Dumbed Down by Weed

Here are some fun facts for those who have been beating the drums for marijuana legalization. I am thinking especially of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker who has just proposed legalizing weed nationwide. Apparently, Booker thinks that if we have fewer laws there will be fewer crimes. It isn’t illogical, but still it’s a bad idea.

Recent research suggests that the academic performance of students who have more access to weed suffers. Who imagined that weed would make students dumb… especially when it comes to mathematics. Now that America is lagging the world in student academic performance, and now that America has fewer and fewer students studying engineering, what we really need is more… weed. 

In a better world our senators would be militating for better academic performance. Alas, nowadays they are protesting against it. They want to dumb down an already academically challenged nation.

It was all reported in Vox:

According to a study recently published in The Review of Economic Studies, access to legal marijuana may significantly reduce academic performance.

The study took advantage of a natural experiment in the Dutch city of Maastricht. In 2011, the city sought to pull back some of the marijuana tourism going to its coffee shops, where marijuana sales are legally tolerated. So through the local association of cannabis shop owners, it banned some foreigners of certain nationalities from buying pot at these venues.

This let researchers Olivier Marie and Ulf Zölitz, in the cleverly titled “‘High’ Achievers? Cannabis Access and Academic Performance,” compare the academic outcomes of Maastricht University students with varying levels of access to legal pot.

What they found: The students who weren’t allowed to legally access marijuana saw their grades significantly improve, especially in classes that require numerical and mathematical skills.

That suggests that a significant consequence of marijuana legalization could be worse academic performance — and that could of course trickle out to any other outcomes or work that generally require using your brain. That doesn’t mean that legalizing pot is necessarily a bad idea, but it is something advocates of the policy now have to think about and account for as they move forward.

Note the last paragraph. Your ability to do a job that requires you to use your brain, especially in mathematics, will be compromised by too much weed. Does that sound like an argument for legalization?

Here’s some more information:

“On average, students performed 10.9% of a standard deviation better and were 5.4% more likely to pass courses when they were banned from entering cannabis shops,” the researchers concluded, although there were no statistically significant changes in dropout probability. The effect is stronger for women and low-performance students. They also found bigger effects on courses that require numerical and math skills — backing up previous research that has found marijuana consumption most negatively impacts quantitative thinking.

This is not the first time that marijuana has been shown to be harmful:

A review of the research published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine earlier this year found that marijuana seems to pose a significant risk for respiratory problems if smoked, schizophrenia and psychosis, car crashes, lagging social achievement in life, and perhaps pregnancy-related problems.

Of course, Vox, being a voice of the left, does not believe that marijuana should be illegal. After all, other legal substances comport risk also. Whether they make you dumb is another story.

I allow Vox the final word, even though it sounds like it was written by someone who was doped out on weed:

So it seems likely, based on the Maastricht study, that marijuana legalization really does lead to negative outcomes on academic performance. But maybe that’s okay.

Then again, maybe it’s not okay.