This is such an obvious problem to anyone who is above the age of 25.
All of my friends who were real big into weed in high school are all pretty bad at remembering things, most work dead end jobs and are generally unmotivated The ones who started the youngest are in rough shape mentally. Every single one of my friends who still lives with their parents smokes multiple times daily.
Out of all of them, only one is successful, and It's because he bought BTC in 2014 and still has around 20 of them.
I have no doubt, smoking when you are <21 is a huge problem long term.
I believe that your perspective is harmful. I'm an accomplished staff engineer who has worked at multiple megacorps and valley darling companies including MANGAFANGA or whatever you call it and am highly goal oriented and passionate contributor. I started smoking weed at 13. I own multiple homes and live a well adjusted life with my wife. I support my parents and sisters. Without weed, I can get tunnel vision, or looped, trapped in the many contradictions and highly irrational layer 8 issues that permeate high stakes corporate decision making surrounding my technical efforts. Weed helps this all bother me less. I vape every day. Often on balconies at work. I'm afraid of schizophrenia, but besides that, weed has been a miracle drug for me. I have a psychiatrist, I've had pharmaceuticals, but really the plant has been the best thing for me and I wouldn't have gotten nearly as far as I have without it.
Getting this subthread back on topic, the study defines heavy (or medium) use - i.e., the problem categories in the study - as 1000+ (or 11-1000 days of usage). Are you a medium-heavy user?
I don't think you being an exception disproves the parent's generality that on the average heavy weed usage doesn't correlate with people in your position.
I believe his generality has more to do with his friends than the drug itself. I am a heavy user. Remembering names sometimes is hard upon first introductions, but besides that my short-term memory seems to function just fine. I have had many coworkers in similar situations at the organizations I've been a part of. We've stayed friends, they're doing just fine. Some are in happier work situations and no longer consuming to cope. I've been actively trying to find my own balance as well. But generalizing stoner -> loser is a harmful, limited, and ignorant perspective in my opinion.
Fair point, but not material for the parent's case.
To your point, AFAIK, the study doesn't differentiate potency of weed. Not all cannabis is created equal and the strands commonly available now are way more potent (with more arrows pointing to addictiveness) than "your dad's weed."
I wasn't meaning to argue anything beyond perhaps bringing to light how naïve these studies are. We don't count alcohol consumption this way. Is someone that smokes once per week for 20 years a heavy user? Would anyone consider someone that drinks once per week for 20 years a heavy drinker?
Why do these studies assume weed is cumulative but alcohol isn’t? Is it because most researchers have experience with being drunk but zero to little experience with being high on weed?
It seems likely there is a difference between someone who is buzzed all day every day for years vs someone that smokes several times each weekend, but these studies all group them together as one. Most likely because the researchers don't understand what they are studying and produce results that do not match the lived experience of their research subjects.
Yeah well I started smoking weed when I was 16 and I'm a poor man approaching retirement with no family or friends or assets and a tenuous job predicated in my ability to perform manual labor. Now what.
Exceptional success is often associated with exceptional behavior. Not as in good, but as in the exception. For instance many/most highly successful tech people also dropped out of university and don't have many great things to say about it. They may well be right, but that's not a path to success for the average person unless they instead plan on pursuing a skilled trade or what not.
I also imagine extreme success drives social issues. It has to suck not ever truly being able to know if somebody is interested in you because they're interested in you, or if they're simply interested in your money/fame. To say nothing of the fact that a lot of these guys can't even really safely walk around strangers anymore. It all seems like a path to various artificial forms of coping, like drugs. Basically the same reason Hollywood types are also screwed.
So you are just like 50% of everyone else. It isn't unusual or uncommon nor proof that you did anything wrong at all, statistically a lot of people are going to be in that situation regardless of their own personal merits just based on the luck of the draw in life events and choices. That is why so many people are unhappy with current economic standards because obviously a lot of people that deserve better get shafted regardless, and others who are below average make out like bandits.
I have plenty of anecdotes in the other direction. Perhaps there are other factors involved.
Weed isn't going to give you a leg up in life, but it's not a guarantee that you're going to end up in a dead end job and live with your parents forever either. Painting it as such reminds me of D.A.R.E.
>In 1998, a grant from the National Institute of Justice to the University of Maryland resulted in a report to the NIJ, which among other statements, concluded that "D.A.R.E. does not work to reduce substance use." [...] The evidence suggested that, by exposing young impressionable children to drugs, the program was, in fact, encouraging and nurturing drug use.
>A ten-year study was completed by Donald R. Lynam and colleagues in 2006 involving one thousand D.A.R.E. graduates in an attempt to measure the effects of the program. After the ten-year period, no measurable effects were noted.
>In 2001, the Surgeon General of the United States, David Satcher, placed the D.A.R.E. program in the category of "Ineffective Primary Prevention Programs".
