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Cannabis & the developing brain

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lodaweed

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Jun 27, 2013
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Here's the deal, i'm 16 and I go to boarding school. I get high grades, do LOTS of sport, and have a normal social life. I never smoke in school, but when I'm on vacation, I blaze like a joint or 2 a day. Question: Is this going to affect my brain negatively in the long run? I'm not dependant or anything, since the longest I ever go smoking is 2 months during summer break.
Cheers guys
 
Your short term memory will most likely be affected. I get extreme forgetfulness recently even when I'm not high, but after a few days of not smoking it seems to be fine again.
 
Really? I don't get any of that, but people keep saying stuff about the developing brain, and the it's more dangerous to start earlier?
 
I'm 17 and smoke at least twice a week when I'm in another city working. Sometimes in my home town I smoke nearly every day, so that might be why. :P I still do well in school though, so for now a slight bit of forgetfulness is a small price to pay. In my previous exams I got 3 As in maths, physics and IT, and a C in chemistry. I actually started doing better in school after that module, so I repeated that chemistry exam and I'm awaiting the results on that repeat and the next module exam results for those 4 subjects which I finished about a week or two ago.
 
Yes. As a sixteen year-old, cannabis usage is dangerous. This is not to scare you. I am not against marijuana, personally.

The most recent technology has demonstrated that people who smoke weed before they're around age eighteen are more likely to develop schizophrenia, or mental disorders with psychotic components. Though smoking marijuana hasn't been shown to cause schizophrenia by itself, people your age with certain genetics and life experiences who smoke are likely to develop the disease. This means you may or may not be at risk. The only way to know is to find out; you don't want to do that, do you?

Please review the current literature. I know you may not know how to evaluate a study, but each one I've come across, as well as every psychiatrist I've met, has been of the same opinion.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395612003512
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0055821
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3544398/
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876201813000944

I wish it wasn't so.

I don't want to tell you what to do because I believe in freedom of choice at your age. Also, I started smoking weed at age fourteen. I wish I hadn't, though. I believe it has contributed a fair amount to my current psychiatric illness. I don't have schizophrenia, but i experience psychotic symptoms.

If you choose to smoke:
1: you may view it as the worst choice you ever made
2: don't say you weren't warned (I wasn't, though I don't know how much a difference that would've made)

If you experience any of these symptoms while high, for god's sake, don't do it again:
1. hearing things, seeing things, or otherwise sensing things which aren't there
2. extreme anxiety
3. extreme paranoia
4. deep depression
5. unexplained hopelessness
6. phobia (avoiding something for no reason, like closing the window because it makes you feel more safe)
7. panic attacks/trouble breathing/tremors (physical shaking)
8. irrational anger or aggressive actions
9. crying
10. a general, very uncomfortable feeling of being mentally confined

If you have a bad experience after smoking weed, or experience any of the effects described above, you'll know that it is definitely not a good idea to use. The most unhealthy thing you can do if this happens is (of course) continue to take marijuana, worse, continue to take marijuana along with another drug to make the symptoms not appear again; your brain will still be negatively affected, you just won't know it.

I want to be clear on something else: you do not necessarily have to have these symptoms to develop a later mental illness.

You'll find a lot of people on this site still use the drug despite having psychotic reactions. One of them was me. I finally quit. Its quite sad.

I'll bet that your friends think the drug is harmless, too. I know my friends did. For some, its about as damaging as drinking a cup of green tea. For others, you might as well give them a high dose of pcp, methamphetamine, and lsd at the same time then throw them in a war zone (it can be extremely damaging, as i've said over and over; i just want to make sure you understand).

If you continue to smoke (assuming you don't have an obviously negative reaction), these would be my guidelines:
-watch out for these symptoms in yourself and others
-stay busy while you're high
-don't smoke more than once every two days
-don't smoke in areas you're uncomfortable with
-don't smoke if you have a curious sensation that you don't want to smoke, even if part of you wants to
-don't smoke synthetic cannabinoids, or legal substitutes
-don't let anyone pressure you into smoking more than you're 100% comfortable with

I'm sure others have productive suggestions to add. Any questions?
 
1. hearing things, seeing things, or otherwise sensing things which aren't there
2. extreme anxiety
3. extreme paranoia
4. deep depression
5. unexplained hopelessness
6. phobia (avoiding something for no reason, like closing the window because it makes you feel more safe)
7. panic attacks/trouble breathing/tremors (physical shaking)
8. irrational anger or aggressive actions
9. crying
10. a general, very uncomfortable feeling of being mentally confined
Click to expand...

Never been given a list like this before. If I'm with friends it's okay (during day), at night, not so much.

