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Comment by iRobbery | Hacker News Reader

I stopped cold turkey smoking weed daily after 25 years, i can tell you from personal experience this does not apply to everybody.

It also seems rather strange to take one property of their lives and use it to explain their in your eyes loss of abilities. Not doing something for a long time also has this effect, so perhaps they for many years didnt need to do calculations in their head, or use their high school french and so on.

If you said you knew a twin, and one of them smoked weed daily and they had identical lives, and one of them lost cognitive abilities and the other didnt, i would be more likely to give your reply any credit.

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Ok, let me give you some more details. The first guy I knew was a friend when I was studying. He studied Electrotechnical engineering at university level, a highly mathematical study and when he started he was quite good with it. However at the same time when he started the study he also started using Cannabis a lot more, up to the point that he was smoking all day long. I used to play games with him like poker and backgammon, both games where you can use both your intuition and your rational brain. Over time he basically gave up trying to calculate or reason things, he just relied on his intuition, which didn't improve his game. At the same time his study results started to crash as well. This all didn't happen at once, it took several years.

The second guy I knew was a guy I met when I was playing backgammon in a café. I tried to explain him some things about the game that involved some very basic probability calculations but he stopped me and told that he had been smoking weed for 20 years and had lost capability to do calculations in his head.

> I tried to explain him some things about the game that involved some very basic probability calculations but he stopped me and told that he had been smoking weed for 20 years and had lost capability to do calculations in his head.

Maybe he just wanted you to leave him alone.

If someone said they got mental problems from regular alcohol/amphetamine/antidepressants/benzodiazepines consumption nobody would question them.

But when they share a negative experience with cannabis, suddenly a bunch of stoners appear and try to discredit their story! Your friend got schizophrenia from smoking weed? Nah bro, he was already predisposed, and by chance it activated after smoking weed. You have memory problems after years of smoking? Nah, you might be just getting old, we may never know!

Don't be so insecure about your drug habits. Cannabis can be harmful, so what? Billions of people smoke tobacco, drink alcohol, eat sugary treats, all while fully aware that it can be harmful (but it might cause no harm to them!). You smoke cannabis because you enjoy getting stoned, even though it might be harmful. You're an adult who weighed the pros and cons, and came to the conclusion that the risks are acceptable for you.

But please, don't try to discredit other people's experiences!

I merely tried to remind the comment poster of the option that there could easily be other causes for his observations of the people has has known. And i can't see why you would instantly label this is discrediting.

Dear friend of mine, who i used to smoke with developed psychosis. So i know consuming cannabis can have negative effects. Cannabis has many compounds, and many studies show some of them have good properties others maybe bad properties. Some science says they cause mental issues other science and study show the opposite.

Again i just find the 'cant do math in head again' a weird statement or things to directly relate to smoking weed. There are plenty of people i know that have never smoked weed and can't do head math as well as they could when they were in high school.

Also to refer to your statement about weed & schizofrenia, there is plenty of research done, but nothing conclusive. e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32839678/

Anything can be harmful, if you use/eat/drink/smoke it enough. And surely not everybody just smokes weed because they 'like being stoned' as you write. Sure does not count for me.

Sounds reasonable. Most adults stop doing many calculations in their head unless they need it at their jobs and thus get worse at it. Same goes for me, btw. And I never smoked weed in my life.

It would be interesting if the people the OP talks about tried to simply retrain their abilities, which I'm sure most adults that are not used to doing these calculations anymore could.

yeah I think this articles doesn’t really say much useful regarding the biological effect by chemicals in cannabis.

I think it would require more detailed research

exactly.. great point. I smoke weed for 20+ years and have no issues with it.. i work in IT (cloud tech) and gotta learn lot of things every week. Weed helps to stress less, but i'm sure that if i was unemployed and smoking, it would make lazy dumb idiot that can't remember much.

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