7 ms·

I'm inclined to believe that there is fairly likely to be long-term negative health effects from cannabis use, but that the very obvious correlation many people

I'm inclined to believe that there is fairly likely to be long-term negative health effects from cannabis use, but that the very obvious correlation many people in this thread can probably identify with their friends in highschool is just that, a correlation, for some reason or series of reasons. My friends who really got into weed at that time were absolutely addicted to it, and some of them I do believe let it affect their reasoning ability, but it's hard to know what they'd have been like had they not been smoking their paychecks away. I regarded them as stupid at the time, but there were few instances where they weren't stoned, and a stoned person is often dumb as hell. In retrospect, one of them was (highly) likely schizophrenic but also intelligent, and would make shatter with his older brother who was definitely a deadbeat at the time, but they both came from the same conflict-laden upbringing, while another was clearly intellectually capable but raised to be emotionally volatile, and the rest were mostly just having fun and quit shortly after. I'm thankful I remained friends with them but didn't get heavily into it at that time, but it's much more difficult for me to frame the weed use as a causal factor in anything besides a sort of dampening of their hypothetical willingness to seek a better existence through other means. As South Park put it, weed lets you feel ok about doing nothing, and that's dangerous in aggregate.

somenameforme 2y ago
A cynical take on many governments embracing weed is Soma [1]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(Brave_New_World) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(Brave_New_World)
- ramesh31 2y ago
  >A cynical take on many governments embracing weed is Soma The marijuana prohibition of the 20th century was a complete anomaly in practically all of human history, driven almost entirely by US policy. Before that humans had used the plant recreationally and commercially without hassle for thousands of years. We'll be just fine.
  - aurareturn 2y ago
    We will be just fine. Just like cigarette smoking, eventually weed will become unpopular to smoke. Unfortunately, it does seem like there is a big uptake in users after legalization, which hopefully will subside.
    - abracadaniel 2y ago
      I don’t think Cigarette smoking became unpopular without heavy regulation. In countries that don’t have such restrictions, smoking is still ubiquitous.
      - aurareturn 2y ago
        Cigarette smoking stopped looking cool to teenagers and young adults.
        creole_wither 2y ago
        Bans and advertising and showing smoking in movies did that.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - roguecoder 2y ago
        Absolutely. The things that did the most to drive down use were raising the price of cigarettes (which fund the healthcare costs) and banning smoking indoors, where it affected even non-smoking workers [1]. When we stop subsidizing harmful behavior, we get a lot less of it. Especially in places that are super-cold. [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2012/961724 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2012/961724
      - somenameforme 2y ago
        The data [1] don't really show this. In particular as recently as 2001-2003 35% of young adults (in the US) said they smoked, versus an all-time historical high of 45% across all age groups for some context. By 2019 that figure was down to 10% for young adults. The first bans on advertising smoking went into effect in 1971! So what happened in the ~2000 era window of time? The internet and social media started exploding in popularity. In fact you'll find that the graph of the decline in teen pregnancy [2] looks roughly similar to the decline in young adult smoking, and probably for the exact same reason. [1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/509720/cigarette-smoking-rate-steady-near-historical-low.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/509720/cigarette-smoking-rate-s... [2] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-the-teen-birth-rate-falling/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-th...
- dedeera 2y ago
  [2] - https://github.com/zrm5kfc401t0q1 https://github.com/zrm5kfc401t0q1
- notjulianjaynes 2y ago
  Brave New World is actually a utopian story told from the perspective of a weird shut-in who only reads Shakespeare and the Bible.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    Isn't it great to live in a world where everybody is entitled to their own opinions, eccentric though they may be.