>In March 2007, the D.A.R.E. program was placed on a list of treatments that have the potential to cause harm in clients in the APS journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science.
It was, at best, ineffective. At worst it was harmful.
Pointless is quite wrong though. Drugs can be dangerous and because of it should require a lot of thought, education about, and respect if you partake on it but they are definitely not pointless.
If used in ways that doesn't affect someone negatively (and here is where the danger, education, and respect part comes in) it can provide life experiences that you could never, ever have by being sober.
Doesn't mean that a sober experience is subpar, it's just different, and it's ok if you want to live that way but it's not the only and "right" way to live a life.
There isn't much to be educated about. Scientific research about the long-term effects of any of these is inconclusive, even on alcohol and tobacco which is everywhere. All they know is smoking increases the risk of lung cancer.
The related "legalizing weed will make people use it less" was a common argument before it was legal. We were actually taught that in college. Did not seem like a good-faith argument.
You have a bunch of anecdotes where the only successful people from the same school and friend group are the ones that regularly smoked and still smoke weed? They have the best memories of the people you know?
>Weed isn't going to give you a leg up in life, but it's not a guarantee that you're going to end up in a dead end job and live with your parents forever either.
Sure, and smoking doesn't guarantee lung cancer. It sure as hell makes it more likely, though.
>You have a bunch of anecdotes where the only successful people from the same school and friend group are the ones that regularly smoked and still smoke weed?
I have a bunch of anecdotes where people I knew who regularly smoked weed throughout high school now range from successful to wildly successful.
I know a bunch of people that abstained and yet they work dead end jobs, have developed mental issues, and/or live with parents still.
Hence my conclusion that there might just be some other (more important) factors.
Sure, that makes sense. If the risk of something is 1 in 10, 10 people do it, you have 9 examples of people who have no problems and 1 example of someone with an issue.
I was thinking you were saying that you had examples of people who were successful because they smoked weed, where others similarly situated were unsuccessful having not smoked it.
>I was thinking you were saying that you had examples of people who were successful because they smoked weed
No, and I'm not disputing that weed is harmful.
What I took issue with in the parent comment is that it insinuates that smoking weed is a guarantee of a shitty life. I disagree with the weight of the harm they imply.
There is a lot of other factors involved, and a lot more nuance and context to consider.
I have anecdotes of them having good jobs and being successful. I do not have anecdote of them being the ONLY successful. Success wise, they are around the same as everyone else.
> Sure, and smoking doesn't guarantee lung cancer. It sure as hell makes it more likely, though.
And even with smoking it is possible to exaggerate health risks it poses. Just like you severely exaggerated marihuana risks.
I observe the same thing, but I think in a lot of towns and schools, like yours and mine, the kids who chose to smoke weed were the ones who saw themselves as unmotivated losers and screwups. The connection could have been a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think there are enough places like that to skew any study that doesn't somehow control for it. It would be interesting to see if the result holds for kids who didn't see themselves that way, kids who are bright and ambitious or even just average, or if it only holds for kids who already saw themselves as underachievers before they started getting high.
It's quite reminiscent of how long it took people to associate smoking with emphysema and lung disease. In hindsight it seems so obvious! But building evidence for even obvious conclusions can be surprisingly hard.
> It's quite reminiscent of how long it took people to associate smoking with emphysema and lung disease.
It was obvious even back then.
The difference was that the crap you breathed in from air pollution as well as the garbage you were breathing in from working the mills and mines was likely to kill you before the bad effects of smoking kicked in.
Once we had the EPA and got rid of the other garbage, suddenly smoking actually mattered to your mortality.
> 2. It isn't chemically addictive or habit-forming for most people.
I've never understood why people claim it's not addictive when there are well established symptoms experienced when withdrawing. Disruption in sleep quality, vivid dreams, insomnia, etc.
I was a nightly smoker for a long time (only after 8pm, never during the day) -- it took extraordinary effort and multiple attempts to quit. Perhaps there isn't a specific biological addiction that can be defined precisely, but it's definitely addictive nonetheless.
If you were a nightly smoker you were already addicted. Most cannabis users don't use it daily. In that way it's like alcohol. This is in contrast to tobacco users, who use it like caffeine.
Some of the smartest programmers I know smoke marijuana quite regularly. I don't know if they all smoked at an earlier age but I know that 2 of them did.
I knew some top students in college who started smoking weed then and continued. They're still programmers or scientists now, which isn't surprising given their education and talent, but something's wrong every time I talk to them. They seem scatterbrained and unable to remember what either of us said a minute ago.
Edit: Forgot to specify, they're in their late 20s now.
> They seem scatterbrained and unable to remember what either of us said a minute ago.
