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From the 2nd Link: > Persistent cannabis use was associated with neuropsychological decline broadly across domains of functioning, even after controlling for

From the 2nd Link: > Persistent cannabis use was associated with neuropsychological decline broadly across domains of functioning, even after controlling for years of education. Informants also reported noticing more cognitive problems for persistent cannabis users. Impairment was concentrated among adolescent-onset cannabis users, with more persistent use associated with greater decline. Further, cessation of cannabis use did not fully restore neuropsychological functioning among adolescent-onset cannabis users. Does the last sentence mean what I think it means. That even after stopping cannabis use, the neuropsychological damage / cognitive problems remained, and didn't rollback the decline from cannabis use? If yes, it's troubling. All my stoner friends claim no permanent damage from chronic use

nerflad 9y ago
Troubling, but not at all surprising
simonsarris 9y ago
> If yes, it's troubling. All my stoner friends claim no permanent damage from chronic use I mean, your stoner friends have got to be making a strange claim in the first place. There is no magic Twin Earth, where yoga is a contact sport, John McCain is president, and they never smoked, that they can compare themselves to. We all decline somewhat from other factors, the question is just how much is attributable to what. How would they even be able to parse out their cannabis-decline from their age-decline, or from their haven't-practiced-long-division-recently decline, etc? If they are only thinking "I felt dumber when smoking but now that I stopped, it seems gone", well, that's something, but it can't be a complete picture vs their never-smoked potential.
- kgwxd 9y ago
  "There is no magic Twin Earth" That's just, like, your opinion man. If they smoke enough, they've probably been to Twin Earth.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    They've probably been to many places. http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the...
- exabrial 9y ago
  Acroyoga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acroyoga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acroyoga Does that count as full contact?
- babyrainbow 9y ago
  I have this same thought when people say their didn't have any problems even after they got all the vaccine shots as a child, so it is completely safe... How did you compare you with your version who never had shots? Or how did any vaccination trials do it?
  - roywiggins 9y ago
    You compare populations. Did a group who got the vaccine have more problems than an otherwise identical group that didn't? This requires careful study design and statistical analysis, of course.
    - babyrainbow 9y ago
      > who got the vaccine have more problems than an otherwise identical group that didn't? But we were not talking about problems. The person I was replying said this > but it can't be a complete picture vs their never-smoked potential. So I am talking about the potential (meaning various capabilities IQ, Social behaviour, Emotional stability (withing the bound of normalcy) etc. I mean, things that are not usually recognized as problems..). How can you compare the potential of a version of you who never had vaccines with a version of you who had a given set of vaccines. This is particularly relevant with vaccines because you don't have a version of you before having vaccines, since these are usually administrated at a very young age..
      - Benjamin_Dobell 9y ago
        Vaccines undergo extremely comprehensive studies before being widely approved for use, there's really not a lot to wonder about. For example, I think everyone knows about the 2015-2016 Zika virus out-break and what experts believe to be a link to devastating child birth defects. This has clearly become a high priority vaccine candidate... and, we believe we already have one. It's just that, despite the devastating effects, medical professionals/scientists aren't going to go willy-nilly releasing it to the public without a comprehensive study (ideally multiple of them), for example, the following study which is expected to complete in 2019. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/phase-2-zika-vaccine-trial-begins-us-central-south-america https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/phase-2-zika-v...
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
I thought it was well-known that marijuana use among adolescents was a risk factor for schizophrenia. I'm 100% for legalization, but no drug is ever completely safe. I had to talk a friend down from a nasty paranoid dissociation episode after she ate the recommended dose of a mass-produced legal pot cookie in Seattle. It's a hell of a lot safer than alcohol, IMO, but that's not the same thing as "safe".
- Hydraulix989 9y ago
  Yes, I've had friends who've had similar experiences after ingesting edibles. Yes, there is some element of responsibility when it comes to consumption (nothing in life is risk-free), but it's not to the point where it should be considered illegal, to say nothing of the ruined lives caused by having a bunch of non-violent offenders run through our judicial system because they "got high."
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    Absolutely. The best solution in my mind is legalization and education. That's why it pisses me off when people spread the story that it's 100% harmless--you can't be a responsible user if you don't know the facts, positive and negative.
- whiddershins 9y ago
  I think it is psychotic breaks you could be referring to. Schizophrenia is its own thing.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    The studies I've seen connect schizophrenia with marijuana use in young people. My friend's episode may be something else; it hasn't recurred despite ongoing occasional use, and she hasn't shown any other signs of schizophrenia that I'd recognize.
- gehwartzen 9y ago
  Kind of a side thought but we have kind of a strange cultural definition of what constitutes a drug. There are plenty of common foods which have physiological and neurological affects.
justifier 9y ago
here is an illuminating issue with the trend of specifying interest as a science develops it usually branches into specific categories of study these categories and their proponents usually create language to simplify intercommunication of ideas but the issue becomes these placeholder words can sometimes be misunderstood: two parties each agreeing on a conclusion but holding different definitions for linking jargon; or sometimes are oversimplifications of their underlying ideas that are less interesting to the science being discussed what does neuropsychological mean? googs will tell you: the study of the relationship between behavior, emotion, and cognition on the one hand, and brain function on the other. wiki(o) will tell you: Neuropsychology studies the structure and function of the brain as they relate to specific psychological processes and behaviours so what is declining? the structure of the brain? how do you measure that? less neurons? less connections? do we know how many neurons or connections is ideal? or is behaviour and emotion declining? how do you determine desirability of emotion and behaviour? wiki also suggests methods of measuring this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology#Methods_and_tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology#Methods_and_to... ; which