1. I hear high pitched and high frequency beeping occasionally. In my head I liken it to being able to hear electricity running through wires or signals in phone lines. Never seen anything, only time I've seen things that weren't there was when I was using a legal high blend containing 5-Fluoro-JWH-122 and AM-1220's Azepan derivative
3. I get paranoid, but more about getting caught because the act is illegal. For instance, when in a park with my friend at around 11PM I thought a woman who was holding an umbrella was a cop with a rifle and her jack russel was a sniffer dog.
5. I suppose this might fit in, after getting extremely stoned before bed I started getting a feeling of hopelessness and then I asked myself "Why do I do this?" and a voice inside my head said "It helps me realise me". Although that quote doesn't make perfect sense, I kind of liked the general meaning at the time. I would like to add I was experimenting and smoked a gram of salvia 10x. I didn't experience a breakthrough though, I attribute this to not using a torch lighter.

I still feel as if any of the bad feelings are worth the good times that I have with my friends and relaxing with them.

EDIT: May also be appropriate to add but I have situational social anxiety (way before trying any drugs) and a persisting self diagnosed dissociative disorder attributed to taking the legal highs I mentioned above.
 
A common, dangerous trend I see is people rationalizing away the negative effects they get from marijuana. I think the drug is more addicting than people give it credit for.

The extent of your paranoia, is, ironically enough, given my initial statement, probably irrational. Ok I'll stop the mental masturbation: being paranoid about doing something illegal is more normal than not, but weed makes the paranoia much greater than it should be. Let's face it: most people around the world don't see smoking weed as a horrible thing. It would make more sense to become paranoid about driving drunk, something which is frowned down upon, and for good reason: its extremely physically dangerous to everyone on or near the road. Yet I've never heard a complaint about paranoia coming from a drunk driver. Usually they're all too eager to drive. The point is that your paranoia about doing something illegal is greatly magnified by the marijuana itself. The fact that you thought you saw a cop with a rifle supports this.

Salvia is a potent hallucinogen; mixing drugs with hallucinogenic properties greatly increases the chance that you'll experience psychosis.

Weed doesn't make you think logically. Yes, it doesn't make sense when you're not high. I hope you realize that the voice in your head was the weed talking. I can translate it into English if you want: "It helps me realize me" = "It makes me high".

You can't diagnose yourself with anything, that's for the people who've spent nearly a decade researching mental illness.

I don't mind giving people advice but I'm not going to spell out what you should do, especially since you're not an idiot.
 
Oh I realise that. I might be slightly worried about getting caught doing something illegal, but after smoking cannabis that paranoia is definitely amplified.

I would also usually never self diagnose something, especially from the internet. Once I tried to look up why I saw sparkles in my eyes sometimes, turns out it's due to blood pressure but the internet tried to tell me my retina was detaching from my eye! The only reason I feel confident about the dissociative disorder (I'm naming it that rather than pick something specific like DR/DP, because I don't know any more than that) is because I've never felt effects like that and what I do feel fits the description. Feels like the world around isn't real or shouldn't look the way it does, and then sometimes it gets worse where I momentarily leave my head. It's like an OBE when sober. Once I was at the gym and my vision shifted and it felt and looked like I jumped back into my own head.

I've heard any psychedelic is also bad for people like that in the same way cannabis is, but oddly enough I never felt any of those negative effects when trying psychedelics. Only with cannabis. For instance, on AMT I had absolutely no problems at all. Everything was perfect.

Would you say cannabis itself holds an even higher risk of exposing underlying mental problems than psychedelics would?
 
i've read studies that talk about how weed can affect the development of your brain.

Believe it or not, you should only be getting smarter from here on. By smarter I mean able to pick up new things quicker, analyze facts and come to conclusions quicker, etc. Your brain is not fully developed yet.

I'd stick to alcohol which will only damage the rest of your body (but leave your brain relatively undamaged long term) until you are a few years older, but hey, it's your choice. Still, I remember at least when I was 16 I didn't fully understand the ramifications of my actions. I sure as hell thought I did though. But that was me, and you may be different.

I started at 21 and I'm glad I started so late.
 
I would suggest steering clear until you are 18-20. As an "early adopter" I started at 13 & whilst I have a good career it has affected me detrimentally. I have a shocking short term memory & I take a long time to learn peoples names. I have learnt to adapt by writing down peoples names in face to face meetings or preparing an agenda but I have gone blank mid conversation & it is can be awkward. Besides that I am not too badly affected & I have been a heavy smoker for 16 of the last 20 years.

You are not smoking often lodaweed but in binges. Provided you steer clear of daily smoking you should be fine although Ho Chi Minh's post has some excellent points to consider. I certainly wish I had waited a few more years.
 
Wow, thanks a lot guys, great feedback! (especially Ho-Chi-Minh, thanks bud)
I don't have any of those problems while smoking, and nobody in my family has any mental health issues so i'm probably gonna go ahead, as long as I restrict my use to these binges on holiday I think i'll be peachy :)
 
I certainly don't have mental health issues & to look at or work with me you would never know I smoke a gram after work every night. I just have an appalling memory for names lol. Go for gold, a few billys won't hurt i reckon.
 
I started regularly at 15ish, and around 17 I noticed the pot had changed me. I was never a socially anxious person until the heavy pot use. I was very social back in the day, I could talk to anyone without social anxiety. Now my social anxiety is pretty bad.

Id wait at least a couple years before you start up.
 
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