measure from urine and saliva?

In the nineties, and and up to about ten years ago, I would hear Doctors mention "chemical imbalance".

Today, I couldn't imagine a medical doctor claiming a person/patient has a chemical imbalance. The truth is they just don't know what causes mental illness, and most mental disabilities.

For awhile, it looked like they could increase dopamine, decrease serotonin, blah, blah, etc. and they were finally getting a handle on these complicated psychological problems.

Well, they were wrong with their chemical imbalance theories, and they are back to speculation--wild speculation in most cases. Out of all the medical specialties, Psychiarty has not made much progress from the 50's. At least they aren't carring around ice picks and severing the frontal lobes though.

The most extreme critics of SSRIs would argue that the alterations to the brain caused by these drugs are severe and irreversible. Another genuine question: what makes us so sure that future generations won't look back at the widespread prescription of brain altering drugs that operate on practically immeasurable and poorly understood mechanisms, as being so different to lobotomies?

Correlation that has stuck with me for 15 years. An acquaintance of mine stated years ago, when we were in our late 20's, that she was put on SSRIs from 13-17 years old and had absolutely no memories of those years. No recall of her teen years, whatsoever. That struck me as incredibly tragic.

Around the same time another friend was taking a smoking-cessation drug that induced very graphic vusuals of dismembering various family members... but I digress.

This is possible and I'd be surprised if no one has done it. The methodology is to inject subjects with a mildly radioactive drug that has a lower binding affinity for a given receptor than the endogenous ligand (e.g. [11C]raclopride for dopamine receptor occupancy) and then measure how much of this drug is bound to the receptor using PET. If more of the drug is bound, then the level of the endogenous ligand is lower. I don't know much of the literature here, but the technique is well-established and should be substantially more accurate than anything that measures urine or saliva.

> It makes it possible to work on stuff you don't particularly enjoy by focussing on an expected long-term reward.

In that case i must be severely dopamine deficient...

> Cannabis blunts motivation

perspicacious diction

really great contribution to the discussion, thanks for sharing.

I wonder then what the effect of cannabis is on the motivation/drive of someone with ADHD. Does the ADHD subject have a very weak frontostriatal circuit to begin with so that low dopamine levels only make something weak weaker (and therefore not having as profound outward effect as making a strong frontostriatal circuit weak).

Or do the low dopamine levels and impaired circuit compound each other, resulting in a larger-than-normal decline in motiviation.

I use cannabis to treat ADHD. I didn't like the side effects of the other drugs my doctor gave me. It works really well for me.

I'd also like point this out:

http://gizmodo.com/the-fbi-is-struggling-to-hire-hackers-who...

>The FBI Is Struggling to Hire Hackers Who Don't Smoke Weed

I think most people who work stressful jobs have difficult times when it comes to concentrating on long term goals, it's just human nature. For me marijuana has helped me reach many goals that I would have other wise given up on due to mental exhaustion.

I, too, have ADHD and use cannabis, although I've always tried to avoid cannabis use in the contexts where ADHD can be an impairment like school and work. So I'm curious, in what specific ways do you find cannabis helps you? What is your approach to treating ADHD symptoms with cannabis?

    It makes it possible to work on stuff you don't particularly enjoy by focussing on an expected long-term reward.

This statement asserts causation where only correlation, particular of neural correlates, only justifies.

That part of the brain plays a role in the process of expectation — it does not, by itself, make it possible. Language, other brain functions, social inertia, etc. makes expectation possible, and there is a critical question of the content of expectation.

Cannabis obviously increases appetite and drives a greater motivation for munchies. Therefore, the reduction of dopeminergic brain-activity alone does not isolate cannabis as the defeater of all motivation but rather of certain kinds of motivation dependent on pleasure-data. Obviously what if I derive pleasure from making logical deductions or from reading? What of children who are synesthes, and who mix up stimulae as a neurotypicality modality that is atypical?

That is true. Once a rather famous illustrator told me that he couldn't have done a certain ad showing a lion because … "Drawing hairs for hours and hours was just too boring, so I smoked".

In my experience cannabis especially lowers the motivation for physical activity, but also the "motivation" to process and work on bad emotions.

As this is framed more as the results of a policy change, there are some things to consider when banning weed:

- Street sales to tourists and foreigners exploded. Small-time dealers reported weekly income of 2k Euros during the prohibition.

- Dutch teenagers use less weed than German, UK and Belgian teens. Legal availability seems inversely correlated with actual use.

- In France there is no clear distinction between hard drugs and soft drugs. A dealer will sell you pot, but also heroin.

- There are other ways to get weed, without using a weed pass. Home growers will not check the age of the person they are selling to.