include card sorting(i) and brain scans the former suffering from what i would consider a fallacy of overfitting and the latter currently under scrutiny for overassuming(ii) it's also a young enough field that hn's spellchecker flags neuropsychology as a misspelled word.. perhaps the spellchecker's neuropsychology has been damaged do i care one way or the other on the short and long term damage from cannabis smoking? of course i am interested in the results but i hope in the future the language, from both sides, will become more descriptive and less inflammatory that said, much like with alcohol use, you are intentionally poisoning yourself in order to alter your perception of shared reality.. accelerated entropy should be expected but the more descriptive information we can form will better inform our decisions on whether the benefits outweigh the negatives (o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology (i) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Card_Sorting_Test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Card_Sorting_Test (ii) https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/apr/09/bold-assumptions-fmri https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/apr...
- Nav_Panel 9y ago
  > that said, much like with alcohol use, you are intentionally poisoning yourself in order to alter your perception of shared reality.. accelerated entropy should be expected This is an odd statement. Weed isn't exactly toxic like alcohol is. It's nearly impossible to overdose, any acute harm will be purely psychological (even though this thread is debating whether long-term harm can enter the physical realm). Also, we do all sorts of stuff all the time to alter our perception of reality, mostly not involving substances...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
geoelectric 9y ago
Well, if you read the results what it basically says is that if you started regular use from adolescence there was a clear IQ decline correlated in proportion with "waves" of diagnoses (iow, they measured a number of times several years apart, and IQ loss correlated with how many times they were diagnosed as cannabis-dependent at measurement so presumably length of time using). If you started as an adult, there was no clear correlation, although looks like at least a small trend towards decline was always observed. http://m.pnas.org/content/109/40/E2657/F2.expansion.html http://m.pnas.org/content/109/40/E2657/F2.expansion.html As far as reversal, looks like it stuck pretty hard if you started regular use during adolescence. If you started afterwards, then you bounced back as long as you weren't still using frequently. http://m.pnas.org/content/109/40/E2657/F3.expansion.html http://m.pnas.org/content/109/40/E2657/F3.expansion.html If your friends are adults it's probably either damage done already or nothing irreversible, at least to the extent this study is accurate. One thing that would be interesting would be a breakdown around different standard deviations. We know that drug use is higher in more intelligent people[1,2], and that probably does represent our audience here given subject matter. I'd be curious to know whether the effects are more or less marked once you're a couple of standard deviations out from the norm, given that the population measured seems to be near median-100 (i.e. either a broad cross-section or skewed towards average). [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201010/why-intelligent-people-use-more-drugs https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamen... [2] http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/15/why-kids-with-high-iq-are-more-likely-to-take-drugs/ http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/15/why-kids-with-high-iq-...
- mirimir 9y ago
  > As far as reversal, looks like it stuck pretty hard if you started regular use during adolescence. If you started afterwards, then you bounced back as long as you weren't still using frequently. That makes sense. The human brain doesn't mature until the early 20s.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
doktrin 9y ago
Depending on when your stoner friends got started, they may or may not be self-reporting accurately. From the same link : > Our findings suggest that regular cannabis use before age 18 y predicts impairment, but others have found effects only for younger ages (10, 15). Given that the brain undergoes dynamic changes from the onset of puberty through early adulthood (37, 38), this developmental period should be the focus of future research on the age(s) at which harm occurs. Age of onset is a particularly important variable as it pertains to cannabis-induced cognitive impairment. I doubt cannabis is perfectly safe and harmless at any age, but it has consistently been shown to be both more harmful and less reversible to younger brains in development.
threepipeproblm 9y ago
For some reason, most of the those who have promoted this piece have failed to notice that the same journal published a pretty scathing refutation of it, a few months later. http://www.pnas.org/content/110/11/4251.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/110/11/4251.abstract It seems the original authors didn't even bother to look for confounding factors, such as socioeconomic status or use of other drugs.
- threepipeproblm 9y ago
  It is also interesting to note that the paper cites only 3 "NIH grants", but the lead author works for the "Duke Transdisciplinary Prevention Research Center, Center for Child and Family Policy," which doesn't sound very objective. Hmm, let's dig further. The home page of the TPRC lists a single funder: the NDIA. https://childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu/project/transdisciplinary-prevention-research-center-tprc/ https://childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu/project/transdisciplin... That would be the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an institution which has a pre-established position on marijuana and other drugs, and stands to gain financially the more problems that are perceived with recreational drug use. The following government piece on drugabuse.org does not mention the serious criticisms, despite heavily quoting from the journal in which they were published 6 months prior. Since it streches credulity to think they didn't know about the problems raised, the logical conclusion is that the authors felt their piece would be stronger without mentioning them (versus offering any counter-rebuttal). https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2013/08/early-onset-regular-cannabis-use-linked-to-iq-decline https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2013/08/ear...
mattxxx 9y ago
I think it's supposed to have a more damaging impact when you're younger, and your brain is rapidly developing.
- geoelectric 9y ago
  I wonder if they corrected for differences in activity level. Pot has a habit of keeping you on the couch and away from more novel experiences and learning opportunities. Maybe being highly sedentary during brain development contributes. Wonder what the observation would be in sedentary-but-sober people.
steiger 9y ago
A slight cognitive function decline is not at all that severe of a consequence, even if it is true. I'm pretty sure "brain damage" is true in some level for almost all recreational drugs. Amongst them, I'd say cannabis is a very forgiving drug of (ab)use.