    - latexr 2y ago
      The (western) world today is incredibly divisive, and differing opinions are not only met with hate but lies are rampant and people in power use this propaganda to keep themselves there, sucking resources from everyone else and cause untold amounts of suffering to satiate their infinite greed. I’m not advocating for a world where people can’t speak their mind, but it does feel like a stretch to call the current situation “great”.
      - pithanyChan 2y ago
        aren't propagating proprietary agendas the foundational problem, constituting the lies and the fraud that both the hate and it's recipients reactive actions result from, not the other way around? it looks like it's not even a cycle, though it might look like one because the coal is shoved top down into the boiling boiler room, to reward and insentivize, the business and marketing psychologists and the disseminatora of the algorithms that keep the information flows to the population as separate as necessary. all under the auspice of cultural friction and artifical obstacles to keep the convection rate as limited as is necessary to keep political and social leaders in fear so that they don't even have to come running for advice when (some)one sparks a civil micro conflict. the older cousin of the "small wars theory" ... a knife attack here, a truck into a christmas market there ... and suddenly people don't need to vote Right, AND their conservative party doesn't have to ruin their image by taking the upRight stance ... the situation demands it, after all, the people need protection
interludead 2y ago
Weed might not directly ruin people’s cognitive ability in a dramatic way, but it can definitely contribute to stagnation, especially for people who are already on the edge of disengaging from life
Xen9 2y ago
I believe weed should be subsidized and sold so that you really must not be tricked onto buying it & cannot buy it when addicted solely for reason of getting more addicted without any other reason. Otherwise though, why restrict people from being dumb? What's the opposite drug in the "South Park," senae? I would say methylphenidate+LSD makes one, not in simultaneous use, more acutely aware of need to do things. LSD probably improves intelligence by increasing the fidelity of one's experience, which makes your subconscious dreams more capable of tying many dreams to a single place you have experienced, though childhood home is hard to beat. Made-up places and places one passed by but didn't feel with senses & are generic too much, DO NOT have as many edges in the directed causal graphs that are the associations through which our subconscious dreams switch from one to another, travelling on granular level one time every edge as we dream single time, "repetitive" dreams's loops actually also having subtle differences in betweenxt. Re your correlation, if poor areas may have more accessible weed & lower education & more crime, and the exact causal mechanisms indeed require care.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- roguecoder 2y ago
  [citations needed], though of course first you will need to define "intelligence". The studies[1] I've seen found increased visuospatial memory and verbal fluency in the immediate aftermath of use, but decreased cognitive flexibility. Given that cognitive flexibility has been founded to have a significant impact on programming tasks [2], that seems particularly bad for this crowd. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924977X22001249 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09249... [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9611030 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9611030
anal_reactor 2y ago
> As South Park put it, weed lets you feel ok about doing nothing, and that's dangerous in aggregate. I'd say, this is a huge feature, because in modern society we're losing the ability to just sit and do nothing. Look at old people, sometimes they spend hours just sitting and looking through the window, completely zoned out. I can't do that for five minutes no matter how stoned I am. My life revolves around having a thousand hobbies and activities. Having said the above, for some reason weed stopped being fun for me. Instead of making me relaxed and giggly, it makes me tired. I don't smoke it, I make edibles. Any suggestions?
- brailsafe 2y ago
