One aspect I’m curious about, especially given the younger cohort, is the causal directionality here - especially when I was younger, I knew a lot of people who were self-medicating with cannabis for things like anxiety and ADHD, which also have effects on working memory and executive function. I’ve known enough heavy users long enough that I do believe there’s long term cognitive effects (whether directly or indirectly), but the specific effects and cohorts they were evaluating here gave me some pause.
I've consumed far more than my fair share of cannabis, starting at age 19. I'm also almost certainly ADHD (according to friend who's a psychiatrist, but says I'm untestable), and have a meaninglessly high IQ.
I've noticed that amongst very slow people, more _seem_ to have started smoking dope at a very young age (9 to 12). The idea that pot could be very bad for adolescents in particular is not a new one. I certainly feel slowed down by it, although as the study says, it's working memory that's affected.
I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if I'd met weed at say 30yo. Would the final stages of "maturing" have played out very differently?
Living with attention challenges doesn't require a formal diagnosis to start implementing helpful strategies. I was diagnosed with ADHD ten years ago and while medication helped with focus issues, it came with significant side effects.
Instead, I adopted these practices:
- Creating daily schedules
- Preparing essentials (clothes, lunch, gym gear) the night before
- Regular exercise
- Meditated daily
- Quitted weed
- Quitted porn
- Reducing screen time
After a while I didn't need medication for my studies and later my work. I believe that if I had continued on medication I would still believe that it was something wrong with me, which I don't anymore. I'm just a person that functions well when there is structure in my life (which I had not learned in my youth), and that's not a disability.
There have been huge advancements in specific life strategies for ADHD- many of them organically from the community, but they aren’t the same things that work for people without ADHD to add structure and discipline- they are adapted to require less executive control. You don’t need a professional diagnosis to try them- but it helps you know what is more likely to actually work, and can be helpful for some people to take it more seriously and deeply investigate and try ADHD specific strategies.
For me, the "Hacking Your ADHD" podcast has been life changing- after trying a number of productivity advice books and not knowing why I couldn't get any to work, this podcast mentions ones that work for me.
Moreover, while not everyone with ADHD does well on or needs medication, for a lot of people it is absolutely life changing... and people end up suffering needlessly for years because of preconceptions that prevent them from trying it. It’s worth trying and finding out. Personally, I think more people would benefit from the less used non stimulant medications and/or lower doses of milder stimulants- most people that have bad side effects are taking heroic doses of amphetamines. I think a lot of doctors are just incompetent when they are starting people out like that.
I do all of the things you listed above plus an extremely low dose of ritalin, and neither would work for me without the other. Structure, discipline, and habits are life changing for anyone- but a lot of ADHD people try the regular advice for implementing them unsuccessfully for years.
> There is no test- they interview you and other people in your life to see if you have the symptoms or not.
This isn't universally true. Over here the evaluation lasts around 6 hours spread over 4 appointments with a specialist (a clinical psychologist) and consists of interviews, questionnaires, and a number of (stress) tests of your focus, impulsivity, and short term memory.
I'd think hard about the possible consequences of doing this. It could be challenging to explain if you're ever asked about it when undergoing official diagnosis, you might be forced to lie or risk being labeled a drug seeker.
And I don't think looking out for whether it "helps you concentrate" is a valuable metric. Healthy people also abuse stimulants because it helps them concentrate.
Perhaps a more valuable effect to pay attention to is whether it calms you down? This is a counter-intuitive effect common in people with ADHD.
How do you think those final stages of maturing would have been different for you?
I picked up weed in my mid 30s and now in my late 30s am a heavy user. Sometimes I take an edible and hack on a hard problem in the middle of the workday and it turns it into a fun challenge rather than a stressful endeavor. I think finding weed at this stage in my life has made me more introspective and certainly a better husband and person. I also quit drinking a few years ago and weed plus no alcohol has made my life immensely better.
Weed is better than alcohol. But I think you shouldn’t get too rosy with weed. There are a ton of negative things that come with it, including the potential to disassociate with society and long term memory loss.
I don't know why people still claim ADHD is "untestable" in adults, when you can just try a non-euphoric stimulant and see if they amp you up or chill you out.
I suppose, that test isn't useful for doctors trying to sort out people who want to get amped up on stimulants from those with ADHD, since it relies on subjective reporting, but if you are curious for yourself it isn't hard to find out.
(Note that there can be lots of other causes of executive function disorder, so not everyone with executive function issues responds to stimulants. But for ADHD in particular we do kind of understand the biological basis now, and the treatment has a different effect in people without that particular dendrite abnormality.)
I suggest seeing a neuropsychiatric specialized in ADHD diagnosis, there are tests that can be used to diagnose ADHD no matter your IQ, by for example looking at impulse control - you can be diagnosed with an IQ at the edge of testability, that is certainly past the meaninglessly high point.