nerflad 9y ago

Troubling, but not at all surprising

simonsarris 9y ago

> If yes, it's troubling. All my stoner friends claim no permanent damage from chronic use I mean, your stoner friends have got to be making a strange claim in the first place. There is no magic Twin Earth, where yoga is a contact sport, John McCain is president, and they never smoked, that they can compare themselves to. We all decline somewhat from other factors, the question is just how much is attributable to what. How would they even be able to parse out their cannabis-decline from their age-decline, or from their haven't-practiced-long-division-recently decline, etc? If they are only thinking "I felt dumber when smoking but now that I stopped, it seems gone", well, that's something, but it can't be a complete picture vs their never-smoked potential.

kgwxd 9y ago
"There is no magic Twin Earth" That's just, like, your opinion man. If they smoke enough, they've probably been to Twin Earth.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  They've probably been to many places. http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the...
exabrial 9y ago
Acroyoga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acroyoga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acroyoga Does that count as full contact?
babyrainbow 9y ago
I have this same thought when people say their didn't have any problems even after they got all the vaccine shots as a child, so it is completely safe... How did you compare you with your version who never had shots? Or how did any vaccination trials do it?
- roywiggins 9y ago
  You compare populations. Did a group who got the vaccine have more problems than an otherwise identical group that didn't? This requires careful study design and statistical analysis, of course.
  - babyrainbow 9y ago
    > who got the vaccine have more problems than an otherwise identical group that didn't? But we were not talking about problems. The person I was replying said this > but it can't be a complete picture vs their never-smoked potential. So I am talking about the potential (meaning various capabilities IQ, Social behaviour, Emotional stability (withing the bound of normalcy) etc. I mean, things that are not usually recognized as problems..). How can you compare the potential of a version of you who never had vaccines with a version of you who had a given set of vaccines. This is particularly relevant with vaccines because you don't have a version of you before having vaccines, since these are usually administrated at a very young age..
    - Benjamin_Dobell 9y ago
      Vaccines undergo extremely comprehensive studies before being widely approved for use, there's really not a lot to wonder about. For example, I think everyone knows about the 2015-2016 Zika virus out-break and what experts believe to be a link to devastating child birth defects. This has clearly become a high priority vaccine candidate... and, we believe we already have one. It's just that, despite the devastating effects, medical professionals/scientists aren't going to go willy-nilly releasing it to the public without a comprehensive study (ideally multiple of them), for example, the following study which is expected to complete in 2019. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/phase-2-zika-vaccine-trial-begins-us-central-south-america https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/phase-2-zika-v...

