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Comment by hooande | Hacker News Reader

I've known many people in silicon valley who smoke cannabis regularly (several times a week if not daily). They all seemed to be cognitively normal. Some of them function on a level I only wish I could attain.

I think regular cannabis use attracts a certain type of person. That type of person can vary in their ability and intelligence, just like any type of person. This is also true of say, hardcore fans of fantasy fiction. They all have certain things in common, but you couldn't paint all of them as "creative" or any other trait.

I'm hesitant when hearing about long term effects, even on developing brains. Both Barack Obama and Carl Sagan smoked a ton of cannabis when they were younger. And they and others really turned out fine.

This paper seems to be a meta study that combines the results from other studies. Since there were multiple methodologies it's hard to get a sense of exactly what questions they were answering.

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Disclaimer: I'm an almost daily smoker of cannabis.

There is definitely some impairment long term. I think we can assume that even without this huge study. I don't think knowing that matters unless we have some scale that tells us how dramatic that impairment is.

If I compare someone who smoked all the time, but also had a rich and engaging social life with a lifelong abstainer who live a mostly isolated existence, who is going to be more cognitively capable?

There are so many inputs that feed into who we are and what we are capable of that, in all likelihood, cannabis use is likely only incidental to much larger factors like isolation, media preferences, home life, etc.

As an anecdote, the worse thing I think I've ever done for my brain, the thing that I immediately felt dumber after doing, was reading "Shadow Wolves" (Steven Segal's book). I had trouble communicating thoughts effectively for weeks after finishing it. It was like it had sucked vocabulary out of my brain. Maybe that's how cannabis leads to long term impairment. It makes you read "Shadow Wolves".

Edit: Since people are voting this, I want to add an extra warning that I was not joking about "Shadow Wolves". If you read it, you will feel dumber, and it will take time to heal the damage done. Seriously.

I wonder, if you hold other psychoactive substances - say coffee, alcohol, or nicotine to the same standard?

That is, we should assume they cause long term impairment without the need for any kind of study?

You should assume any disturbance of your brains chemical equilibrium is bad long term. Those drugs included. Absent fixing a specific deficiency that is.

If a study comes back and says, with a high confidence, that isn't the case for this or that, great, but I think it's a safe assumption for most chemicals.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm saying it's not enough to show something is bad, as pretty much everything is bad. It has to be bad enough to matter.

If you take the point a step further, your argument can be applied to everything including sugar, salt, etc.

I think we are mostly in agreement - that any substance entering the body will have some effect.

The question is what effect, how much of an effect, and wether it is permanent/long lasting. Questions which require a study to answer.

Totally agree. However, I highly doubt such a study will be possible for the same reasons we still argue about salt and sugar: what's the control?

Unless we're able to find twins that live largely the same lives absent the one factor, we are really only capable of sussing out the especially harmful things with long term lifestyle studies. If cannabis is as bad as sugar, then we have 40 years of back and forth to look forward to, and the answer will ultimately be: A little bit is bad, but not bad enough to matter more than how many steps you took today, or how sad or angry you were, or how late you ate dinner.

I don’t think assumption is the correct stance, but a healthy skepticism sounds in order.

Alcohol is clearly capable of long term impairment, the debate seems to be about dose response. Nicotine is more questionable, but clearly leaves long term changes in the mind. People abstaining after long term nicotine usage will spend the rest of their lives experiencing cravings. Hell, it seems plausible long term consumption of food types has long term cognitive effects.

Oh goodness. Thank you for introducing me to Shadow Wolves. It sounds positively dreadful. I want to read it but I don't want to pay for it. Either monetarily or cognitively.

You really really don't though. It's not one of those 'so bad it's good' kind of things where there is some novelty to be had. It's boring. It's written with a 4th grade vocabulary. There's no character development outside shallow tropes. Random right wing conspiracies are mixed in without any grounding in the story. The main character is a cartoon of cartoon of a human in a cartoon world with cartoon side kicks. It's awful in every way a book can be awful. And to top it all off it will literally curse your brain.

Haha. Fair. I've got this morbid curiosity about right wing authoritarian conspiracy fiction. Apparently Ben Shapiro has several novels in the same vein. Genuinely curious... why'd you read it in the first place? Are you part of the worst book club in history or something?

