Casual marijuana use linked to brain changes

[m314]

The headlines I read about this story said "Brain Damage" instead of "Brain Changes". It's funny how they assume changes mean something's damaged. If they try this exact study using coffee instead of weed, they'll find brain changes too. That doesn't mean it's bad for you.

I didn't start getting high until I was 21. I definitely haven't noticed changes in IQ from getting high. The worst side effect I get is a temporary reduction in short term memory. It's just temporary. I'd find it more difficult to do my job as a software engineer if I got high all day every day. The solution for me is to stay sober when I'm doing my job. It's not complicated.

 

[HempKat]

What gets me about studies like this is that even though there is a long history of intelligent people who smoked and were still able to do great things all of that is instantly forgotten or overlooked by all who have never smoked marijuana. They'll all turn to this and say "see, it changes the brain, marijuana is obviously bad". Few if any will say, "Gee, there is nothing in the long history of marijuana use that really backs up this finding, surely if it were true there would be lots of evidence to support these findings".

Of course all those who have ever smoked will instantly recognize it as the anti-marijuana propaganda it is.

 

[stoned-trout]

it hasn't ruined my brain enough to believe this study......my iq was genius level haven't had it tested recently tho

 

[lemongrove]

The thing that the government really hates is the fact that marijuana fine tunes your bullshit detector. The government counts on people buying their bullshit and when something comes along that helps people see through their bullshit, they hate it.
The government also depends on people buying into the lackey or slave mentality. Work hard, watch and listen to constant advertisements, spend your hard earned money on the junk they advertise, keep your mouth shut and go along with the program, ( that you have been programed to receive.)
Yet when people see frequent stories of people who have worked for companies for 15 ,20 ,25 or even 30 years and spent the best years of their lives working hard and leading "good lives," get fired due to "cost cutting measures," then they lose their homes, their health benefits etc. ; people stop believing in the program.
Now normally a person would be considered intelligent to not believe in a philosophy of life that can be crushed by a bean counters ledger sheet. When it comes to, (the normal philosophy of how were supposed to live in a capitalistic society,) however you are supposed to actually DISREGARD your intelligence and just go along with things as they are.
So an intelligent toker sees all of this and says to himself or herself, "Why should I sacrifice the best, most productive years of my life busting my ass for a business that can and does take it all away on a whim?" We see it all the time. The toker says however, " I don't think I want to do that. Looks like a raw deal to me. No matter what I do, I could get totally fucked at any moment regardless of how hard or long I worked."
You know what the government says to that, " Those tokers are unmotivated." An intelligent person would ask, "What in the world would motivate a person to buy into a system of thought and behavior that would ask them to spend the best years of their life working (spending most of their time and energy), doing things they probably don't even like doing but have to do to survive and it can all be taken away from them at the drop of a hat? Not too many smart people are going to be eager (motivated) to go along with that. Naturally they are "unmotivated."
Rather than being considered to have low IQ, I think the problem is that mj opens up or focuses a persons' common sense and he or she ends up saying, " You know what? This is a bunch of bullshit." The one thing government hates more than anything else is someone calling them on their bullshit. Mj is the ultimate bullshit reveal-er.
A little recent past history shows you how much the government hates with a passion when mj reveals their bullshit. During the Vietnam war many of the young mj smokers looked at the war and naturally asked," Why should I go half way around the world to kill a bunch of young Vietnamese kids or get killed myself?" A natural question I would think. The reasons the government gave were not nearly good enough for these kids so they took to the street and protested. The government responded with beatings, imprisonment, shootings, wire taps, infiltration, character assassination etc. etc. The government was determined to end all of this "bullshit" calling or else.
So you see it's not that tokers are stupid or totally unmotivated. It's just that they know bullshit when they see it or hear it and for government agencies that live on bullshit and the public believing it, that cannot be tolerated.

 

[Wiggs Dannyboy]

Here is a response...and...TA DAAAAA...no surprise, it is very critical of that study as many suggested earlier.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/22/marijuana-brain-study_n_5170422.html?ir=Science

Scientist Blasts Report Linking Casual Pot Smoking With Brain Abnormalities

A study claiming that marijuana has negative effects on the brains of casual users made waves earlier this month. But at least one scientist claims the research misrepresents the truth.

"The paper is terrible on a number of levels," Lior Pachter, a computational biologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told The Huffington Post. "It reeks of dishonesty."

Pachter, who says he doesn't smoke pot or use any other drugs, has blogged about what he sees as flaws in the study. He told HuffPost that after closely examining the research, he came to the conclusion that not only did the scientists involved use flawed methodology, they then misrepresented their findings to the media.

Published by The Journal of Neuroscience, the study takes a look at three aspects of the brain morphology of 20 marijuana users aged 18-25. The researchers examined the density, volume and shape of the marijuana users' gray matter, and compared their brains to those of 20 non-marijuana users. The report concluded that two areas of the brain associated with emotion and motivation -- the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens -- were shaped differently and had a higher density in the marijuana users' brains.

On his blog, Pachter suggests that the researchers cherry-picked their data to arrive at the conclusion they were looking for, and questions the statistical significance of the results they generated.

Pachter also argues that the report merely shows correlation, not causality. At minimum, he says, the researchers would have had to do a study of marijuana users over a longer period of time in order to reach the conclusion the researchers state in the abstract.

