Recreational Pot Use Harmful to Young People’s Brains? | Hacker News Reader

Recreational Pot Use Harmful to Young People’s Brains?

time.com

17 pointsjellyksong18 comments

People seem to hold very strong opinions on factual issues, which always strikes me as odd, because the funny thing about facts is that they stay the same despite your opinion.

A lot of people I know believe that marijuana is seriously damaging to the brain. I also know a lot of people who believe it isn't dangerous one bit. And I've also noticed that online (being a much more liberal environment generally speaking), any study showing that marijuana could be a potentially damaging substance is immediately discredited somehow (and always by people who aren't experts in the field).

The fact is, the laws of physics have and always will continue to operate the same way regardless of your opinion on how they should work, so it's wise to keep an open mind toward all studies and consider the evidence yourself before immediately embracing or discrediting an idea with little thought into why you're doing so.

Meh. This one isn't really worth the bother though.

It's got a very small sample size, no accounting for correlation vs causation. The areas of the brain that are apparently different are involved with reward-seeking behaviour.

It seems perfectly plausible to me that pot causes some changes in the brain as it continues to develop through young adulthood, but it's also perfectly plausible that these differences are pre-existing and encourage drug-seeking behaviour.

What you absolutely cannot say from this study is anything other than 'differences in brain structure have been observed'

In that respect the Time article is almost criminally ignorant from the title onwards - "Recreational Pot Use Harmful to Young People’s Brains"

Link to the study: http://jn.sfn.org/press/April-16-2014-Issue/zns01614005529.p...

20 people in each group (control and MJ), 9 male and 11 female.

That still seems a small sample size. The study itself seems to be well titled and not make many sweeping statements. It even says towards the end that early exposure to alcohol may even be behind some or all of the effects.

I like this analysis - http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/study-finds-re...

Not disagreeing at all, I was just adding some more infos.

Regardless of whether this study would claim pot is harmful or harmless, this study can conclude nothing of the sort. They only study correlations, and only among people who had already chosen to smoke or not smoke pot (this is a general limitation that is difficult to avoid, of course). What I found especially annoying is the hand waving assertion about brain "damage", without finding any actual functional differences. In effect they have merely found "differences", and they shouldn't be so eager to attach value judgments to them. Perhaps the paper is more careful than this press release.

The flip side to your comment is that because pot is a politically charged topic, one should be extra critical of any studies, because it becomes more likely that people have a vested interested in certain outcomes. Add to that the fact that law makers can probably put more weight on their side of the story (because money), and you have the reason why liberals may be extra suspicious about studies purporting to show harm.

The problem with facts is that we don't often see them for what they really are since our understanding of the world is as precise as the tools we use to probe it (ie: development of physics in the last century).

And the brain is far from being completely understood.

  Facts are like "f*** you"'s, sometimes.

(Sorry about using code-formatting; asterisks are apparently used to denote italic text.)

I did a review of the literature on the harmful or beneficial health effects of marijuana several years ago and didn't find any convincing (non-marginal-result, controlled) studies that showed marijuana had long term negative effects on health. The literature I find is pretty weak. Not only are these studies weak, but there are even mixed results - some (similarly unconvincing) studies suggest marijuana has positive health effects (anticarcinogenic, etc).

This study is in line with what I found. I find it plausible (and rather obvious) that marijuana use causes short-term negative effects. I'm more interested in the long term effects, though. I take it for granted that marijuana use is going to have negative cognitive effects in the short term (e.g. the next week).

Obvious question: how do they know that those parts of the brain were changed by the drug? Is this yet another correlation with no evidence at all of causation?

Also, even if the drug does change the brain, is this necessarily bad? The implication seems to be that users have narrower horizons and enjoy fewer things. Is this meant to be a measure of quality of life? I know plenty of people whom I consider to have narrow horizons and it would be very easy for my to assume that they have a lower quality of life than me because they don't even derive any pleasure from things that I enjoy. That would be a ridiculous assumption, though.

I think people see what they want to see. Current Zeitgeist is pointing towards approving use of pot for recreational purposes while ignoring all the risks or even discrediting anyone saying the opposite. I deeply remember one episode from my adolescence when another kid smoke a large amount of pot in the basement and suddenly started yelling: "Dragon, I see dragon!" while having his eyes open in an expression of fear for a few hours. From my point of view, pot smoking is another horrible idea such as cigarette smoking - it annoys anyone who doesn't smoke as the air quality deteriorates and damages both active and passive participant's health. Moreover, certain parts of population are prone to damage their brains as well as compromise their will, instead running away to "lalaland" whenever they face any challenge. There is a saying in Frankfurt nightclubs that you can't build a business on stoners and some nightclubs had to close due to having their business deteriorating due to unofficially allowing pot inside. Similar to crack cocaine in Rio de Janeiro when the drug trafficking favelados decided not to sell it anymore as it was killing their own customers and business. As a professional photographer I can see what drugs are doing to my models - you have a world-class awesome beauty with a great personality one year, and the next year a train-wreck with horrible changes to physiology and likely involved in escorting business. In other words, I see the movement to legalize pot as another insanity in progress. And we think humanity is evolving...

Personally I see the mass incarceration of people and the billions of dollars and many lives wasted in the War on (some) Drugs as a far greater tragedy than you getting upset about air quality and a few people making bad choices.

Yes, it's a horrible tragedy what is happening in Mexico, especially border cities like Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, as well as other South American or Middle-Eastern countries due to drug trafficking. Ask people in northern Mexico what do they think - most of them will tell you that they just want Americans to take all the drugs and the facilities to USA and keep them away from Mexico so that they can live normal lives and not be threatened by Zetas and Gulf cartel gunners hijacking buses and forcing participants to fight in gladiator-style for survival, or to dig 5000 graves of women killed by gangs of Juarez at the outskirts of the city. Why do they have to suffer all the consequences when some people in the US need to be "high" to feel good about themselves? The problem is in YOU guys, not in the war on drugs.

>Why do they have to suffer all the consequences when some people in the US need to be "high" to feel good about themselves? The problem is in YOU guys, not in the war on drugs.

Changing either factor would help them, and only the latter is in the direct control of the US government.

You instantly focused on the uninteresting part of his argument.

It seems clear to me that harm reduction is clearly a better policy then zero tolerance. We are not going to fix the smoking problem by banning it, just like we aren't going to stop people from drinking by banning it.

People still smoke cigarettes. But it is better then it was, especially in the USA. This happened with heavy regulation, heavily advertised evidence of harm, and eventually social pressure making it "uncool" in most cases. Meanwhile, pot has been the target of a "war" that ruined far more lives with jail time them the drugs themselves would have, and it is more popular then ever.

Holding on to failing idealism is just stupidity.

When the alternatives are changing the behaviour of any large group of people vs. changing laws, my bet is on changing laws being the most effective and realistic method to improve things any day.

You won't ever stop people taking drugs. We've been doing it since the dawn of time and every attempt has failed.

Now, with that in mind, would you rather pursue a pointless, expensive and dangerous war on drugs and feed masses of money to the black market or would you prefer to look at an overall harm reduction strategy that benefits users and non-users alike?

Because if it's the former then you're part of the problem, not me.

--edit-- by the way, I'm not American and I don't need drugs to feel good. I am passionately interested in harm reduction though. Perhaps you should read up on it.

"it annoys anyone who doesn't smoke as the air quality deteriorates and damages both active and passive participant's health"

Do you drive or have you ever been driven anywhere in a car? If so your statement is ridiculously hypocritical.

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