Weed Dumbs American Students Down

America has found yet another way to dumb down its students. Let them smoke weed.  Yes, indeed, when college students have free access to marijuana their grades suffer. They spend more time partying and less time studying. It’s amazing. Who could have imagined such a thing? From an innocent substance like weed.

The Daily Mail reports the startling results:

Legalising cannabis leads to more university students flunking their exams.

Striking evidence that legalising the drug negatively affects undergraduates’ behaviour and makes weaker students particularly likely to fall behind is provided by three new studies.

In America, researchers found that students’ grades at Washington Western University fell after Washington became the first US state to legalise the recreational use of marijuana in 2012.

Legalisation ‘leads to an increased incidence in the assignment of D and F grades’, authors Adam Wright and John Krieg wrote in the journal Economic Inquiry. ‘Specifically, we estimate that Ds and Fs are given about seven per cent more frequently after legalisation.’

They also found ‘a much stronger [negative] effect on grades of men than women’ – consistent with evidence that young American men are twice as likely to smoke cannabis as young American women.

This last paragraph deserves some emphasis. Considering that women, on average, outperform men in schools—exception made for STEM subjects—the availability of weed dumbs men down even more. Apparently, weed is a weapon in the war against men.

Another study has shown, amazingly, that when weed becomes legal students play more and study less. This applies in states where weed is only legal for medicinal purposes:

A second US study discovered that even in states where only medicinal cannabis use has been legalised, students were more likely to slacken off, with average study time around a fifth lower than in states with a blanket ban.

‘College students in medical marijuana law states spend approximately 20 per cent less time on education-related activities and 20 per cent more time on leisure activities than their counterparts in non-medical marijuana law states,’ the research team reported.

They added that while medical laws should mean the drug is confined to patients who are prescribed it, such as to relieve multiple sclerosis, in practice the drug ‘commonly leaks from legally qualified patients or dispensaries to illegal users’.

Again, for emphasis. Once marijuana becomes legal as a prescribed medical treatment, somehow or other, the wall does not hold and it becomes more available to everyone.