  > I'd say, this is a huge feature, because in modern society we're losing the ability to just sit and do nothing. Look at old people, sometimes they spend hours just sitting and looking through the window, completely zoned out. I can't do that for five minutes no matter how stoned I am. In moderation, I agree. Although given that numerous people have asked me why I don't where headphones at the gym, I might be an outlier in terms of my ability to zone out and ponder, sober or not, which I do try and practice. > Having said the above, for some reason weed stopped being fun for me. Instead of making me relaxed and giggly, it makes me tired. I don't smoke it, I make edibles. Any suggestions? Nah, I feel similarly, and it probably means it's been too regular of a habit. Even though at most I'd be consuming 0.5g joints or 10mg gummies a few times a week, it feels like it's time to dial it back cold turkey for at least a few months, or keep it to weekends.
  - anal_reactor 2y ago
    I tried using it less, but it's not helping much :/
- darthrupert 2y ago
  From my experience with meditation and weed I'd claim that sitting, "zoning out" and doing nothing requires significant effort. Weed works in opposition to that. It more likely makes the mind wander more, not less. That's not always a negative thing, but I think it's almost the opposite of meditation.
TZubiri 2y ago
Personal observation and common sense logic are often disregarded as 'unscientific', yet they are more powerful tools for learning about the world around us than sifting through hundreds of papers we are not trained to on scholar.google Weed make you dumb short term? Probably make you dumb long term. Friends who smoke weed end up dumb and underachieving? Correlation established. Life is not a college science test. Sometimed you have to just put 2 plus 2 together.
- h0us3 2y ago
  Funny. I have smoked regularly for two decades, yet also have two STEM degrees, a full time EE job, occasional side work, and I’m fixing up a 100 year old house. But I started in farm land learning to build with raw materials, fixing tractors and other machines, growing food, while most of my peers sat inside watching TV. My muscle and cognitive memory is well developed from development of electronics products, a life of building homes and barns to stripping cars to frame and rebuilding them. Weed has nothing to do with underachievement. It’s a contemporary culture that champions low effort fail up office work or asset ownership. Having worked in web apps the last 10 years, the only challenge I’ve faced is keeping pace with low output office lifers who never learned to rotate a tire or grow a potato. Weed just makes someone more of their inner self. I get stoned and take on a project because that’s what I’ve done my whole life (built new garden boxes and ripped up an old sagging deck last weekend). A stoned couch surfer was already a lazy couch surfer.
  - brailsafe 2y ago
    > A stoned couch surfer was already a lazy couch surfer. This is the only part of your comment that I think there's some nuance to disagree with. I don't think it's an untrue statement, but I do think it's partly a matter of whether weed or any of those maladies come into the picture before you learn to do anything remotely ambitious or self-directed. If you're already the type of person who's taking on projects, looking forward to an interesting future, challenge-seeking, etc.. then that's fine it's no problem, that's a state you're going to come back to, but it's also not something you really earned at the outset either, you're more likely to just be pre-disposed to those things early on for some reason or another. I was and am this type of person, but I didn't really realize it in a tangible way until my early-mid twenties, and if I'd be chronically indulging in weed or drinking or gaming, it seems pretty plausible I'd never have been able to get out of the place and rut I was in, but if I wasn't in a rut, I don't think it would necessarily put me in one. I was in a terribly unambitious state in my late teens, floundering and depressed, it's not a productive personal thing to enable more methods of just dealing with it, much like being a lazy couch potato doesn't encourage a person to start a lifelong fitness journey, and having kids early should reduce your inclination to take unnecessary risks. Anyway, I just think that while it's not to blame for a person becoming a loser, it's plausible that it doesn't help a person become not a loser if they find the crutch at the wrong time.
armitron 2y ago
Some of the smartest and most accomplished people I've met in my life spent their 20s experimenting heavily with weed and psychedelics. But that was not *all* they did and the goal behind this experimentation was not 'get fucked up and have fun' but fuel for their creativity and curiosity. So it does seem that easy negative generalizations based on superficial correlations are poor models of what is actually a much more complicated reality.

