Adults with history of recreational cannabis use have altered speech production

> Basically no acoustical difference, except in perceived effort.

On the data points measured. It's easy to observe things like "heavy cannabis users tend to have flat affect," but very difficult to translate "flat affect" into something measurable.

Look at the way that Alex Grey or Terence McKenna talk. There is clearly something going on there, regardless of our ability to measure it.

Yes agreed - the title doesn't seem to accurately reflect the details in the abstract.

Beyond a larger sample size, IMO it would have been also been useful to take repeat measurements of the cohort over time and also under the influence, especially given the observation of "change in line with duration of abstinence from cannabis use".

Perhaps those details are in the full paper, I haven't been able to find a copy.

The sample size was also 31 users, 40 controls. This really isn't a meaningful result.

I feel like it’s more of a culture thing. You spend time with people who talk a certain way because of X reason and then you pick up their way of talking over time. This sounds like someone’s half assed attempt at a disertation for their graduate degree

> You'd get the same intensity out of a group of tired people too

That would be interesting too, since AFAIK weed helps with sleep and gets you more deep sleep, but at the cost of REM sleep. There's a lot of theories tossed around as to what that can do to people, but I found it hard to find something solid in that area.

So? It just shows that rapping might be an effective prevention therapy for this supposed effect.

> let me offer some purely anecdotal evidence that has a bigger sample size

That is not how science works.

And a study isn't absurd just because you don't like its conclusions.

You mean rappers who are likely faking their drug use as they often do with their use of firearms, expensive jewellery and cars.

Just seeing the headline, my first thought was, "NEWS FLASH: recreational cannabis users 30% more likely to say 'dude'!"

Yeah. There are other tricks to make a tiny n seem more relevant, like making the relevant (tiny) n a subset of a bigger sample, taking many separate samples from different populations and looking for correlations in them separately, and so on. Trust the science.*

*Whereas science is defined as getting a certain score in an abstract statistics game.

Yes. Though it's also normal that whatever your sample size, someone will always complain it wasn't bigger.

Well, the first thing I thought upon reading the headline is someone somewhere is going to build an AI based on this and there will be false positives and it'll suck.

> based on audio recordings of their conversational voice

While they are high??

I've been a recreational Cannabis smoker for almost 20 years, since I was 14, and smoking it 100% has a noticeable effect on my speech. People, also stoners mind you, will make fun of me for it because of the level of effects it has on me. For instance, they would say I'm actually a model for why people shouldn't smoke pot (again these are users). Anyway, these effects go away with abstinence, but generally take up to a month to really go away (not that I've had many breaks that long in the last 20 years). Yes, weed effects my speech, but also other activities that involve hand-eye coordination or heavy thinking, such as sports, video games, programming, learning mathematics, etc. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination (and a theory supported by research) that short term neurochemical changes will result in longer term structural, i.e. syntactical, changes in the brain. There is a lot understood about this type of mechanism (I did a PhD in computational neuroscience, so I've seen and understood the research in this area).

This was mentioned in the paper, sounds like an interesting point.

By that logic America should also ban video games because Chinese kids arn't "zonked out" on Fortnite. You're not having a real discussion either, you're employing overblown rhetoric in your request to bring the conversation to a more sane environment.

In most states there are limits on purchases for different products. While I totally agree that more regulation should be in place to inform consumers, I cannot at all agree with your rational or verbiage.

I would argue that the injustice of mass incarceration resulting from inequitable and inconsistently applied drug laws was far more unfortunate and harmful. I say: more legalization, and now.

Federal legislation is far from finished. Who knows what we end up with.

I for one would prefer to pay rehabilitation therapy rather than supporting the ludicrous enforcement apparatus we have now. If someone wants to burn away their brain cells, let them do it. Why involve police and the justice system? Why throw them in jail, where they have even less chance of rehabilitating themselves?

I don't need to retread the old discussion "How on earth is alcohol legal?", since the effects of alcohol abuse are so much worse than the effects of marijuana abuse and it's rather hard to OD on the later. But in the end; what do I care?

There's the case to be made for protecting young adults, since there's solid evidence that smoking weed is harmful to the developing brain.

I think our ability to evolve, adapt, invent, and assimilate will keep us ahead of the game longer than others might, though eventually it will lose efficacy. The Chinese government is too genocidal, militaristic, and authoritarian to permit the same broad range of innovation as exists...basically everywhere else (including Russia). China will only continue to advance as long as the rest of the world permits their technology thievery and genocidal empire building to continue.

Guinness World Record for biggest strawman. As if anywhere close to that number of people would be permanently "zonked out", or that the "zonked" ones wouldn't aready be as such on alcohol or illicit cannabis, or that the government should have the right to tell you exactly which mood-altering substances you can enjoy, or that cannabis isn't actually a beneficial mood-altering drug for many people.

In other words, I disagree with almost every premise you've established.

If you used a different strain like UK cheese it would provide an anti-anxiety effect to that group. Mint Diesel and AK-47 sounds like it would make you ampped and confused. Finding/using the proper strain for the effect you want is the missing context from your comment above.

The discussion of the consequences were raised 50 years ago and the accepted conclusion was the biggest harm was it acting as a gateway drug to crack specifically in the 80s. I don't think that belief is as accepted as it was before.

Your fears of a lost generation and losing a trade with China as a result is not based in reality. The economic loss to China is a result of large companies trying to open the market to their product while giving away too much and inbalances in currency and trade barriers. A super motivated extra 10-15% of the under 29 age group just doesn't matter when weighted against those bigger policies.

This is the sort of response that makes me wonder: dude, what have you been smoking?

Let's start with the whole notion of organizing our society based on some perceived need to compete with a country half the world away. That's the sort of paranoia combined with hazy connections that I'd expect from somebody who was a bad kind of high.

And then there's the concern about addiction. Marijuana is way down the list of addiction potential. Nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine are much stronger and the former two have widespread proven harm: between the two they cause ~600k deaths per year. [1][2] (People debate the latter more, but most of those arguing in favor of caffeine are addicts themselves, and nobody can deny that Starbucks is a plague upon the urban landscape.) And let's not forget sugar, the white powder that causes enormous medical harm and that whole industries work to hook our children on!!1!

Jokes aside, I'd note that at least here in California, we already have a "middle ground". Marijuana is only available from a relatively small number of places, with production and distribution heavily regulated. Alcohol and nicotine are much more widely available. If anything, I'd expect legalization has resulted in reduced availability to minors, as this has surely driven a lot of the previous weed dealers out of business.

I believe that we have a duty to prevent people from exploiting others, especially to prevent organized commercial exploitation. And I believe that duty is strongest where addiction is concerned, because that bypasses the rational choice that freedom depends on. But on balance I think we do a much better job with marijuana than drugs like alcohol, nicotine, and the legal opiates.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...

> gives us an advantage over China?

1) What exactly has China, its people and government done or doing to you, your people and your country specifically

I don't think HN is the type of platform for BS political flame baiting but...

2) I am curious as to why you felt the need to include win against China and if you think that's a reasonable statement.

Here's a good analysis by the CATO institute, and the conclusion is that legalization has not had much of an impact in either the positive or negative direction. Until there's good data to support the idea that cannabis legalization is creating harms it's probably best to remain neutral. Both pro and anti cannabis sides are going of "feels", rather than facts it seems.

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/effect-state-marijuana-...

Comments like this remind me why I avoid this place