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

I thought it was well-known that marijuana use among adolescents was a risk factor for schizophrenia. I'm 100% for legalization, but no drug is ever completely safe. I had to talk a friend down from a nasty paranoid dissociation episode after she ate the recommended dose of a mass-produced legal pot cookie in Seattle. It's a hell of a lot safer than alcohol, IMO, but that's not the same thing as "safe".

Hydraulix989 9y ago
Yes, I've had friends who've had similar experiences after ingesting edibles. Yes, there is some element of responsibility when it comes to consumption (nothing in life is risk-free), but it's not to the point where it should be considered illegal, to say nothing of the ruined lives caused by having a bunch of non-violent offenders run through our judicial system because they "got high."
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Absolutely. The best solution in my mind is legalization and education. That's why it pisses me off when people spread the story that it's 100% harmless--you can't be a responsible user if you don't know the facts, positive and negative.
whiddershins 9y ago
I think it is psychotic breaks you could be referring to. Schizophrenia is its own thing.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  The studies I've seen connect schizophrenia with marijuana use in young people. My friend's episode may be something else; it hasn't recurred despite ongoing occasional use, and she hasn't shown any other signs of schizophrenia that I'd recognize.
gehwartzen 9y ago
Kind of a side thought but we have kind of a strange cultural definition of what constitutes a drug. There are plenty of common foods which have physiological and neurological affects.

justifier 9y ago

here is an illuminating issue with the trend of specifying interest as a science develops it usually branches into specific categories of study these categories and their proponents usually create language to simplify intercommunication of ideas but the issue becomes these placeholder words can sometimes be misunderstood: two parties each agreeing on a conclusion but holding different definitions for linking jargon; or sometimes are oversimplifications of their underlying ideas that are less interesting to the science being discussed what does neuropsychological mean? googs will tell you: the study of the relationship between behavior, emotion, and cognition on the one hand, and brain function on the other. wiki(o) will tell you: Neuropsychology studies the structure and function of the brain as they relate to specific psychological processes and behaviours so what is declining? the structure of the brain? how do you measure that? less neurons? less connections? do we know how many neurons or connections is ideal? or is behaviour and emotion declining? how do you determine desirability of emotion and behaviour? wiki also suggests methods of measuring this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology#Methods_and_tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology#Methods_and_to... ; which include card sorting(i) and brain scans the former suffering from what i would consider a fallacy of overfitting and the latter currently under scrutiny for overassuming(ii) it's also a young enough field that hn's spellchecker flags neuropsychology as a misspelled word.. perhaps the spellchecker's neuropsychology has been damaged do i care one way or the other on the short and long term damage from cannabis smoking? of course i am interested in the results but i hope in the future the language, from both sides, will become more descriptive and less inflammatory that said, much like with alcohol use, you are intentionally poisoning yourself in order to alter your perception of shared reality.. accelerated entropy should be expected but the more descriptive information we can form will better inform our decisions on whether the benefits outweigh the negatives (o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropsychology (i) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Card_Sorting_Test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Card_Sorting_Test (ii) https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/apr/09/bold-assumptions-fmri https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/apr...