Smoking weed in Holland has a social stigma attached to it. It is not cool, it is for chumps. Policy changes like these may make it dangerous, hidden and cool again, actually raising our usage to the levels of neighboring countries.

As to the results, I shudder and think: Imagine what Feynman would have been able to achieve, if he had no access to weed or bongos for seven months...

Or that ne'er-do-well Mister X, akA Carl Sagan: http://marijuana-uses.com/mr-x/

An immediate family member, who happens to be a 30 year practicing behavioral therapist freely admits most science preceeding the 21st cemtury is bunk science based more on policy than science. The blank brain scans of the "habitual pot smoker" hanging on the clinic walls were the source of many amusements. The pro's I speak with all agree, addictions and self-defeating behaviors are the products of deeper problems... and, "everything in moderation". Oh, but we as a culture are taught to always blame external 'demons' we can point to to excuse our personal shortcomings without having to shoulder that whole 'personal responsibility' burden. Meh.

Thank you for posting that, I was not aware of Mr X

Or consider how shitty music would be if musicians did not have access to pot, psychedelics, and various other currently illegal drugs.

If you like virtually any 20th or 21st century popular music, you are greatly indebted to drugs.

Likewise the vast majority of modern computer software, though alcohol does share credit. There's a saying that Microsoft wouldn't be able to hire anyone if they drug tested. (Though Nintendo does drug test.) And, for alcohol, there's the famous Ballmer Curve: https://xkcd.com/323/

The real concern with this study is not the possible negative effects of marijuana (which are already known) but the moral correctness of its legalization. I personally have not and never will smoke pot, but that doesn't mean I support the continuing ban in America. Everyone has the right to determine his own destiny, and if engaging in personally (but not socially) destructive behaviors like smoking pot is a person's chosen destiny, he shouldn't be held back by dated laws restricting personal freedom.

How harmful would cannabis have to be to people until you'd consider banning it?

Personally, it would have to be worse than the impact on your life for getting a felony charge for possession.

This whole "we have to put people in jail and destroy any and all future job prospects for their own protection" is madness.

That simply doesn't happen in America. Cannabis is de facto legal throughout the USA. I repeat: marijuana is in practice legal in America, and all these people talking about drug charges ruining lives don't know what they're talking about.

The only way you get serious charges or any jail time at all for marijuana in America is when you've been arrested for serious crimes, but a District Attorney goes with "possession" for the plea deal. It's just easier that way.

You are either incredibly misinformed or you are an out-and-out liar.

For instance, a drug charge of any kind, even just a misdemeanor for paraphernalia precludes any Federal Student loans from being offered. My younger brother was arrested with a pipe containing some cannabis residue and was unable after that point to receive any Federally subsidized student loans.

Some 20,000 inmates in US prisons are currently incarcerated for cannabis possession and trafficking.

There was a young man of 19 years of age down here in Texas that was arrested after he was ratted out by some teenage customers who were themselves arrested and flipped on their dealer to save themselves. He was arrested with cannabis and cannabis oil along with a pan of brownies he had made with the oil. The Williamson County prosecutor sought to treat the entire volume of brownies as drugs and the defendant was facing LIFE in prison over some cannabis brownies.

So yeah, you either need to inform yourself better or you need to stop lying.

Not true at all. Out side of progressive areas like major coastal cities posession of marijuana can in some cases be a felony offense. Contrary to what you have stated, people ARE arrested regularly for simple possession of the drug, almost always meaning very limited life prospects in the future.

You are misinformed, there were over 700,000 arrests made for marijuana last year. Even without jail time, a possession charge can have serious consequences for young people. Being ineligible for federal financial aid, losing your job, and losing public benefits just to name a few.

Imagine what better things our police officers could be doing if they didn't have to churn a kid through the system every 51 seconds.

You don't get it. Those people get hit with narcotics charges because the cops and D.A. know exactly who they are and the long list of other crimes they've committed.

People who simply use or sell some marijuana and that's the extent of their "illegal" activity, they don't wind up in prison. Doesn't happen.

Nothing can be called "de facto legal" when hundreds of thousands of people are arrested for partaking in it each year. Prison time or not, possession charges can have serious consequences for many.

This is pure disinformation. I was arrested for possession of marijuana in college. There was no other charge, there was no other crime. I was a white middle class male stopped in a middle class suburb of a smallish college town in the midwest.

You got a small fine. At no point were you at any risk of facing incarceration. You were also probably doing something stupid and very annoying like stinking up the floor in a dormitory. This illustrates how the drug laws in practice work.

>> This illustrates how the drug laws in practice work.

