I've been a recreational Cannabis smoker for almost 20 years, since I was 14, and smoking it 100% has a noticeable effect on my speech. People, also stoners min

I've been a recreational Cannabis smoker for almost 20 years, since I was 14, and smoking it 100% has a noticeable effect on my speech. People, also stoners mind you, will make fun of me for it because of the level of effects it has on me. For instance, they would say I'm actually a model for why people shouldn't smoke pot (again these are users). Anyway, these effects go away with abstinence, but generally take up to a month to really go away (not that I've had many breaks that long in the last 20 years). Yes, weed effects my speech, but also other activities that involve hand-eye coordination or heavy thinking, such as sports, video games, programming, learning mathematics, etc. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination (and a theory supported by research) that short term neurochemical changes will result in longer term structural, i.e. syntactical, changes in the brain. There is a lot understood about this type of mechanism (I did a PhD in computational neuroscience, so I've seen and understood the research in this area).