Nav_Panel 9y ago
> that said, much like with alcohol use, you are intentionally poisoning yourself in order to alter your perception of shared reality.. accelerated entropy should be expected This is an odd statement. Weed isn't exactly toxic like alcohol is. It's nearly impossible to overdose, any acute harm will be purely psychological (even though this thread is debating whether long-term harm can enter the physical realm). Also, we do all sorts of stuff all the time to alter our perception of reality, mostly not involving substances...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

geoelectric 9y ago

Well, if you read the results what it basically says is that if you started regular use from adolescence there was a clear IQ decline correlated in proportion with "waves" of diagnoses (iow, they measured a number of times several years apart, and IQ loss correlated with how many times they were diagnosed as cannabis-dependent at measurement so presumably length of time using). If you started as an adult, there was no clear correlation, although looks like at least a small trend towards decline was always observed. http://m.pnas.org/content/109/40/E2657/F2.expansion.html http://m.pnas.org/content/109/40/E2657/F2.expansion.html As far as reversal, looks like it stuck pretty hard if you started regular use during adolescence. If you started afterwards, then you bounced back as long as you weren't still using frequently. http://m.pnas.org/content/109/40/E2657/F3.expansion.html http://m.pnas.org/content/109/40/E2657/F3.expansion.html If your friends are adults it's probably either damage done already or nothing irreversible, at least to the extent this study is accurate. One thing that would be interesting would be a breakdown around different standard deviations. We know that drug use is higher in more intelligent people[1,2], and that probably does represent our audience here given subject matter. I'd be curious to know whether the effects are more or less marked once you're a couple of standard deviations out from the norm, given that the population measured seems to be near median-100 (i.e. either a broad cross-section or skewed towards average). [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201010/why-intelligent-people-use-more-drugs https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamen... [2] http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/15/why-kids-with-high-iq-are-more-likely-to-take-drugs/ http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/15/why-kids-with-high-iq-...

mirimir 9y ago
> As far as reversal, looks like it stuck pretty hard if you started regular use during adolescence. If you started afterwards, then you bounced back as long as you weren't still using frequently. That makes sense. The human brain doesn't mature until the early 20s.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

doktrin 9y ago

Depending on when your stoner friends got started, they may or may not be self-reporting accurately. From the same link : > Our findings suggest that regular cannabis use before age 18 y predicts impairment, but others have found effects only for younger ages (10, 15). Given that the brain undergoes dynamic changes from the onset of puberty through early adulthood (37, 38), this developmental period should be the focus of future research on the age(s) at which harm occurs. Age of onset is a particularly important variable as it pertains to cannabis-induced cognitive impairment. I doubt cannabis is perfectly safe and harmless at any age, but it has consistently been shown to be both more harmful and less reversible to younger brains in development.

threepipeproblm 9y ago

For some reason, most of the those who have promoted this piece have failed to notice that the same journal published a pretty scathing refutation of it, a few months later. http://www.pnas.org/content/110/11/4251.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/110/11/4251.abstract It seems the original authors didn't even bother to look for confounding factors, such as socioeconomic status or use of other drugs.

threepipeproblm 9y ago
It is also interesting to note that the paper cites only 3 "NIH grants", but the lead author works for the "Duke Transdisciplinary Prevention Research Center, Center for Child and Family Policy," which doesn't sound very objective. Hmm, let's dig further. The home page of the TPRC lists a single funder: the NDIA. https://childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu/project/transdisciplinary-prevention-research-center-tprc/ https://childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu/project/transdisciplin... That would be the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an institution which has a pre-established position on marijuana and other drugs, and stands to gain financially the more problems that are perceived with recreational drug use. The following government piece on drugabuse.org does not mention the serious criticisms, despite heavily quoting from the journal in which they were published 6 months prior. Since it streches credulity to think they didn't know about the problems raised, the logical conclusion is that the authors felt their piece would be stronger without mentioning them (versus offering any counter-rebuttal). https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2013/08/early-onset-regular-cannabis-use-linked-to-iq-decline https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2013/08/ear...

mattxxx 9y ago

I think it's supposed to have a more damaging impact when you're younger, and your brain is rapidly developing.

geoelectric 9y ago
I wonder if they corrected for differences in activity level. Pot has a habit of keeping you on the couch and away from more novel experiences and learning opportunities. Maybe being highly sedentary during brain development contributes. Wonder what the observation would be in sedentary-but-sober people.

steiger 9y ago

A slight cognitive function decline is not at all that severe of a consequence, even if it is true. I'm pretty sure "brain damage" is true in some level for almost all recreational drugs. Amongst them, I'd say cannabis is a very forgiving drug of (ab)use.