somenameforme 2y ago

A cynical take on many governments embracing weed is Soma [1]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(Brave_New_World) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(Brave_New_World)

ramesh31 2y ago
>A cynical take on many governments embracing weed is Soma The marijuana prohibition of the 20th century was a complete anomaly in practically all of human history, driven almost entirely by US policy. Before that humans had used the plant recreationally and commercially without hassle for thousands of years. We'll be just fine.
- aurareturn 2y ago
  We will be just fine. Just like cigarette smoking, eventually weed will become unpopular to smoke. Unfortunately, it does seem like there is a big uptake in users after legalization, which hopefully will subside.
  - abracadaniel 2y ago
    I don’t think Cigarette smoking became unpopular without heavy regulation. In countries that don’t have such restrictions, smoking is still ubiquitous.
    - aurareturn 2y ago
      Cigarette smoking stopped looking cool to teenagers and young adults.
      - creole_wither 2y ago
        Bans and advertising and showing smoking in movies did that.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - roguecoder 2y ago
      Absolutely. The things that did the most to drive down use were raising the price of cigarettes (which fund the healthcare costs) and banning smoking indoors, where it affected even non-smoking workers [1]. When we stop subsidizing harmful behavior, we get a lot less of it. Especially in places that are super-cold. [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2012/961724 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2012/961724
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      The data [1] don't really show this. In particular as recently as 2001-2003 35% of young adults (in the US) said they smoked, versus an all-time historical high of 45% across all age groups for some context. By 2019 that figure was down to 10% for young adults. The first bans on advertising smoking went into effect in 1971! So what happened in the ~2000 era window of time? The internet and social media started exploding in popularity. In fact you'll find that the graph of the decline in teen pregnancy [2] looks roughly similar to the decline in young adult smoking, and probably for the exact same reason. [1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/509720/cigarette-smoking-rate-steady-near-historical-low.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/509720/cigarette-smoking-rate-s... [2] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-the-teen-birth-rate-falling/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-th...
dedeera 2y ago
[2] - https://github.com/zrm5kfc401t0q1 https://github.com/zrm5kfc401t0q1
notjulianjaynes 2y ago
Brave New World is actually a utopian story told from the perspective of a weird shut-in who only reads Shakespeare and the Bible.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  Isn't it great to live in a world where everybody is entitled to their own opinions, eccentric though they may be.
  - latexr 2y ago
    The (western) world today is incredibly divisive, and differing opinions are not only met with hate but lies are rampant and people in power use this propaganda to keep themselves there, sucking resources from everyone else and cause untold amounts of suffering to satiate their infinite greed. I’m not advocating for a world where people can’t speak their mind, but it does feel like a stretch to call the current situation “great”.
    - pithanyChan 2y ago
      aren't propagating proprietary agendas the foundational problem, constituting the lies and the fraud that both the hate and it's recipients reactive actions result from, not the other way around? it looks like it's not even a cycle, though it might look like one because the coal is shoved top down into the boiling boiler room, to reward and insentivize, the business and marketing psychologists and the disseminatora of the algorithms that keep the information flows to the population as separate as necessary. all under the auspice of cultural friction and artifical obstacles to keep the convection rate as limited as is necessary to keep political and social leaders in fear so that they don't even have to come running for advice when (some)one sparks a civil micro conflict. the older cousin of the "small wars theory" ... a knife attack here, a truck into a christmas market there ... and suddenly people don't need to vote Right, AND their conservative party doesn't have to ruin their image by taking the upRight stance ... the situation demands it, after all, the people need protection

interludead 2y ago

Weed might not directly ruin people’s cognitive ability in a dramatic way, but it can definitely contribute to stagnation, especially for people who are already on the edge of disengaging from life

Xen9 2y ago

I believe weed should be subsidized and sold so that you really must not be tricked onto buying it & cannot buy it when addicted solely for reason of getting more addicted without any other reason. Otherwise though, why restrict people from being dumb? What's the opposite drug in the "South Park," senae? I would say methylphenidate+LSD makes one, not in simultaneous use, more acutely aware of need to do things. LSD probably improves intelligence by increasing the fidelity of one's experience, which makes your subconscious dreams more capable of tying many dreams to a single place you have experienced, though childhood home is hard to beat. Made-up places and places one passed by but didn't feel with senses & are generic too much, DO NOT have as many edges in the directed causal graphs that are the associations through which our subconscious dreams switch from one to another, travelling on granular level one time every edge as we dream single time, "repetitive" dreams's loops actually also having subtle differences in betweenxt. Re your correlation, if poor areas may have more accessible weed & lower education & more crime, and the exact causal mechanisms indeed require care.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
roguecoder 2y ago
[citations needed], though of course first you will need to define "intelligence". The studies[1] I've seen found increased visuospatial memory and verbal fluency in the immediate aftermath of use, but decreased cognitive flexibility. Given that cognitive flexibility has been founded to have a significant impact on programming tasks [2], that seems particularly bad for this crowd. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924977X22001249 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09249... [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9611030 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9611030

anal_reactor 2y ago

> As South Park put it, weed lets you feel ok about doing nothing, and that's dangerous in aggregate. I'd say, this is a huge feature, because in modern society we're losing the ability to just sit and do nothing. Look at old people, sometimes they spend hours just sitting and looking through the window, completely zoned out. I can't do that for five minutes no matter how stoned I am. My life revolves around having a thousand hobbies and activities. Having said the above, for some reason weed stopped being fun for me. Instead of making me relaxed and giggly, it makes me tired. I don't smoke it, I make edibles. Any suggestions?