It's true that it's more difficult with a high IQ, but looking at impulse control tests, variations in subscores, IQ-like tests to detect invalid subscores, attention direction tests, as well as your personal habits and talking to people in your surroundings/who you grew up with, it's very much possible for a confident diagnosis to be made no matter the IQ.
I had a friend who was self-medicating her anxiety and bipolar disorder (as I understand it, she only found out about the bipolar disorder some time after she quit smoking). She was pursuing a bachelor's degree at the time and was highly promising in her field, according to her supervisors. But after six months of use, all her academic achievements turned into failures. Plus, during depressive phases, cannabis sometimes made her feel even worse. In the end, after a year of smoking weed, she quit because she realized it was seriously affecting her brain and abilities. And that she could end up completely screwing up her life.
most classical ADHD people I’ve met were slightly/very above average IQ types regardless of their symptoms, so my instinct would be told be that the effect may be even more pronounced- they’d probably have to do some controlling via something like looking at PSATs to get a before/after.
Stimulants also 'increase ADHD-symptoms' for individuals that don't have ADHD, so I don't think the sentiment was attempting to address side effects of irrelevant cohorts.
It's a myth that stimulants only work on people with ADHD. ADHD is not a real condition anyway, it's a collection of symptoms that can have many different causes.
I know this doesn’t add to the conversation but I hate that term, they should just say they’re addicted to weed. 95% of the time the anxiety is either normal or a result of chronic weed use (ie withdrawal)
My understanding is that THC is primarily indirectly psychologically addictive. I should also add the irony that at least according to some, weed was pushed for bannage at least in part because it was something migrant farmers would use to help get through the simple monotonous work in their day [0].
To that extent it's not that different from the folks I worked with in many industries that had notable yet not directly debilitating habits in the gacha/lootbox, nicotine in one form or another, gambling, adult entertainers, expensive weekend trips, or whatever else happened to hit their dopamine receptors the right way due to past stimuli.
The bigger question is this; I've had colleagues that within a week of stopping work at a toxic place, stop drunk-dialing me at 2AM. Why aren't we asking that?
What are we not asking about cross-correlation? How many people go to darker paths to get their kicks? [1]
[0] - And maybe that's apocrypha, OTOH every productive JVM dev I've met seems ok with the devil's lettuce....
I agree with this in general though of course there are exceptions though from anecdotal experience they're outliers. The amount of people I went through my teenaged and then university years with who adopted the stance of "weed isn't a "real" drug and smoking every day for years on end doesn't make me an addict" when it was clearly affecting their life negatively in a visible way was always baffling. The majority of them didn't start smoking weed to "self medicate", they started recreationally and just got to a point where they didn't WANT to function without it but would begin to associate the "boring" feeling of sobriety as something that needs to be treated.
I had a college friend who claimed it wasn't addictive, and then became addicted. Towards the end of freshman year he quit school for a couple weeks, just to determine he couldn't stop smoking and went right back. Last I spoke to him he was still trying to quit, and he had a new method of locking the weed in a box to limit his use.
His withdrawals included him becoming extremely anxious, which is presumably why so many people think the weed helps with their anxiety. In 30 years we're going to look at weed like a slightly different version of cigarettes and wonder why anyone legalized it knowing what the consequences would be.
Weed isn't physically addictive. Forming habits is a very different thing though - anything can become addictive if you train yourself to need it. I've known heavy smokers who couldn't eat or function normally without weed, but people with less structured and intense habituation who use similar amounts over similar lengths of time without any issues.
I would turn that around and say addiction should be more often seen in the context of self medicating: what issue is the person having that the drug is fulfilling some important need for them, even if it is doing so in an unhealthy way?
There usually is an underlying psychological issue, and this framing gives a path towards understanding and addressing it.
You're right, it doesn't add to the conversation, especially because you're citing at best some anecdotes without any sources.
Plenty of people self-medicate with cannabis. They take regular, measured doses of cannabis products, making sure to pick specific strains or brands that they know to have the needed effects.
Point out the problems caused by marijuana during the thousands of years of unregulated use. The regulatory environment is the main driver for the problems caused by most drugs in the modern world. If it weren't illegal to use/possess/sell, people would largely not be stealing or killing or doing other antisocial things in order to do so. I'm not really a fan of decriminalization as a panacea to societal problems around drugs, but criminalization was the cause of most of those problems.
no idea how this got so heavily downvoted. sorry, but most of these people don't actually have a reason for using it. it hasn't been strongly evaluated for psychological use; there are a few physical conditions for which it can make a difference but essentially nobody is using it for that relative to the population size of abusers.
criticize it on twitter as harmful and addictive and a dozen people will pop up, inveigh at you with a score of mean replies, then block you. of course they're not addicted though. weed's not medicine, dude, it's, like, harmless, man.
i'll admit i'm personally biased here in that i know people who have had both temporary and permanent psychological issues from overconsumption and i just generally think depressants/downers are bad things in most cases.
