new study concludes: pot definitely messes up memory and learning skills

It says it right in the article:

While the average age participants started using marijuana was 16, some began as young as 10 or 11 and were more seriously affected.
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Basically, the whole focus is people who started using before their brains fully matured. FWIW I agree fully with the thought that it's not how much you toke but how much you actually use your brain that matters. IME, as long as you fight the negative effects you can push through them and be just as smart as you want to be.
 
How do they get grants for these studies? This is as stupid as "kids do more drugs during the summer." obviously being high impairs your cognitive abilities. That does not include outliers who claim otherwise but for the most part drugs as a whole make you less likely to remember stuff.

I do drugs and I learned stuff, that's not to say I couldn't do better if I wasn't high. I just think its silly to say drugs make you better. I honestly don't think drugs make anyone "better" how can people honestly say that they are better when they are high? I like my sober self for learning sober me is much better at understanding. Sure sometimes drugs make it easier to visualize chemistry, my passion, but that's not to say I'm "better" at it high.
 
^ Drugs affect everyone differently (especially considering different doses and different ROA).
Would you tell all those kids (and adults) with ADHD that ritalin doesn't make them better, despite their loud protests?
What about people who say that anti-psychotics save their lives?
This is not really very different.
Weed allowed me to make connections that I would likely not have made sober, and that helped my scientific work.
It also made me forget what the fuck I was thinking in the middle of a thought, which hurt my work.
So I am not saying that it made me "better", but I am saying that it improved aspects of my work, while hurting others.
Ask an artist or musician (l am one) if weed or some other drugs makes them "better".
Many, many people will say it does.
Drugs have many effects, and some are very useful for making music or art or poetry, for example.
Others help with scientific pursuits. Still others may hurt logical thinking, or musical creation.
But isn't it up to the individual to determine what is "better"?
To say that "it is just silly to say that drugs make you better" is not seeing the whole picture.
Maybe you are better at understanding chemistry when sober, but the same is not true for all people and all pursuits.
 
^ meaning to say why not apply that to your sobriety. I find it hard to believe anyone is incapable of applying the things drugs taught them to normal cognitive function. Musicians, scholars, and hobbiests alike. Drugs can help as a crutch for enlightenment or creativity but they should only be used as such
 
I find it hard to believe anyone is incapable of applying the things drugs taught them to normal cognitive function.
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some of the lessons can cross over into sober headspace. but only if you capture those lessons verbally (so they're better recorded into memory), or the lesson was overwhelming (peak experiences, nonverbal emotional realizations, etc).

they aren't just a crutch -- they can allow peak experiences higher than we can achieve without entheogens. they can be used as tools, to enhance our thinking like computers do. there are physical limits on our creativity. these limits can be adjusted, eg often reduced by alcohol, or often increased by pot. simple thought experiment as proof: take any monk meditating at his peak, and give him LSD... he'll get much farther into nirvana ;)
 
Thanks for that, I love PDFs :D I've only skimmed through it so far but seen that the average use for the user group is 147 joints/month. That's 5 joints/day. That's madness!
 
Yeah I am not sure. I have no idea how they could properly do this test. Grab 50 stoners... get half of them stoned regularly and half not and then have them all learn new things involving a range of activities. Physical, strictly mental, memory. I don't see how this would work.

Since everyone is different and learns/remembers in different ways then there is no way to test this. You can't use one person for this test. I don't see how this can be proven.

Regardless, I do not mean to toot my own horn... It is probably just where I live and that I have not been to college and met new people but I always feel rather detached from most people, stoners or not. I can sit and have conversations about just shit like graffiti, gossip etc. but I don't know anyone to actually talk to about the MASS of information that I have gathered since I started smoking pot and using the internet. Even educated people have a hard time keeping up with me in conversation.
Marc Emery offered me a future job for my apparent writing skills (I can if I try lol) and everything I talk about, everything I write came to be interesting to me because of pot. I research constantly and dont know anyone else like that. I smoke as much or more pot than all the burnt out deadheads. I started when I was 13. I don't understand why I havent been effected if this is apparently proven.
 
szuko000 said:
Drugs can help as a crutch for enlightenment or creativity but they should only be used as such
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I agree wholeheartedly with everything before the "but" in your sentence.
The problem I have is with your "should".
You are deciding for other people how they should use their drugs.
But there are many ways to use / purposes for using drugs, and it is not up to you to decide for everyone what the only real correct way is.
 
slimvictor said:
I agree wholeheartedly with everything before the "but" in your sentence.
The problem I have is with your "should".
You are deciding for other people how they should use their drugs.
But there are many ways to use / purposes for using drugs, and it is not up to you to decide for everyone what the only real correct way is.
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This is pretty much my viewpoint too.
 
slimvictor said:
I agree wholeheartedly with everything before the "but" in your sentence.
The problem I have is with your "should".
You are deciding for other people how they should use their drugs.
But there are many ways to use / purposes for using drugs, and it is not up to you to decide for everyone what the only real correct way is.
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I think maybe these are words of wisdom though, because there is certainly a such thing as too much reliance on drugs for creativity. Think of the Golden Mean:

"In philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, the golden mean is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency. For example courage, a virtue, if taken to excess would manifest as recklessness and if deficient as cowardice."
 
^ Yeah, I can definitely understand what you are saying.

In Buddhism, the Middle Path is also seen as the best path to walk.

And I tend to overly rely on drugs for creativity at times, so I can personally appreciate your point.

But I still support the freedom for people to use drugs how the want to, even if I can imagine a more "enlightened" way to use drugs (that I, myself, do not practice!).
 
Many might comment that "we all knew this already" but it's always helpful to keep piling on the scientific evidence. If someone is addicted to marijuana their rationalisations will shield them from facing this truth. Science is an authority that is taken seriously enough that it could help break through them.
 
Who or which group of people benefit most from a study such as this arriving to the conclusions that it has done?
Not that its really telling us anything new
 
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