I've never used weed and definitely have moments like this from time to time. I think I'm old. And that having 3000 Slack channels piping content into your brain 8 hours a day isn't real good either.
That said, I kind of understand the effect this thread is talking about. My youngest brother was doing a lot of smoking in high school and I definitely wonder about the long term effects.
Some of this is definitely social media use and short-form content consumption. My working memory improved significantly when I limited social media consumption and started reading instead. I personally haven't smoked weed in over 5 years.
Sure but I know plenty of people who are dead sober who exhibit the same behavior.
I behave like that occasionally when I have too many unrelated tasks at once and am a little stressed. I hope people don't think it's because I was high.
Yep, the effects aren’t permanent. It seems people choose to be scatterbrained for some reason or another. I do smoke ocasionally and that is very little as I don’t like getting the anxiety/paranoia effects and weed is very potent these days. I only do it to zone off creatively, gives me the childhood magic which dampens the day to day stress. All in all it is a very positive experience. I do see kids these days overdoing it but hey, in my day kids were drinking more than today so these habits change over time
I know a few smokers (tobacco only) who lived into their 90s, and some of them were exposed to much worse in their daily lives when they were young (leaded gasoline, solvents, etc.), but I suspect those may be genetic outliers.
To be fair lung cancer as the biggest concern to smoking was just the advertising boogeyman to convince people to stop smoking, the vast majority of smokers die from heart attack and stroke, not lung cancer. But telling some 14 year old kid that they might just drop dead at 55 of a heart attack isn't exactly convincing, to them that is old as fuck and just dropping dead from a heart attack sounds like one of the best ways to go at the time.
Agreed- in fact, I think for the ones I know, it is a performance enhancer. For me, if I have an incredibly boring job to do, smoking weed enables me to keep going many many hours beyond what I could do without it. As I've gotten older, I've gotten used to boredom, so it's not necessary anymore, but still makes it much more fun
I didn't review the study (wouldn't even know how to do that), but I did read the article and it doesn't say anything about permanent effects. In fact, the participants were aged 22-36, so definitely past high school age.
The title makes it sound like smoking weed causes permanent brain damage, but I don't think that's what they found at all
> The researchers found that both recent and heavy lifetime cannabis use was associated with a statistically significant reduction in brain activity only during the working memory task.
So they observed reduced memory function during a memory task for people who smoked recently or were "heavy" smokers, but not in any of the other tests. Maybe the heavy smokers have permanent brain damage, but the OP at least don't mention any findings like that.
"The researchers found that both recent and heavy lifetime cannabis use was associated with a statistically significant reduction in brain activity only during the working memory task."
They theorized that abstention may help long term users, but that wasn't in write-up
Also this is not necessarily a universally bad thing.
For example if I need to work through something from first principles as opposed to instant recall I may develop a more novel understanding.
Anecdotally I have found a number of individuals that are great a remembering and therefore excel in some academic situations are the quite intellectual rigid and unable to think beyond what they are told.
But as a disclaimer I'm not advocating marijuana use as it can have detrimental affects on motivation for example.
You are misunderstanding the meaning of working memory. Working memory is very short-term and small; it's what you use when you read the second half of an equation and still remember what the first half said.
A reduction in working memory is a direct reduction in cognitive capability for some/many tasks.
Maybe, but i also think that the type of people who smoke all day as teenagers probably also have factors that will hurt them later in life unrelated to the smoking.
My own anecdotal evidence is myself and many of my peers smoked plenty well under 18 and many of us became successful or reasonably so. the whole moral panic over cannabis use has been overwrought and fraught with bad science. now, would I want my child to use before they were 25? absolutely not. is it a catastrophe if they did? also no.
because the mind is developing and the science isnt conclusive as to the factors that affect that. the original claim, if im understanding this thread, is that all marijuana use before 25 will make you functionally useless. I am refuting that claim with the anecdotal evidence of myself and many of my peers that that is absolutely not the case - hope that clarified things.
Well, the vibe I'm getting from these comments is people reacting emotionally, and assuming the study concludes that smoking cannabis causes memory problems. But the article itself says:
> The study has limitations. It was an uncontrolled, cross-sectional study, so the association seen between cannabis and brain function can’t be considered causal.
So even this study doesn't say it's causal, and admits to many other limitations. I agree with your point about evidence and science though, but this is hardly a smoking gun that cannabis makes you dumber.
Yea but what’s the cause here? maybe seeking substances is a symptom itself, and not a cause for the issues.
teen drug use is trending downward and i think thats a good thing so stuff being posted like this just sounds weird to me - as a teen “drug user” that now has a computer science degree, I’d say the kids maybe need a huff of something, they dont seem ok to me. of course thats just my anecdotal opinion, dont do drugs, of course.
