What happens when you get stoned every day for five years | Hacker News Reader

What happens when you get stoned every day for five years

washingtonpost.com

9 pointsaburan285 comments

The conclusion of this article is bizarre. After essentially admitting that pot elicited no serious long term cognitive side effects, in a strange attempt to resuscitate the idea that pot is bad for you, they go on to cite the dangers of long term alcohol abuse as somehow undermining these results, despite their being completely different drugs with completely different modes of operation and effects on the body.

The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one.

Clearly you must be reading an entirely different set of peer-reviewed articles from the ones I've just been looking at.

"Persistent cannabis users show neuropsychological decline from childhood to midlife" www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1206820109

"Cannabis use has been shown to impair cognitive functions on a number of levels —from basic motor coordination to more complex executive function tasks, such as the ability to plan, organize, solve problems, make decisions, remember, and control emotions and behavior. These deficits differ in severity depending on the quantity, recency, age of onset and duration of marijuana use. ". J Addict Med. 2011 Mar 1; 5(1): 1–8.

Plenty more where these come from.

Uhh... you mean this part of the article, which flat out contradicts your claims, and is based on the results of this most recent study?

On the other hand, it's also quite surprising that you can smoke weed every single day for five years, and not have it impact your problem-solving abilities or your ability to focus at all.

The part right before the part where he brings up the spectre of alcohol abuse?

> Auer and his team measured lifetime marijuana exposure in a fantastic new unit of measurement they call "marijuana-years." Essentially, if you smoke pot every day for a year, that equals one marijuana-year of use. Ditto if you smoke every other day for two years, or once a week for seven years.

That sounds highly suspect.

Interesting study though - the original is linked below for anyone that has access or cares to buy it (bugs me no end that I have to google for the source from articles like this)

https://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2484...

I was thrown off by this definition of "marijuana-years" seemingly being used as the base of the study, when we then read this:

>> Few people actually smoke this much pot. Among the 3,385 study subjects, only 311 (8 percent) had more than five marijuana-years of exposure.

The article makes an assumption about how much one's memory would be affected by 45 years of smoking... but if only 311 participants have smoked for even 5 years, it is logically unsound to even pretend to extrapolate that to 45 years.

Why do studies (or perhaps the study itself makes none of these conclusions, and it's just the article) try to overreach on their conclusions? :/

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