When you're a middle-class white male

I agree people should have the right to determine their own destiny. Earth, however, isn't a free planet. Show me a country with sovereignty and I'll show you the Bilderberg, World Bank, IMF, CFR and the UN. How can any individual truly be free to choose their own destiny when society is constructed on man made conventions such capitalism. I contend that freedom doesn't exist at the state level therefore cannot extend to the individual.

I see the truth isn't popular today.

Well, you did mention a number of organizations that are strongly associated with conspiracy theories of various sorts.

I upvoted your post because I agree that the freedoms we are offered is limited to a set of options deemed acceptable by un-elected and un-representative authorities.

That is where we are as a society now? Discussing the influence of global organizations on sovereignty is consider conspiracy theory? Every organization I've mentioned has publicly stated mandates, far from conspiracy theory.

Would you extend that reasoning to heroin, for instance?

It's already handed out to addicts for free where I live. Immediate benefit was discovering weening people off heroin with heroin works much better than methadone, throngs of violent street dealers disappeared, no more seeing countless people sprawled out in alleys shooting up either.

It's my body, so yes. It's legal to kill an unborn fetus that lives in my body, but it's not legal to grow some poppies and ingest them? That's ridiculous to me. It's my body.

Don't make some substance illegal because I might commit some other crime while pursuing my addiction. Arrest me if and when I commit some other crime. If shit were legal, it'd probably be pretty cheap anyway because we'd be able to grow our own.

People who work towards keeping the drug war going are the people who benefit from it. They do not care about other people's bodies or safety from crime. They just want their money and power. All sorts of money disappears when drugs are made legal. Local police can't just seize money anymore, DEA can't have any funding, CIA can't make any money for black-ops and so on and so forth. They'll never give that money up, so it's just never going to be legal. Maybe pot will, but harder drugs - never.

To play devil's advocate, if you apply the same reasoning to seatbelt laws, the flaws become obvious.

It's your body, yes, but it's our society. Your reckless endangerment costs money and ties up limited resources.

The fact that prohibition is not an effective strategy makes for a good argument, but "it's my body" rarely does, IMHO.

if you apply the same reasoning to seatbelt laws, the flaws become obvious

No, not quite: When one drives, one most often drives on shared public roads, and one's action can directly increase risk to others, costs to those who maintain the system, etc. E.g., if you are in an accident and unrestrained, your being unrestrained may place me at greater risk. Your being more seriously injured due to being unrestrained will have greater social costs (financial cost of first response, possible PTSD to first responders, etc.).

One can hardly but drive in a public space, one can hardly ever drive in a private space.

While similar arguments re costs of first response, e.g., can be made about drug use, drug use can be practiced wholly privately, and, with quality drugs and with appropriate delivery systems, including training, risks kept manageable, likely social costs kept low, etc.

Just to play devil's advocate, as you say.

The "my body" argument is the central thrust of Roe v Wade and it is the very reason that abortion is no longer illegal. So that argument is absolutely worthy of consideration here.

Indeed, the stronger point is "Don't arrest me because I might commit some other crime." If we applied drug law logic to things like politics, we'd be arresting anyone who became a politician because they might be corrupting our society worse than any drug.

And I don't get your seatbelt argument. If I don't wear my seatbelt, I'm not harming anyone else - even if I get in an accident and get hurt or die due to my lack of wearing a seatbelt. Seatbelt laws are as unconstitutional as are the drug laws IMO. (Although, after reading about seatbelt law constitutionality, I see two decent arguments - 1) the driver can become a deadly projectile in an accident and 2) the driver is more likely to retain control of the vehicle with a seatbelt on. Those are good arguments, but I still don't think they're common enough occurrences that they should limit my personal freedom.)

Never say never.

I was very anti-drug when I was young, due to being very trusting of the tons of anti-drug propaganda I was fed, and my lack of knowledge about drugs.

As I learned more about them I found out that they were not necessarily so evil and their users not so stupid as I'd been taught. In fact, there were some brilliant users and advocates of drugs, and their effects could be quite interesting and useful. That included pot.

Eventually, my attitude towards drugs turned almost 180 degrees. Now I recognize that currently illegal drugs have benefits and drawbacks. Some of them (psychedelics in particular) have quite amazing benefits. A lot depends on who uses them, with what knowledge, mind-set, and intention, and how they are used.

It's possible to have respectful, constructive, and beneficial use of drugs. That's something the laws and most mainstream society do not yet recognize. To them all use is abuse. I believe that's a mistake. Scientific research on psychedelics is bearing this out. Barring another major conservative backlash against drugs (which is still quite possible), there may be a positive sea-change of attitudes towards drugs in the not-so-distant future.

