The continuing need to subdue violent dopers.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Violent cannabis users?
Posted on 03/13/2006 6:23:52 PM PST by Moonman62
Memory, speed of thinking and other cognitive abilities get worse over time with marijuana use, according to a new study published in the March 14, 2006, issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
The study found that frequent marijuana users performed worse than non-users on tests of cognitive abilities, including divided attention (ability to pay attention to more than one stimulus at a time) and verbal fluency (number of words generated within a time limit). Those who had used marijuana for 10 years or more had more problems with their thinking abilities than those who had used marijuana for five to 10 years. All of the marijuana users were heavy users, which was defined as smoking four or more joints per week.
"We found that the longer people used marijuana, the more deterioration they had in these cognitive abilities, especially in the ability to learn and remember new information," said study author Lambros Messinis, PhD, of the Department of Neurology of the University Hospital of Patras in Patras, Greece. "In several areas, their abilities were significant enough to be considered impaired, with more impairment in the longer-term users than the shorter-term users."
The study involved people ages 17 to 49 taking part in a drug abuse treatment program in Athens, Greece. There were 20 long-term users, 20 shorter-term users and 24 control subjects who had used marijuana at least once in their lives but not more than 20 times and not in the past two years. Those who had used any other class of drugs, such as cocaine or stimulants, during the past year or for more than three months throughout their lives were not included in the study. Before the tests were performed, all participants had to abstain from marijuana for at least 24 hours.
The marijuana users performed worse in several cognitive domains, including delayed recall, recognition and executive functions of the brain. For example, on a test measuring the ability to make decisions, long-term users had 70 percent impaired performance, compared to 55 percent impaired performance for shorter-term users and 8 percent impaired performance for non-users. In a test where participants needed to remember a list of words that had been read to them earlier, the non-users remembered an average of 12 out of 15 words, the shorter-term users remembered an average of nine words and the long-term users remembered an average of seven words.
###
The American Academy of Neurology, an association of more than 19,000 neurologists and neuroscience professionals, is dedicated to improving patient care through education and research. A neurologist is a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing, treating and managing disorders of the brain and nervous system such as stroke, Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, autism and multiple sclerosis.
For more information about the American Academy of Neurology, visit www.aan.com.
Sagan ran around, cackling like Chicken Little to anybody and everybody that we were going to have "nuclear winter." If his science was tentative and he had half a brain left, he would have shown more discretion.
Was there a control group whose speed of thinking and other cognitive abilities stayed the same or improved as they aged?
The continuing need to subdue violent dopers.
Sagan famously predicted that smoky oil fires in Kuwait (set by Saddam Hussein's army) would cause an ecological disaster of black clouds. Retired atmospheric physicist Fred Singer dismissed Sagan's prediction as nonsense, predicting that the smoke would dissipate in a matter of days.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It was about the U.S. federal government going to save us from the devil weed that now makes people forget stuff. But, back in 1937 the fed.s were busy saving us from the devil weed that made white women want to get laid with African American men and Mexicans.
Hell - I think the fed.s forget why they started the war against cannabis users, but that doesn't keep them from arresting almost 700,000 cannabis smokers in the U.S. per year. I'd like to do a study on the effects of being arrested for cannabis and choice of political affiliation.
After 33 years of smoking all the cannabis I want-
I have an excellent memory!
In about 45 minutes - I'm going to do some more research.
Cheers
From personal experience I concur.
The continuing need to subdue violent dopers.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Violent cannabis users?
Miss Marijuana?
Four or more joints a week? What sort of ditch weed do they have in Greece? Plus, is joint some sort of standard weight, like a gram? Or did they not take that into account either? What about the edcuational levels of the participants? I know several pothead computer programmers who would run circles in just about every memorization test you can think of against several high school dropouts who are sober.
My observations also. It would appear that a much higher percentage of people who identify themselves as liberals use mj than do people who call themselves conservatives. Doesn't that suggest some correlation concerning the ability to think clearly and not so clearly depending on who smokes grass and who doesn't? I mean c'mon, who among us who have gazed in bewilderment at the paucity of logic by the nut jobs on lib forums like DummyUnderground concluded that most of their "reason and logic" must be bong-produced?
Bump to the top.
bttt
HEY GUYS!!! BOY HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU. I’m the guy in that photo. I’m sure you can just imagine my surprise at finding my photo used all across the world on some forum. But get this, although a weed smoker at the time, I wasn’t even stoned during that pic, I’d just finished a long-distance drive with a friend of mine to another city, and that is a digeredoo in the background not a bong....Funny hey.
I have a theory that I told my daughters.
Your mental aging stops when you start using marijuana regularly.
Whatever age you are when you start using regularly is the mental age you stay until you stop using.
I can say from experience that this is what happened to me.
“Percentages of persons who smoke marijuana at least once a month”
Wow, if that’s anything like accurate, I’m surprised - a lot more people smoke pot occasionally, all over the country than I ever thought. It would seem to indicate that nationwide at least a third of the populatian does. Is this only college students or people 18-40 years old or something like that?
Also, the distribution of frequence of use is almost the opposite of what I might have expected. For example, I might have expected some of the highest rates in Washington and Oregon, and the lowest in what has sometimes been called the “Bible Belt”. Where did this map come from, and based on what?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.