"Given what they did, the best they could hope to say was that they found a correlation between pot use and some aspect of the brain," Pachter said. "The problem is that this is very different from causation. Maybe users have strange brains because they smoked pot. But maybe they smoke pot because they have strange brains. There is an important difference here."

Pachter also took issue with the way one of the researchers presented the data to the media. In a press statement regarding the report, Dr. Hans Breiter, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine and a co-author of the study, said:

"Some of these people only used marijuana to get high once or twice a week. People think a little recreational use shouldn't cause a problem, if someone is doing OK with work or school. Our data directly says this is not the case."

On his blog, Pachter criticized Dr. Breiter's statement, calling it a "lie" and alleging that the description does not reflect the findings of the report accurately.

"The repeated use of words like 'recreational' and 'casual' suggest they are talking about people occasionally using some pot," Pachter told HuffPost. "In reality, their average user was doing more than 11 joints a week. I don't know that much about pot but that seems to be a lot. Again, it seems dishonest."

Breiter defended his and his colleagues' research to HuffPost, maintaining that their sample size was not too small for the design and purpose of the study, that the reported findings are in no way misleading and that the results of their findings are unambiguous. He did add that future longitudinal studies are needed to fully flesh out the findings.

"Dr. Pachter's allegations are false and misleading," Breiter said. "He is clearly unfamiliar with the field of neuroimaging and its conventions. We are confident in the quality of our work, the stringent peer review process at The Journal of Neuroscience, and our own integrity. We know Dr. Pachter's criticisms do not apply."

But other experts agree with Pachter's assessment. Dr. Asaf Keller, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who has done research related to the effects of marijuana use on the teen brain, told HuffPost that the study "suffers from several shortcomings in design, statistical analysis and -- most importantly -- in interpretation."

"The hype surrounding this manuscript is unwarranted," Keller said. "The sample size is woefully small. The statistical methods used -- to the extent that they can be assessed from the very brief descriptions in the manuscript -- are inappropriate. Even if the study was done appropriately, the results do not reach statistical significance."

Dr. Susan Tapert, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who has also done research on marijuana's effects on teen brain tissue, told HuffPost that she didn't think the research was flawed. However, she added, she believed it was "limited in how much it can tell us" due to its sample size and scope.

"The study does spur interest on the topic," she said. "Given how widespread marijuana now is, we certainly should invest in long-term studies that follow people over time to see how starting, increasing and stopping marijuana use changes the brain and cognition."

John Maunsell, editor-in-chief of The Journal of Neuroscience, told HuffPost that the editorial board does not comment on specific articles.

Pachter, for his part, went so far as to suggest that Breiter should be sanctioned for misleading the media about his work.

"Lots and lots of people care deeply about the issue, and major policy decisions will have to be made using the type of information in the study," he said. "The nature of the paper, coupled with the statements made by the last author in the press releases, made me very, very angry, because the actions will hurt a large number of people."


.

 

[yao]

ive had about 3-4 different personal doctors tell me weed would help me but i dont live in a medical state.

 

[Jhhnn]

I was a lazy unmotivated slacker long before the herb ever hit my lungs.....and I've got the pre-ganja school reports to prove it.

That touches on the flawed methodology of the study. They claim brain changes, when in fact the varying affinity for cannabis may be due to innate brain differences. They can't separate cause & effect.

What did the brains look like before cannabis use?

If they can't answer that question, none of their conclusions are valid.

 

[Harry Gypsna]

That touches on the flawed methodology of the study. They claim brain changes, when in fact the varying affinity for cannabis may be due to innate brain differences. They can't separate cause & effect.

What did the brains look like before cannabis use?

If they can't answer that question, none of their conclusions are valid.

Another thing, all my life I've been told by parents, teachers and various authority figures that I'm very clever, I could do this, I could do that, I could be anything I wanted if only i applied myself. 22 years after my 1st toke, I still get this pretty much all the time, so it can't have diminished my mental capabilities that much.

 

[HempKat]

That touches on the flawed methodology of the study. They claim brain changes, when in fact the varying affinity for cannabis may be due to innate brain differences. They can't separate cause & effect.

What did the brains look like before cannabis use?

If they can't answer that question, none of their conclusions are valid.

Exactly, to have any hope of being accurate they would need to take a much larger sample group of diverse people from as many different socioeconomic and ethnic background as possible, at least 1000 all of whom have never used marijuana. Take image of their brain functions before starting. Then split that group in two and have one half use marijuana and the other half not, take images of each group periodically over a period of at least 10 years and then compare them. Both with their own images from the beginning as well as comparing between one group and the other.

A sample size of 20 is ridiculously small and it also begs the question of did they pick 20 people who used marijuana and already showed significant brain changes in order to get the most damning results? How are we to know for certain the marijuana caused the brain changes? 20 samples is so small that it's very possible these 20 subjects shared some other common behavior or thing they consumed that caused the changes. If it doesn't look at a brain untouched by marijuana previously and then track marijuana use by the same brain then the data is potentially meaningless.

 

[HOVAH2.0]

iM was already stupid before I started smoking at 30yrs old, after 12 yrs of smoking 10 times per month... at 42 yrs old I scored at the top of my Calculas class! go figure..

But smoking too much weed will have bring bad results, whats smoking too much?
3 to 5 times per day for a more than 3 days.


I have a high tolerance anyway, and snobbish toward what alot of folks call "high grade" weed... Its medicore at best.