One thing that jumps at me in this study is the high risk of investigating two different populations with different characteristics. Foreign students are more likely to be high achievers (and high-achieving women), quantitative degrees are also in higher demand from foreigners and more likely to be in English. If you are Dutch you can pick whatever university/field you want and they will admit you (exception is medicine); thus there is a higher chance of low-achievers (who drive the results) to be in that part of the sample. I am suspicious of results which are driven by the tail of the distribution and die out in time (when that tail drops out).

Didn't the study compare the performance of a group before and after the marihuana ban, with the natives being the control group? the differences you list (motivation, skill, effort) didn't change (except as an effect of the ban).

The study used a "diffs-in-diffs" technique which would control for that. It takes the difference between two groups, say English and Dutch, prior to banning marijuana for English students, and then looks at the difference between the two groups afterwards. So it's a way of looking at how the performance of the English group changed with banning the drug, while trying to control for the things that affected _all_ students.

Well... I can see how it can be easy to reach conclusions like this. The same result (most likely even worse) would be reached even if the effect of alcohol was studied instead of cannabis. This is not surprising, but neither is it interesting in my opinion. Of course there is a correlation between time spent doing mentally engaging activities and success, and surely smoking weed is not a mentally engaging activity. But this does not imply anything about moderate consumption in leisure time, neither does it mean that we should never engage in activities in which we do not exercise our brain.

Like all (good) drugs, they get better when you age. When you're young and blasted there's no way to make sense of things and responsibilities become more difficult. When you're older its like a whole new wonderful world to explore.

I agree with this. If weed becomes legal it should be restricted like alcohol.

I think things like drugs and alcohol are worse for growing brains. From a NYC teacher (One reference point)

"I’ve taught high school for 25 years and I hate what marijuana does to my students. It goes beyond missing homework assignments. My students become less curious when they start smoking pot. I’ve seen it time and time again. People say pot makes you more creative, but from what I’ve seen, it narrows my students’ minds until they only reference the world in relation to the drug. They’ll say things like: “I went to the beach and got so high,” or “I went to a concert and got so high.” They start choosing their friends based on the drug. I hate when people say that it’s just experimenting. Because from what I’ve seen, it’s when my students stop experimenting.” ' http://www.humansofnewyork.com/post/129574836736/i-hate-pot-...

I think our modern education system has done more to blunt people the curiosity of young people then these drugs possibly could.

I see what you did there.

I think this teacher should take this as an opportunity to examine what it is he, and the institution he works for is offering these students as an alternative, and consider the students are making rational choices that serve them better.

We know from the Rat Park study that rats in an enriched environment full of positive social engagement and freedom do not choose morphine. [1]

If the students are choosing drugs, it's because they are trapped in a bare metal cage.

For high achievers the do good in high school so you can go to a good college so you can get a good job track can be financially rewarding, but it is also stressful, often leads to burn out and depression and at the end a kind of existential malaise.

For average students this track means bleak economic prospects, low status, a boring monotony with high student loan debt burden.

Cannabis based friendships while in high school form extremely tight, rewarding social bonds. With a shared group identity and shared activities. Going to a concert and getting 'so high' can be an extremely life affirming peak experience that strengthens social bonds.

If his students are rejecting society's plan for them and choosing another, perhaps he should examine what it is he is offering. The conclusion often made from his sentiment is a reflexive authoritarian prohibition.

I know many high achieving friends that rejected society's plan, got high, had fun and went on to start lucrative tech careers, and started businesses that are building the future.

I know many other average students that rejected society's plan, got high, had fun and went on to live rewarding ski-bum lifestyles funded by bar tending, waiting tables, and small scale real estate investment.

The people with their boot on your face don't have your best interests at heart. Believe in yourself, and find your own way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

Frankly I'm very skeptical about the idea that people don't use drugs when fulfilled. There's always stress in modern life, and drugs are always attractive at some level

Sure, but that's sort of the point. They are attractive but if you have access to something better then you'd rather be doing that.

Edited for clarity

Yes, but it is much easier to do them responsibly if you have other rewarding activities to look forward to.

I, for example, spent almost six months high a couple of years ago and loved it. I stopped because the hippies I was working for ran out of money. I was about an inch away from homelessness before I managed to get a job as a software developer. I was sober at work, but I'd get fucked up as soon as I got home, later with friends, &c. Now that I'm working on my own startup my drug usage has declined even more. I still get high when I have the chance, but I have other highly stimulating activities to spend my time on now.

I wouldn't recommend my life choices to anyone else, but there are ways to responsibly partake of excess.

It's not just about dealing with stress. Some drugs offer transcendence, others escape, some enhanced creativity, or the potential to learn more about yourself or the world around you, or a greater bonding with people you love, or greater tolerance, understanding, and empathy, yet others are self-destructive.

