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Comment by satori99 | Hacker News Reader

I am a regular pot smoker in my mid-40s. I have been using marijuana regularly since I was 16 and have participated in several studies of this nature since I was in my early 20s.

I have volunteered for these because I have always felt that marijuana does not diminish my cognitive performance for certain tasks -- and definitely does not diminish my memory recall abilities.

Some of these tests involved listening to short stories, and re-telling then an hour later, and other memory games.

I like to think I aced them, to keep the bell curve wide.

On one occasion, the researcher did indicate this to me, well after the experiments were over.

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I grew up around a lot of people who were regular smokers from an early age, say 15. (and by regular I mean "can't sleep without pot"), and their cognitive abilities definitely suffered from smoking, and they freely admit it, and I think it's very obvious if you're around people who smoke a lot.

You simply can't concentrate when you're high the same way you can when you don't smoke. Reading is more difficult, exercise is more difficult, that's just the literal effects of weed.

If you're high all the time you're not going to perform the way you can when you're sober, and this is just my anecdotal observation, with people who started smoking young it becomes a sort of personality trait. You just become less sharp, less active, and when there's habit less interested in doing things not-high. Studies aside, that just can't be helpful.

I have noticed this in others too -- I never recommend trying pot to other people mainly for this reason.

But it does not affect me in this way. The code I write when stoned compiles just as well as sober code, and I remember everything I read when high just fine.

It enables me to achieve a deeper and longer focus when performing solo tasks that involve a certain level of concentration, than I can do otherwise.

However, it is most definitely detrimental to team orientated or social tasks -- especially to starting them at all.

It is possible that I have conditioned myself to be this way, but it was also the reason I started using it in the first place.

I have no formal education beyond high-school, so it is not too hyperbolic for me to state that nearly everything I have ever taught myself (from coding to hardware design), I have learned while high.

I do not believe I have been handicapping myself but rather the opposite.

Sure, this seems obvious with respect to my own experience with it, personally. But the question I really want to know the answer to is if I've been totally sober for over 24 - 48 hours, is my performance still below baseline? What about a week or a month without it?

If it were theoretically somehow proven I was still experiencing a negative effect despite cessation for over a week, that would be enough for me to rarely or never use it again. As far as I know, there isn't any convincing evidence of that, but if there ever was, I'd definitely want to know about it.

Some conflicting studies have found subtle cognitive deficits in users who were abstinent for ~28 days (see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3037578/).

In my anecdotal experience, I definitely notice difficulty with conversations, deep reading, etc for ~2 weeks after stopping. It takes about 1 month of sobriety for me to feel 95% back to normal and 2-3 months for 100%.

Not that this necessarily makes things any better, but what are the odds this could largely be explained by a kind of withdrawal from people who were using it every day for years? If you suddenly stop taking almost any psychoactive substance that you've had in your body 24/7 for years, the odds of some negative effects persisting for a month don't seem too unlikely.

It could certainly be some combination of both, too.

Heaping all weed together produces this confusion where one person has one experience and a different person another.

Some strains make you highly focused. Others more social. Some make you more creative. Some might make you scared and hearing things.

It's like thinking all food is the same. One person eats chocolate bars all day and another carrots but are treated as a baseline.

No. It would be like saying: one person ate kale all day while the other ate red cabbage.

For me, this was not true. I smoked weed almost daily from my freshman year in high school through college. I was able to zone in and concentrate while high, and every subject was much more fascinating. It did take me longer to do the work but I pulled straight A's and was probably more creative and more willing to take calculated risks. I was probably the exception though because most of my stoner friends did not have this experience.

"You simply can't concentrate when you're high the same way you can when you don't smoke."

I won't argue against that being your personal experience but it's certainly not mine.

Mine is quite the opposite and has been for a long time. I've been smoking for 47 years taking a puff and getting to work is routine for me.

Weed is the only "drug" I've ever used. I snorted a few lines back in the 80`s but I never liked that crap. I don't take any prescription drugs and never have but most of those I know my age do now. I'm not saying weed is the reason why, but it's worth noting.

I congratulate you on your personalized anecdote designed to tacitly defend the things that you enjoy.

In a world of methodological uncertainty and eroding trust in these kinds of studies, anecdotes are more important than ever (and they were never unimportant to begin with).

Imagine how much better you would have done without pot!

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