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Here’s some news you can use. As more and more American states and municipalities legalize marijuana, researchers in Canada have just discovered that smoking weed is bad for your brain. Especially if you are of the adolescent persuasion. In truth, it’s really bad for your brain. It’s even worse than alcohol.
The Daily Mail has the story:
Regularly smoking cannabis can affect teenagers so severely that they end up three years behind their classmates in terms of brain development, a landmark study has found.
The results of the investigation, which involved almost 4,000 secondary school children in Canada, led researchers to conclude cannabis is more toxic for youngsters’ brains than alcohol.
Persistent use of the drug seriously affected basic reasoning skills – while it also had a disastrous effect on self-control, they found.
Smoke more weed and you won’t be able to think straight. This might explain the behavior of some of our younger political leaders… though we have no direct evidence of marijuana usage.
And if weed does make children stupid and out of control, it might even increase their chances of becoming schizophrenic:
Meanwhile, a separate study has found hard evidence that the main psychoactive compound in cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), causes changes in the brain that trigger schizophrenia.
In the high school study, researchers at Montreal University studied pupils from the time they entered the Canadian seventh grade – aged 12 or 13 years – for four years.
More weed makes children more stupid:
Professor Patricia Conrod, professor of psychiatry at the university, said not only did they find cannabis users tended to do worse than non-users, but also that those pupils who smoked cannabis saw their results deteriorate when their use of the drug increased.
She told The Mail on Sunday: ‘We had really expected alcohol to have a more powerful effect [on brain health] than cannabis, but that didn’t seem to be the case. In terms of neuro-development, it’s now looking like cannabis might be quite a risky drug for young people.
‘If you’re a cannabis user, and you used it this year and last year, your level of inhibitory control in the tenth grade is lower than that of a seventh grade non-user. So you lose three years of development.’
So, if you were wondering what’s wrong with American youth, add weed to the list.
4 comments:
I have never met a lifelong pot smoker who was honest enough to admit the damage it did to them, damage that was always self evident to others. I also find most pot smokers claim it has either no effect, or a salutary effect, on their driving. Sigh. I think the worse side effect of marijuana use is the lying.
There must be at least a dozen, maybe two or more dozen, weed establishments selling it within 15-20 miles of me. I don't do it.
The article seems to be missing context. So perhaps this will help. When one has seen what the policies of the Provincial Government has done to Montreal (not so much rural Quebec) over the past 35+ years you might understand what very telling details go unmentioned about the study.
Smoking anything combustible can, but should she?
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