A friend gave it to me for Christmas as a gag gift, and as part of the joke escalation cycle I decided I would read it so I could bring it up sometime later. Bad idea :(

There's a theory that drug use is often about self-handicapping:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-handicapping

E.g. if someone in college does poorly because they got high all the time, maybe the reason they got high all the time was that they felt (rightly or not) that they would have done poorly anyway, and now they have the drug to blame. And maybe those who smoke a bit and still do well, do it sort of to have the excuse in reserve.

I've not much experience with cannabis, it's far less popular where I live than the US, but I can certainly see that alcohol is used as this sort of "flexible excuse", both short term and long term.

The people that I see doing it are doing it because of anxiety reasons. I think there are a variety of people with a variety of reasons for smoking weed.

while i agree with you there are many reasons for drug use. its likely the wikipedia article linked also applies subconsciously, so while they tellyou/think they do it for anxiety they may do it for a host of other reasons without fully knowing themselves. We all do this with many aspects of life, just pointing it out.

Yea fair point, it's indeed a lot easier to look at surface level reasons and take them at face value, while instead we should be critical of that. Good point.

Self-handicapping is a huge effect, I’m surprised we don’t see it more frequently discussed in tech. This effect is really about creating a narrative and identity for ourselves. People attempt things and fail all of the time. If we put too much of our ego into the attempt it can be emotionally devastating when failure happens. So we protect ourselves by crafting alternative narratives. “If I succeed then great, but if I fail it’s because i choose to […]”. You are more likely to accomplish your goal if you put yourself fully into it, and the more you feed alternative narratives the less successful you’ll be. The way to live is to be fully committed and focused on your goals, and to have good skills on knowing how to recover from failure when that occurs.

[some definitional text] The purpose of self handicapping is to protect your self identity. “I could have x, but I didn’t because of y” is the narrative story. I could have gotten an A on the exam but I didn’t because I partied instead of studied is a classic example. For it to be true self-handicapping y needs to be a choice.

> I think regular cannabis use attracts a certain type of person. That type of person can vary in their ability and intelligence, just like any type of person.

This matches my personal experience as well. I’m good friends with someone that holds a high-level FAANG position and consumes weed every day. While working. Attending meetings, coding, managing large teams, the whole she-bang. It’s unbelievable. They say it “calms their thoughts” and allows them to focus.

If I tried to code while high, I would end up wasting 3 hours just fiddling with the text colors in the IDE or just space out in a wormhole of deep introspection.

Marijuana really affects people differently.

I can code high, but I can't bug-fix or plan for shit.

Brains are weird.

I used to do this and in fact getting really high was the way I could marathon code. Sativa dabs would keep me up as long as I wanted and I could just keep going and going until about seven years into this habit, I sort of hit this wall where getting high no longer motivated me to keep going, instead I just wanted to play video games. Then I was prescribed medication for ADHD and it basically removed the desire to get high and helps me better than getting high used to because it doesn't impair my memory and gives me the ability to choose what I am motivated to do.

It's really no different to people using caffeine (aside to the legality). They are both drugs, the main difference being I bet more folks suffer from the effects of caffeine (anxiety, loss of sleep, stress), than the do cannabis.

Nicotine and caffeine are both mild stimulants and have nootropic effects. Weed hasn't done anything for me besides give me bad panic attacks and making me feel like I'm detached from reality. It does not have the same kind of nootropic and cognitive-enhancing effects of caffeine, not at all.

Like David Lynch, I'll stick to the coffee and cigarettes (even if the latter will probably kill me eventually, at least I can think straight)

Personal anectode but might help:

I also have anxiety and panic attacks triggered. Though when it's over and I can think calmly, I ALWAYS see those panic attacks are my subconscious' way of telling something wrong with my life/where I'm going etc. and I need to fix things. When everything's on track I never have panic attacks regardless of the amount of substance.

In that sense it's actually telling me, in a brutal yet true way, to fix my life, by facing me feelings or thoughts that I've been subconsciously running away from.

Might not be the same case with you, surely, but this is my 2 cents.

You might try rosemary and sage oil for your panic attacks after weed (should help if this is caused by AK1 gene).

A big difference is that caffeine is a stimulant, or "upper". Stimulants have a very different role socially. They are little good as excuses: No one is going to claim the reason they hit on the boss' wife at the Christmas party was because they got too high on coffee, or that the reason they got low grades in college was that they spent all day in their room drinking red bull.