All of my friends, including myself, smoked constantly from 16 to 25. We're all now college graduates with a range of successful careers, including staff software eng (me), ER doc, and 2 lawyers.
Ironically, some of the most anti-weed people I knew growing up are either hard drug addicts now, or deeply hateful fundamentalists.
This comment is so strange. You've clearly described a group prone to confounding factors, identified a viable case study outlier, and then just concluded that the dependent variable is causally impactful anyway.
Don't you think it's more likely that the cannabis use in this group is highly correlated with other risk factors?
As opposed to data? What data?
Imagine how hard this is to study:
- can we identify groups who regularly use and don’t use
- and isolate other lifestyle factors
- and follow them for years of the life
- and get them to accurately report data
- and determine which life outcomes can be attributed to cannabis use
No study like that is going to be compelling. The anecdote is going to be just as useful in your personal life. It’s how humans learn.
This whole thread is pretty funny to me, because from a group that generally prides themselves on being logical/rational and valuing the scientific method, it just highlights why anecdotes are generally useless in topics like this.
Sure, this is just a forum, and it's not like many folks are performing experiments with statistical analysis on this topic. I just think it's funny how the language that people using imply that they are so sure that their anecdote is the right one: "This is such an obvious problem", "Your position is harmful", "Some of the smartest programmers I know", etc. I mean, the whole reason statistics was invented was to actually bring rigor to observational analysis.
At a previous company I worked at, the server from where we shared A/B test results was named, as an ironic joke, "Obviously". It was done to deliberately highlight the point that it was pretty easy to come to any conclusion (right or wrong) and use language like "obviously" to kind of imply that the experiment wasn't necessary. I think there were even some example where this kind of language was used to argue the exact opposite possible outcomes to highlight why statistical analysis is so important.
You do realize that the comments in replies quoting with counter anecdotes is specifically to point out that anecdotal evidence is just that and nothing more?
I think you might have missed out on some subtleness.
I smoked a lot as a teenager and it had bad long term effects. There is no doubt. Most friends I had, who were upper middle class, did not make it through college.
I could never understand why parents would allow able-bodied adult children to live with them (regardless of marijuana use or whatever). It's not doing them any favors. Some people need a little tough love to get launched in life. Drag them down to the Army recruiting office or something.
As an able-bodied adult child who lived with his parents for 2 years, it absolutely did me favors in that I was able to save a small down payment for a home. Some people do need tough love, and others don't. It's a case by case basis.
Because a single person doesn't need a separate house. In many countries, the default is for children to stay home until they're married. Now, if that person is like 30 and doesn't appear to be going anywhere, maybe that's a problem.
Hopefully, it's to help enable their success and wellbeing in such a way that it gives them steps towards becoming self-sufficient. Your tone is slightly crass, but you're not wrong that enabling bad behavior in your children is in opposition to your goals as a parent. If you can reason that your nourishment of resources gives them opportunity without becoming a direct dependence and the cost to yourself isn't too high, I don't see it being a problem. Essentially, it varies on how you see your role as a parent and your relationship with your child.
As someone who was once a young weed smoker, I get the sense that this is more correlation than causation. I know as many failures as I do successes from this position.
Those who have been failures were going to be failures anyway irrespective of whether they smoked weed or not, as was the case for those who ended up successful.
With that said, I don't deny that weed smoking at a young age would likely affect your brain negatively. But I don't think it determines what your outcome will be.
The article does not claim that smoking determines outcomes for any individual. It gives statistical evidence that outcomes (measured brain activity while performing certain tasks) for weed smokers are worse than for non-smokers __on average__, and that this pattern persists in various subpopulations determined by demographic and lifestyle factors.
I agree that short term memory loss being a side effect of heavy use is common knowledge to anyone who is or knows a heavy user.
But I think you shouldn't be so confident that smoking when young is a huge problem long term.
I would have been in the 'heavy user' category by the time I was 17, and I've had the odd experience of persistent short term memory loss (e.g., having multiple people tell me 'you just asked me that' with a bewildered look). I also quit smoking when I was 17, and haven't had any noticable symptoms since I was 20 (> 20 years ago). I doubt if anyone who knows me would say I'm not 'successful.'
Not recommending heavy use, to be sure. Just saying that it's not necessarily a permanent, long-term effect.
The original comment implies their “friends” are failures, which i don’t know about you but I wouldn’t say that about any of my friends, and wouldn’t expect any of my friends to say that about me.
All of my friends who were real big into weed in high school are all pretty bad at remembering things, most work dead end jobs and are generally unmotivated The ones who started the youngest are in rough shape mentally. Every single one of my friends who still lives with their parents smokes multiple times daily.
Out of all of them, only one is successful, and It's because he bought BTC in 2014 and still has around 20 of them.
I have no doubt, smoking when you are <21 is a huge problem long term.