Posted on 09/20/2016 9:12:24 PM PDT by steve86
Flying a bit under the radar in August, the federal National Institute on Drug Abuse wrote an explainer to a significant longitudinal study involving young twins and marijuana pointing out that marijuana did not cause a decrease in IQ.
In the explainer titled "Study Questions Role for Marijuana in Teen Users' IQ Decline," the agency wrote:
"In a recent study sponsored by NIDA and the National Institute of Mental Health, teens who used marijuana lost IQ points relative to their nonusing peers. However, the drug appeared not to be the culprit."
Instead, the culprit for the differences in IQ between kids who used marijuana and kids who didn't was, you guessed it, their families and other environmental factors. Again, the agency writes:
The researchers propose that marijuana users fall behind in IQ because they have experienced adverse familial influences that decrease their motivation to learn and predispose them to engage in delinquency and deviant behaviors, including substance use. These negative attitudes and behaviors impede the normal accumulation of vocabulary and information.
(One researcher) says, "We suspect that children's delinquent proclivities, and the family-level characteristics that underlie them, drive IQ decline." For most of these young people, marijuana use is one deviant behavior among others, and their generally under-socialized behavior and delinquency, rather than marijuana use, affects their IQ trajectory.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattlepi.com ...
This confirms my lifelong experience Kama which is that most people who use marijuana start out as dumbasses. Note that I said most. Those who qualified under my experience stayed dumbasses.
So the suspicions of "many" are validated.
However, the twin that smoked marijuana always had his shoes on the wrong feet.
This kind of observational study answers very little.
Is the family behavior a result of, or cause for, the drug use?
Can a decrease of IQ—which implies a physical disruption of brain processes—really result from bad family environment, or is it a result of the drug use?
The problem is that these factors act in an additive or synergistic fashion and feed back on each other. This is why good studies are designed to control for various factors, which allows researchers to examine only the experimental question. Without proper controls, there are too many confounders to make any kind of conclusion about the study results.
This sounds like a flawed study. Which came first? The chicken or the egg?
...what it really means to say is that weed users are losers from the start...
kids that are losers turn to weed...
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The constant pressure is always on to say Pot is great, but I can’t ignore how many serious crimes take place, and the perp happens to have it or the Toxicology shows they were using.
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Maybe it’s just that the people who smoke it all the time have really low IQ’s to begin with.
All I know is that people who smoke a lot of marijuana tend to be really stupid.
The concerns you note are handled by the processes of peer review and attempted replication. These are strengths of the scientific method not weaknesses. Additionally, statistical confidence intervals are clearly stated, often in the abstract.
I am not sure how much the extended use of marijuana lowers someone’s IQ... but most of the people I know who have been heavy pot users are idiots. Most of them do not get to be President, but when one of them does... it is a complete disaster.
I’ve sat with teens in substance abuse counseling sessions where 16 and 17 year olds are already experiencing negative long term consequences to their lives from smoking pot and their resulting behavior. Whether the pot and/or their family situation is a cause or contributor the situation is a tragedy for the teen, the family and our society. As a father myself, it also breaks my heart. The meth and heroin users are even farther gone but that is another subject.
It's not a perfect system, no matter how you juggle the math.
Sad, very sad.
I remember WELL the "mantra" of the '60s: DRUGS, sex and rock 'n roll. I was disgusted even then. It's no surprise that we are reaping what we sowed 40+ years ago.
This confirms my lifelong experience Kama which is that most people who use marijuana start out as dumbasses. Note that I said most. Those who qualified under my experience stayed dumbasses.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Bill Cosby was told by someone that marijuna “enhances one’s personality”
Cosby’s reply was, “yes but what if someone’s already an ass hole”?
Self-inflicted IQ destruction is absolutely unacceptable, outside of culturally permitted means such as television, alcohol, pills, and processed food nastiness.
My (limited) observations suggest not a loss of IQ, but a loss of will to use that talent.
So, getting your kids to smoke dope is the new conservative point of view on drugs?
Just make it legal and stop this nonsense.
Just shoot druggies and put us all out of their misery.
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