A lot depends on who the user is, what assumptions, pre-conceptions, and goals they have, how and where they use the drug, and which drug it is.

Sure, some may use a drug for stress relief or to party, but others use them to expand their mind.

Unfortunately, escapist, ignorant, and self-destructive uses are all too common in modern societies. It doesn't have to be that way.

"Cannabis based friendships while in high school form extremely tight, rewarding social bonds. With a shared group identity and shared activities. Going to a concert and getting 'so high' can be an extremely life affirming peak experience that strengthens social bonds."

Do you have any stats to back this up besides anecdotal evidence?

"The people with their boot on your face don't have your best interests at heart. Believe in yourself, and find your own way."

This may be the case, but MJ use at an early age is pretty much known by the medical community to cause issues that will directly effect learning. I'm not sure why, if we are a community about learning, we should be encouraging this and spreading outright propaganda.

There may be people that are successful after smoking MJ for years at a time, but everyone that I know that smoked in highschool regularly never really accomplished anything and many are still in the same place (no career, always trying to make ends meet, barely an education).

Here is a good link on teen drug use and the effect on learning:

https://teens.drugabuse.gov/drug-facts/marijuana

It's really not something we should be encouraging.

I'm not encouraging teenage drug use. I'm pointing out how intellectually, emotionally and economically harmful modern high school is for young people.

Before and during alcohol prohibition, demonizing alcohol was the only way that society had to talk about the problem of domestic violence, because society could not address the problem directly. So alcohol was made the scapegoat.

I believe that we currently use drug use in teens as a similar scapegoat, because we can't talk about the reasons teenagers are in distress.

In my opinion the way we do modern education in its current form is harmful to young people. If it wasn't we wouldn't see such high rates of anxiety, depression and ADHD.

I can only offer anecdotes, but at my highschool the burnouts were burnouts before they ever touched pot

I couldn't disagree more. I didn't know code at all and learned over 50% of what I know about code today high. Thousands of hours of high coding. I am now a full stack developer. I was actually the most productive of my entire life when I would wake up and smoke at 8AM every day and continue smoking throughout the entire day.

I would also regularly go into class high and have riveting conversations with my professors. I remember I went into Calculus and Chemistry in senior year of high school high every single day and I always asked the most questions in class every time.

I'm not saying that smoking weed is good or bad, but to say it is strictly bad for learning is false.

I will say from my experiences that it bothers me deeply that we don't unbiasedly look into this more. I wish we could study these things since we already have millions of people doing active experiments worthy of scientific study. And for some reason we are wildly comfortable giving our kids adderall to do homework, which basically is saying every time you have to critically think you will use this as a crutch. That is good, but weed is bad? That seems absurd to me and I would say the long term impact adderrall has on a persons ability to learn is potentially worse than marijuana. I'd also argue that the social stigma of asking questions has more impact on a persons ability to learn than any drug. People are so afraid to ask questions.

I agree with you that it needs more study. Were you prescribed Marijuana? If not, then it seems like you may have just coincidentally been one of the few people who's performance improved as a result taking this drug.

did you intend to leave off the first two sentences of this post?

    I hate pot. I hate it even more than hard drugs. ..

i am trying to understand why this comment is on top for this article

the comment fail to address the linked study and instead quotes an unrelated third party,

the quote is truncated and anecdotal(One reference point) ,

the source of information for this teacher is eavesdropping on teenagers' bravado,

and the teacher seems to confuse his own conclusion seemingly for some rhetorical zing

   I hate when people say that it’s just experimenting. Because from what I’ve seen, it’s when my students stop experimenting.

the argument of 'just experimenting' i understood meant the kids were experimenting with the chemical processes of their bodies, but the teacher convolutes the term with all forms of experimenting

from this quote i recognise this teacher only references his world in relation to cannabis, and to be choosing which students he is friendly with based on how they talk about cannabis among themselves

Let me give you another reference point. I know this teacher; I sat in their classes for years listening to them drone on and on about subjects I have no interest in. I listened to them explain to me that '[the next test] will determine my future'. This is the teacher that told me I needed to take 3 years of Spanish in high school or I wouldn't get into a good college.

I know this teacher well, because I was one of their students who started smoking pot.

I went to the beach. I dove in the surf, laughed with my friends, tossed a frisbee, smoked a bowl and fell asleep under the light of the stars listening to the waves crash in.

I went to a concert. A symphonic metal band opened my ears to creative possibilities that I had never before imagined.

I started hanging out with different people. I had previously associated mostly with high academic achievers; most of my new friends were on a different path. They were from the other side of town. They hung out in the school's computer lab, and so did I. They were also some of the most kind and loyal people I'd ever met, and I still count most of them among my closest friends.

