A paradox with marijuana

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So it's found to lower IQ - IQ, of course, being incredibly versatile, with 'intelligence' composed of a huge number of variables. I'm not saying they weren't scientifically rigorous, but I'd like to know exactly how they catered for all those possibilities.

Still, this is a paradox (besides being an ancient propaganda piece) - how could it lower people's IQ if, almost consistently, when they consume it people become deep thinkers? Deep thinking equals a lower IQ now? (Ooh, Big Brother watchers must be super intelligent!)

News article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19372456

Last edited by Mootoo on 28 Aug 2012, 1:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

Source?

It's not wise to grade your own thinking...especially when high!
It may take a lot longer than crack or meth, but you can fry your head on weed. Snoop Dogg, Cheech and Chong, and countless old hippies are good examples.

and again, any source besides anecdotal evidence?

Yep.
A related thing is that drunk people think they're great conversationalists.

The reality is that university students, both historically and currently, indicate that they smoke it to get a better grasp on their interests, and these, from the perspective of IQ, are the most intelligent. What, does anyone think there's often fault in logic while high? Thinking may be idealistic, but often it's not outright delusional, whereas anyone could see that drunkards slur.

How is that a related thing? Alcohol and Cannabis hardly have the same effects.......so what is true with alcohol is not necessarily true with cannabis.

Ask and you shall receive. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/08/22/1206820109

This was a 38 year, longitudinal study of just over 1,000 New Zealanders. The most important factors correlating with a drop in neuropsychological evaluations between age 13 and age 38 were: 1) age of onset of persistent marijuana use; and 2) persistence of use.

Smoking more than once a week during adolescence correlated with a statistically significant drop in performance, that was not mitigated by later cessation. What this suggests is that while the brain is still developing in adolescence, persistent marijuana use will have an impact on that development, and persistent users will be inhibited in relations to their peers who are not persistent users.

The study does not suggest, however, that occasional use, or persistent use after adolescence will present impacts.

(made a small comment about it on my thread in PPR) This thread he generalized it, didn't state that it was for people who smoked it in adolescents that it lowered IQ.

Did they test the IQs of all these adolescents before their cannabis use to actually make sure their individual IQs dropped? and also how do they know the IQ level they reached as an adult would have been higher without the cannabis use? not to mention maybe other drugs factored in unless they drug tested the test subjects to insure cannabis was the only drug they were using.

What I meant is that people under the effects of mind-altering substances may not be in the best position to judge how well they're thinking (only while actually stoned).

Of course they did! Do you think that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences publishes material without a peer review of it methodology?!? It's one thing to examine methodology for flaws. It is quite another to imagine stupidity that would never make it past a junior editor, let alone a peer review.

As for your second question--we can never know that, and the journal does not speculate on that. What we can know is that of just over 1,000 New Zealanders, those who were never persistent users of marijuana between the ages of 13 and 38 presented a control on the change in their neuropsychological evaluations. Some may have scored better, some worse, but the non-users established a baseline of comparison. Persistent users who did not start until they were adults demonstrated no significant difference in performance. Persistent users who started as teens, did.

However, if persistent marijuana use as teens served to preserve these individuals' neuropsychological performance, then their even more dramatic drop in performance had they not been persistent users would have demonstrated an enormous outlier among the controls.

As for other drugs factoring in, of course it is possible that every single one of the persistent users who presented a significant drop in performance was also a persistent user of some other psychotrope. But that seems statistically improbable. You are, however, quite right in your implication that correllation does not equal causation. Further studies of this type will be required before we can state with any degree of certainty that persistent marijuana use in adolescents is likely to impair cognitive development. But we can state with some degree of confidence that it doesn't improve cognitive development, whatever its other beneficial properties might be.