brailsafe 2y ago
> I'd say, this is a huge feature, because in modern society we're losing the ability to just sit and do nothing. Look at old people, sometimes they spend hours just sitting and looking through the window, completely zoned out. I can't do that for five minutes no matter how stoned I am. In moderation, I agree. Although given that numerous people have asked me why I don't where headphones at the gym, I might be an outlier in terms of my ability to zone out and ponder, sober or not, which I do try and practice. > Having said the above, for some reason weed stopped being fun for me. Instead of making me relaxed and giggly, it makes me tired. I don't smoke it, I make edibles. Any suggestions? Nah, I feel similarly, and it probably means it's been too regular of a habit. Even though at most I'd be consuming 0.5g joints or 10mg gummies a few times a week, it feels like it's time to dial it back cold turkey for at least a few months, or keep it to weekends.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  I tried using it less, but it's not helping much :/
darthrupert 2y ago
From my experience with meditation and weed I'd claim that sitting, "zoning out" and doing nothing requires significant effort. Weed works in opposition to that. It more likely makes the mind wander more, not less. That's not always a negative thing, but I think it's almost the opposite of meditation.

TZubiri 2y ago

Personal observation and common sense logic are often disregarded as 'unscientific', yet they are more powerful tools for learning about the world around us than sifting through hundreds of papers we are not trained to on scholar.google Weed make you dumb short term? Probably make you dumb long term. Friends who smoke weed end up dumb and underachieving? Correlation established. Life is not a college science test. Sometimed you have to just put 2 plus 2 together.

h0us3 2y ago
Funny. I have smoked regularly for two decades, yet also have two STEM degrees, a full time EE job, occasional side work, and I’m fixing up a 100 year old house. But I started in farm land learning to build with raw materials, fixing tractors and other machines, growing food, while most of my peers sat inside watching TV. My muscle and cognitive memory is well developed from development of electronics products, a life of building homes and barns to stripping cars to frame and rebuilding them. Weed has nothing to do with underachievement. It’s a contemporary culture that champions low effort fail up office work or asset ownership. Having worked in web apps the last 10 years, the only challenge I’ve faced is keeping pace with low output office lifers who never learned to rotate a tire or grow a potato. Weed just makes someone more of their inner self. I get stoned and take on a project because that’s what I’ve done my whole life (built new garden boxes and ripped up an old sagging deck last weekend). A stoned couch surfer was already a lazy couch surfer.
- brailsafe 2y ago
  > A stoned couch surfer was already a lazy couch surfer. This is the only part of your comment that I think there's some nuance to disagree with. I don't think it's an untrue statement, but I do think it's partly a matter of whether weed or any of those maladies come into the picture before you learn to do anything remotely ambitious or self-directed. If you're already the type of person who's taking on projects, looking forward to an interesting future, challenge-seeking, etc.. then that's fine it's no problem, that's a state you're going to come back to, but it's also not something you really earned at the outset either, you're more likely to just be pre-disposed to those things early on for some reason or another. I was and am this type of person, but I didn't really realize it in a tangible way until my early-mid twenties, and if I'd be chronically indulging in weed or drinking or gaming, it seems pretty plausible I'd never have been able to get out of the place and rut I was in, but if I wasn't in a rut, I don't think it would necessarily put me in one. I was in a terribly unambitious state in my late teens, floundering and depressed, it's not a productive personal thing to enable more methods of just dealing with it, much like being a lazy couch potato doesn't encourage a person to start a lifelong fitness journey, and having kids early should reduce your inclination to take unnecessary risks. Anyway, I just think that while it's not to blame for a person becoming a loser, it's plausible that it doesn't help a person become not a loser if they find the crutch at the wrong time.

armitron 2y ago

Some of the smartest and most accomplished people I've met in my life spent their 20s experimenting heavily with weed and psychedelics. But that was not *all* they did and the goal behind this experimentation was not 'get fucked up and have fun' but fuel for their creativity and curiosity. So it does seem that easy negative generalizations based on superficial correlations are poor models of what is actually a much more complicated reality.