At the beginning of sophomore year I was ranked 3rd in my class. I graduated 7th. This teacher was very disappointed in me.

I graduated college with a ridiculous job offer at a growing tech company building systems that save lives every day. Most of the students who slurped up what this teacher was offering didn't realize it was horse shit until they finished school and had to move back in with their parents.

I think this is a phase. It doesn't last past a few years. Marijuana becomes boring for people, just like other things.

Alcohol is far worse because you can become dependent on it in a way marijuana doesn't really allow.

> Alcohol is far worse because you can become dependent on it in a way marijuana doesn't really allow.

Well, I've seen more people become dependent with hash/pot than with alcohol. I'd say that's because it's much harder to be functional drunk than stoned.

There might not be physical cravings or withdrawal but when someone starts hitting the bong several times a day, all this talk about hard and soft drugs is bullshit. And once they want to stop, the biggest difference is that they don't have the excuse of being in pain physically.

The biggest thing here is that like all drugs, not all people mix well with it. In fact I can't name anyone I know who was academic whilst high. Most people are of the mindset that to get the most out of smoking weed you need to do something fun like a concert, beach trip, movies etc. Now that I work full time, I smoke as a release after work, never before, it really clears your mind and helps you mentally disengage from even the most stressful work. When I studied, I always preferred to smoke and get stuff done, my last semester of university was my most successful and most influenced by weed. I've never met anyone else who's like this, but when you stop hanging around the people that "only reference the world in relation to the drug" you find it's less acceptable to talk about it openly with most "normal" people. Most of the people that I tell I was high as a kite for my entire tertiary study can't understand how I did the work and how I stayed motivated. If you can't retain cognitive skills whilst high, don't do it when you need to get stuff done. Several times I had to throw away my paraphernalia in order to stay on top of things, drugs are a very easy 'way out' when faced with a difficult decision, task or goal. It takes a lot of mental self control and will power to succeed in any field and for some people THC does provide a way to forgot the unnecessary and focus on the important.

I want to note that this is how THC can effect academic performance. There are other compounds in marijuana other than THC and although THC is the leading compound in most cannabis, in the medical cannabis world there are certain strains like Cannatonic that will test 0%THC with 10-20%CBD. CBD is not like THC and has a lot of different medical benefits associated with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabidiol

   A first step is to have an idea of baseline consumption
   rates for the particular group of individuals who were affected by the policy. To obtain rough
   estimates of these rates, we carried out an anonymous survey among currently enrolled
   students at Maastricht University. To make the question about cannabis consumption less
   Although these are different students to the ones on which we have performance data that we use in the rest of
   the analysis, their baseline consumption rates are relevant for two reasons. First, their demographic 
   salient, we embedded it in a more general questionnaire on risky behavior. In total, 192
   students answered the survey, which is over 97 percent of the students present in the lectures
   where it was distributed. The survey question we focused on asks students if they “have ever
   smoked cannabis or hashish” and if so, when: “ever”, “in the last 12 months”, “in the last 30
   days” or “in the last 7 days”.

all ridicule of the data used aside.. they fail completely to address dose

give a kid 2400mg of ibprofen and see how well children function on 'numerical skills'

I would never argue against science but the following is a true anecdote:

A friend of mine was up all night smoking pot and drinking alcohol. She had a University exam the next day that involved writing essays.

She picked herself up, went to the exam and passed. She did so well that she got an award for the best peformance that year.

True story.

Alcohol is the real threat to cognition, and we don't talk about it. [1] [2]

We don't know where the line is exactly, but somewhere around 4-5 drinks over a few hours has an acute neurotoxic effect.

Cannabis use in adolescents does not result in changes that can be picked up on high resolution MRI scans. [3] This is a considerable finding considering that one would expect changes just from the added stress of being a cannabis user in a prohibition environment (fear of arrest, fear of expulsion, fear of parental punishment upon discovery). It may even point to a protective effect of cannabis on the brain, as we see in Parkinson's and has been seen in other studies and in stroke. [4]

A UK study on the IQ effects of moderate cannabis use on students did not find evidence of harm. The study did find significant evidence of cognitive deficits caused by alcohol use. [5]

Why do young adults want to get high so much? I think the answer is that they are coping with the stress of being locked into institutions that do not serve them, do not respect them and offer them very little, while demanding very much.

One of the themes of Ferris Bueller's Day Off was high school as prison. The entire movie is a jail break story, and I think it gets to the truth of what its like to be doing time in high school better than anything.

It's no wonder so many teenagers cope by getting high as much as they can. And then we blame them, and treat them like criminals, when they are just sufferers of low mood.

