The actual results[1] are less scary: long-term, heavy cannabis use that begins in adolescence correlates with increased rates of psychological conditions and IQ decline.
Edit: To inject a personal anecdote: every time I travel to Europe, I see people my age (and sometimes substantially younger) drinking beer and smoking marijuana. I almost never see reckless drinking or smoking the way I do in the US (e.g., at every college event), and I attribute that to a cultural failure of ours.
My opinion: if we want to stop the kinds of results that these studies show, then we should focus our efforts on reducing the taboos/absence of cultural knowledge that lead to binge usage.
I think you're making it sound less scary than it actually is. The study you linked looked at adolescents who used cannabis once a week, and found that they suffered a permanent decline in IQ.
Once a week is not "binge usage." That term isn't used anywhere in the study. The study doesn't make or support the claim that only binge usage causes mental decline.
What the study supports is that weekly long-term use beginning in adolescence causes permanent mental decline.
Furthermore the NYT links many other studies to support their position, and a recurring theme is that we still don't understand all the long-term effects of marijuana.
I have a feeling that if this article was about tobacco or alcohol the comments would look totally different. I like cannabis, I think it's probably more benign than both of those drugs, but I don't think we should give it a free pass because of its counterculture association or any other reason. By the admission of researchers it is not well understood, so there is a good case to be made that the path of least harm is to legalize carefully and in stages.
Once a week is chronic use though, and long term too.
It's fine if this is actually tested in an RCT instead of a silly correlation that has any number of confounders such as:
- parental care - stable young people start smoking later and smoke less and/or less often
- wealth - rich people -"-
- mental illness
- social groups where early marijuana use can be special in other ways
- location
- other concurrent habits
I'd like to at least see a thorough analysis instead of one potentially random number average need with all sorts of biases. And just the bare bones of statistics have been applied to insufficient data.
The most reasonable paper, the IQ one, is funded by a drug prevention and treatment center.
And the other linked papers are a big bag of laughs. FMRI "looking" abnormal? Bah. Epigenetic study in vitro, wow, very useful if you're made of glass.
Precautionary principle is well applied here already, and in more reasonable countries. Remove reasons for abuse and it rarely happens.
Thanks for the citation, but not sure how that's less scary. Sure they see the most effect statistically in long-term heavy users, but there's no evidence to indicate that such amount of usage is the threshold. Even occasional users show a slight negative Delta IQ in the tables.
Perhaps you're okay with taking something that makes you even the slightest bit dumber, but I am not. Importantly? Do you think kids should be allowed to make this mistake when they don't understand this difference?
> Do you think kids should be allowed to make this mistake when they don't understand this difference?
Does banning it actually decrease usage (I'm genuinely asking, as it's a highly political issue and I can find articles claiming either side)? Also I feel it's much more our duty to inform people as much as possible to empower them to make the best decisions (for the same reasons I think a lot of anti-drug campaigns that exaggerate the dangers of drugs do more harm than good, or why abstinence only sex ed is a net negative). Kids are going to do stupid shit, it's an invaluable part of growing up. If they're not directly harming anyone else, it should ultimately be their choice - even if we think it's a bad one. What makes an arbitrary age any better?
My argument does not have much data behind it, and I welcome studies that contradict my stance.
> Even occasional users show a slight negative Delta IQ in the tables.
So, this is true. But it's also lacking context: that same table also shows a nearly identical gain for adolescents who didn't smoke marijuana at all, suggesting that the negative results for the "used, never regularly" cohort are within the margin of error.
Also consider the scale: the authors say that -0.38SD corresponds to a decline of ~6 IQ points; that means that usage cohorts 1, 2, and 3 each declined by less than 3 points. I'd have to do more background reading, but I suspect that creeps into confidence interval territory. Similarly, we are left without a good explanation for the relatively smaller decline in IQ for the 2 waves cohort. By and large, not confidence inspiring.
> Perhaps you're okay with taking something that makes you even the slightest bit dumber, but I am not.
I'm not okay with taking things that'll make me dumber. However, I'm not convinced that marijuana usage, on par with* reasonable alcohol consumption, would make me dumber. Beyond that, I am confident that several other environmental factors are far more important: absence of lead paint, proper early-life nutrition, &c.
> Do you think kids should be allowed to make this mistake when they don't understand this difference?
I take issue with framing it as a mistake. Per my anecdote, I think that adolescents harm themselves more in a culture that treats alcohol and marijuana as taboos. We should definitely put effort towards stopping adolescent addiction; I think our efforts there will benefit greatly from a culture shift.
* Edit: "on par with" meaning "suitably scaled," not "one joint per beer" or something silly like that.
> Edit: To inject a personal anecdote: every time I travel to Europe, I see people my age (and sometimes substantially younger) drinking beer and smoking marijuana. I almost never see reckless drinking or smoking the way I do in the US (e.g., at every college event), and I attribute that to a cultural failure of ours.
If we are in personal anecdotes, there is an disproportionately high rate of people around me with light to severe psychological conditions that started marijuana around or before 15 (at least 4 are/were close).
The actual results[1] are less scary: long-term, heavy cannabis use that begins in adolescence correlates with increased rates of psychological conditions and IQ decline.
Edit: To inject a personal anecdote: every time I travel to Europe, I see people my age (and sometimes substantially younger) drinking beer and smoking marijuana. I almost never see reckless drinking or smoking the way I do in the US (e.g., at every college event), and I attribute that to a cultural failure of ours.
My opinion: if we want to stop the kinds of results that these studies show, then we should focus our efforts on reducing the taboos/absence of cultural knowledge that lead to binge usage.
[1]: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2012/08/22/120682010...