No, it’s not. If you are really comparing weed and coffee either you never tried weed or you are posting in bad faith.

Caffeine is one of the few stimulants that seems to be beneficial to the human health. Moderate use is linked to a lower likelihood of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, liver and endometrial cancers, Parkinson’s disease... Certainly more beneficial than smoking cannabis (in most cases together with tobacco). Damage to the lungs is one of the first thing that comes to my mind.

Most of the beneficial effects are because of the complex chemistry of roasted coffee and not solely because of Caffeine. AFAIK cannabis has also a multitude of complex phytochemical elements that are beneficial to human health.

Vaporization of cannabis without tobacco makes lungs a moot point though.

Does it? Smoke is still smoke

Smoke is different from vapor. When you vape cannabis, you're not actually combusting anything, just heating the plant matter enough that some of the particles on the flower are converted to vapor and inhaled.

I am a dire pothead who only uses their Pax2, but please don't frame accepting "plant vapor" into your lungs as a totally harmless thing. It's still heated organic material that your lungs arn't made to accept.

It's better than smoking, but we need to be responsible and admit that it's not exactly without risk or harm.

The person you're responding to never said it was without risk, just that vaping isn't the same as smoking- and the scientific literature backs this statement up.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30049223/

> Conclusions: Single-dose inhalation of vaporized cannabis had no clinically meaningful positive or negative effect on airway function, exertional breathlessness, and exercise endurance in adults with advanced COPD. Clinical trial registered with www.clinicaltrials.gov (NCT03060993).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4456813/

> The majority of studies suggest that vapourizers adequately reduce risk of pulmonary symptoms (5,14–16), although complete safety may require a regulated source of plant material, rather than ‘street’ samples, which produce ammonia (17).

> The findings suggest that vapourization reduces the delivery of toxic byproducts associated with the use of smoked cannabis. A subsequent experiment addressed exhaled carbon monoxide (CO) (14). The researchers found a statistically significant difference between the increase in CO exhaled following smoking cannabis versus vapourization. The amount of exhaled CO showed little to no increase following vapourization compared with large increases following smoking, which would be expected for inhalation of a combustion product. These findings give further evidence that vapourization reduces exposure to gaseous combustion toxins.

This isn't to say there is no risk, but if someone is going to consume cannabis it is amazingly clear that vaporizing it is safer than smoking it.

> smoking cannabis (in most cases together with tobacco)

In most cases? Where in the world? In Canada at least, frequent cannabis smokers and frequent cigarette smokers are nearly disjoint groups.

There are definitely places where "spliffs" (weed+tobacco) are the norm, but it's definitely atypical.

Spliffs are the norm most of Europe. An entire continent is hardly atypical.

Yes, this is a big difference between North America and Europe. I've never understood why (and consider it to be a big mistake), but for some reason most potheads in Europe mix their weed and hash with tobacco.

When I drink a lot of coffee I can still function 100% normally (and because of ADHD, even better than my usual) and I am in no way impaired. That cannot be said about cannabis. They are not the same.

Your subjective experience as a caffeine addict is not really applicable. Caffeine definitely impairs me. I can't sleep, can't sit still, can't poop, can't focus on anything. Weed, on the other hand, keeps my thoughts focused and doesn't interfere with sleeping or bowel movements. See? Our personal experience is irrelevant to the discussion.

Nope. Not a caffeine addict. My wife once challenged me to go without caffeine for 30 days. No problem. Not even a headache.

You are not using the same meaning of "addiction". I'm most definitely an addict, of various substances. Can easily put them down for months or years, that's not proof that I'm not an addict. The addiction is the part where I keep coming back even though I can quit.

No, sorry, cannabis and caffeine are not the same. Not the underlying substances, not the internal biological changes, not the effects.

No one laughed out their brains after drinking a pot of coffee.

Pun intended.

They are both drugs, but the side effects of caffeine are a lot less bad per usage compared to weed per usage. Perhaps I should phrase that a bit better, but I hope you see what I'm getting at.

Got a source for that?

Caffeine can have pretty "bad" effects - issues with sleep, headaches, panic attacks, and all sorts of cardiovascular issues (increased heart rate, sweating, etc).

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