We need a radically different approach to high school education. I think we need to find a way for people to be more economically useful, economically empowered and more in control of their lives at younger ages.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25702705

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3183294/

[3] http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/4/1505.short

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10863546

[5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/22/no...

if people used other drugs as heavily as alcohol is used, then it's not going to be sunshine and roses. it's the volume of alcohol consumed that's the problem. too much of anything is bad for you, as the saying goes.

Glad to see some sort of scientific study on this. Too much of the debate is based on ideology and hearsay, not systematic study.

Colorado sets aside a quarter of its pot taxes for scientific study. Fed funding sources generally ban or highly restrict such studies. So we dont have good modern evidence for the claimed benefits or harms of drugs.

can you speak more to your findings that this paper is scientific?

i find it frustratingly unscientific in regards to what i consider scientific investigation

PHP fascinates me when I'm high :), I usually incline towards languages in which I can enjoy the syntax (clojure and ruby), but when I'm baked, I enjoy the pure act of coding;translating my thoughts into binary manifestations. I think there should be more studies on how weed impacts learning.

"We find that the academic performance of students who are no longer legally permitted to buy cannabis increases substantially."

Pfft.

For my own case, when I smoke cannabis, my brain becomes hyperactive. I want to resolve all of my codesmell at once. I want to finish all of my code at once. My writing becomes "electric". My writing becomes transcendental and on fire — why do I become electric, yet all of these students become unmotivated globs? Tell me why this is the case before you moralize and vilify such a beautiful plant!

So maybe it's me. Or maybe the lot of you just don't know how to smoke and ritualize the practice. Maybe you all have a flawed philosophy to begin with, or worse, you don't have a philosophy about what you're smoking — to begin with.

As Kafka notes:

The unfitness of the object may cause one to overlook the unfitness of the means. — Franz Kafka

I think it has to do with the maturity of the smoker. Since you probably have an established career or passion, weed tends to amplify that. Whereas with students, they are still maturing and figuring their lives out and since marijuana amplifies that they become even more lazy? Just my 2 cents

So is there evidence of this in states where cannabis access has been legal/decriminalized for at least a decade like California, Washington, and the Netherlands as a whole? It sounds like a significant portion of students from those states should be consistently underperforming each year compared to other states and to students before legal access was allowed.

Steve Yegge comes to rescue:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...

So... one minor, teeny-weeny almost insigificant caveat before I continue: I have smoked marijuana (and inhaled it, deeply) on more occasions than I can count. And yet I'm almost undoubtedly smarter than your kid that you're so goddamned worried about. I skipped three grades (3rd, 7th and 8th), entered high school at age 11 and graduated at age 14, took A.P. courses, had stellar SAT scores, was a U.S. Navy nuclear reactor operator, went to the University of Washington and earned a Computer Science degree, worked at major corporations like Amazon.com and Google for many years as a senior staff engineer and/or senior development manager, and now I'm an internationally famous blogger.

I don't usually dwell on that, but today it's relevant. It's relevant because I've smoked a LOT of pot, and I dare you to prove that it has impaired me in any scientifically detectable way. We would debate, and you would lose; nevertheless I double-dog dare you.

Steve Yegge is not a scientist and prone to highly emotional rants. Further, your situation, whatever it is, is an anecdote, not sufficient to draw a conclusion.

I wonder if the same is true of alcohol, given the two substances are so close. Whatever the conclusion, it's not justification to ban either of course. There are many other facets of the problem to consider.

Cannabis and Alcohol share just about nothing in common. Not the chemical structure, the method of consumption, the neuro-physical effects, nor the after-effects. They both do get you a high in their way, but aside from that, nothing. They don't feel much alike, and are very different in terms of long term and short term cognitive effects.

I can't quote a source, but I recall one study correlating higher IQ with higher risk of psychoactive drug usage. Maybe your brain is amazing enough to not be hindered by smoking pot. Maybe the performance decline is not noticeable and you continue to function well. Maybe you've smoked so much marijuana that you have a strong resistance to its effects. But then again, maybe you are the exception - that's the problem with anecdotal evidence. If a more average person is given easy access to THC, maybe their chance at greater academic performance would go up in smoke (ha).

Either way, as a recreational smoker, I prefer to keep my habit away from my work and study. That would be the worst way to multitask - can't enjoy the high due to work, can't be as productive at work because of the high.

Good point, people brain and psyche structure can respond differently to substances. To some it might free the system of some problems, balances things so you can focus or be more relaxed longer, but for others it might just trigger 'unproductive' fun.

It's interesting. I was just thinking a little while ago about the tendency for smart people to equate being smart with being right. A while ago I was mentoring a young colleague of mine and I warned him that it is often the case that when we experience one failed project after another, we tend to think, "People should listen to me. I've seen every way to make a project fail and so I know how to make a project succeed." In reality, unless you have experienced success you are unlikely to know how to create that success.

He replied with one of the most interesting things I've heard in a while: "But I have lots of good ideas. Not all of them can be wrong". I had to step away and think about that for a long time, but eventually I realized that, yes, he could be wrong every single time. The search space is huge. And the tricky thing is that it doesn't really matter how smart he is. He can still be wrong every single time because there are a lot more wrong answers than right ones. A lot of the wrong answers really look like they should be right too. Even to otherwise brilliant (though wrong) people.

In a similar vein, I think you will find that despite your great intellect and professional success, there are many, many areas where you are wrong. In fact, there are likely to be a lot more areas where you are wrong than areas where you are right. There's just a huge search space out there.

I have no idea if you are right or wrong about marijauna use. I'm am absolutely convinced that you would beat me in a debate on the subject (I can't even spell the damn word correctly). Beating me (or anyone) in a debate makes absolutely no difference to whether or not you are correct.

It's not like I am immune to the occasional (umm... possibly a lot more than occasional... :-P) egocentric outburst, but I have found that admitting that I am likely wrong actually improves my credibility. I mean a brilliant, internationally famous blogger with a CS degree might very well be right about the effects of marijuana on the brain. Researchers on the effects of marijuana on the brain may just have the edge though, despite a possible lack of comparative brain power. It's something to consider.

The thing about being wrong is interesting.

It reminds me of something i read about a bright young developer that joined a company, got assigned tasks, completed them brilliantly, until the day that one stumped him.

Afterwards he claimed that the experience had been the best he could have, because until that day he had not really faced failure.

Yet for me a few months of pot gave me a stutter for two years, and I'm pretty sure killed my motivation in my final school year. I eventually got my act together and got an engineering degree, but I'd definitely recommend against pot use.

As would I. I missed my late teens and early twenties while sitting in a haze of pot smoke, and while I did have some interesting experiences, the time would have been far better spent learning to deal with life in healthier ways. Ten years on, and I'm still dealing with the aftermath of those poor decisions.

Every time I ever got high on weed I felt lingering effects for about three days. I've never experienced this with anything else. It always seemed to me that people who smoke weed a couple times a week or more often might be slightly under the influence almost continuously and not even realize it.

That doesn't even make sense. Who's to say he would not have done even better if he had not smoked pot? How can he assume his case generalizes across the population? How does someone who is So Very Smart not realize this? Did his AP courses not give him an inkling of the scientific method?

For what it's worth, that blog post caused a tiny increase in my propensity to believe marijuana is harmful.

And maybe Yegge would had accomplished less without weed? The point is, he still accomplished all that while having smoked a lot of weed. True you can't generalize across the population but his story is still relevant. Maybe Francis Crick would had invented time travel if it wasn't for LSD.

I know 10 doctors and surgeons, and the majority smoke weed and do cocaine (not everyday / nor every week). I wouldn't say they are great people though.

Yes, precisely. So many times a debate is about whether or not something does measurable harm. People or policies with a measure if success are often cited as evidence of lack of harm. Whether it's taking drugs or raising the tax rate, if the subjects in question continue to prosper, it is assumed no harm is done.

However people forget to ask the question whether the outcomes are maximised? Could the blogger have been the next Steve Jobs but for the weed use? I don't pretend to have the answer but I see the question is rarely asked.

This really has nothing to do with the study but congrats ... I guess.

Well endowed smart kid is not wrecked by drugs? Common entertainment drugs in general are not disastrous for mentally healthy well off people. As per rats -

http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/

I have nothing to say about drugs, but neither does Steve's anecdote.

P. Diddy has been known to go for 4 days without sleeping, seemingly with no ill effects according to assistants who have had to stay awake and by his side during these times.

I'm sure this self-reported N of 1 study is extremely relevant to sleep researchers all over the world.

The abstract clearly points out that the observed (negative) effect is stronger for low performers and women.

Furthermore, Yegge's rant is a bit short on actual facts that would show possible effects. For example, did his career changes happen due to increased pot consumption at the time? Did he abandon his PhD plans because of it? Did he even smoke before high school (at the age of 11)? We don't know.

He describes how undeniably exceptional he is, and then implies that his experience should be a guide for unexceptional people.

There will always be outliers.

Are people not realizing that everything after the first sentence is a direct quote from the Yegge rant?

https://www.drugabuse.gov/about-nida/legislative-activities/...

Posted for the list of data sources. Read all of the articles on the site if you can. Conclusion: If you are fked up you are fed up and one would be showing poor judgement at the least and be legally liable at the most if they trusted you with ther child, finances, or company, regardless of how functional a drug-addict you are.

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