For the first time, researchers have found that casual users of marijuana, even those who use it just once or twice a week, suffer significant damage to their brains, particularly in the parts of the brain that govern motivation and memory. In other words: duh.
Unmotivated
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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I don’t buy it.
1) They’ve been studying the stuff for decades only to find this alarmist stuff right now as legalization is gaining steam?
2) Although I don’t smoke daily any more, I did for eight of the first ten years of my career as a software engineer and my employers and coworkers have always been impressed with my abilities. The first two years I didn’t smoke- drug testing- then that company dropped the policy. I stayed there two more years, kept getting raises, no one seemed to notice any difference.
I’m spacy when I’m high… still focused like a laser after.
Thirty year smoker and I still outperform the young’uns. If everything they said when I started was true, I’d be impotent and have big boobs.
Trouble with 99% of the “research” is t hat they’re setting out to *prove* something rather than to determine something.
Not only that but … uhhh … what were we talking about?
Clearly the science has a long way to go. It’s kind of amazing that they are only really starting to get serious about this stuff now that it is getting legalized. However, personal observation indicates to me that pot does more harm than good to people who are trying to stay sharp and mentally focused.
I can only speak to my own experience, of course.
I absolutely can’t do my job while under (any) influence. But more than once I’ve had the experience of banging my head against a brick wall all day long, giving up, smoking a little smoke, and having a divine revelation – the solution presents itself in living technocolor. There’s no way I can actually implement it until the next day, but at least I know what it looks like.
Now, I’m not saying it made me smarter, more that it helped me look at the problem from a far different perspective than my anal-rentetive, strictly-mathematical side.
Oh, and your comic is missing. I had to go to Yahoo to see it.
There was a comic associated? I thought the lack of a comic was part of the joke….like…Ted was not motivated enough to produce a comic
The comic is up there now. If I hadn’t been smoking so much pot…
Define “significant”, because that’s the Word of the Day.
Personal anecdotal evidence does not preclude these findings. They may very well prove out with more study. The real problem is this: It’s been illegal to study pot and its effects for the duration of the War On Drugs. That’s the REAL crime against us all.
And my anecdotal evidence tells me one simple thing: If alcohol is legal, pot should be, too–because one of them is toxic and the other is not, ‘significant’ amygdala and nucleus accumbens damage or not. Based purely on a cost-benefit analysis, pot is simply one of the safest drugs you can ingest.
That it’s not healthy for you is a separate issue from the legality question. Lots of unhealthy behavior is perfectly legal, as it should be.
Exactly ! Criminalising this stupid activity, in particular with dire penalites and idiotic «three-strikes» laws, is far more dangerous to society than the activity itself. But, as Ted points out, that doesn’t make the activity inherently desirable….
Henri
I don’t remember which writer (might have been P.K. Dick or Hunter S. Thompson) but he mentioned that being on marijuana for the creative process of writing worked but that being on marijuana for editing was a disaster. I suspect that if you smoke dope like it’s going out of style, you aren’t going to do very good writing either.
John D. MacDonald wrote positively about LSD in the 1960s as a therapeutic drug used specifically for its capacity to allow psychotherapy when done under supervision. He also discussed it as having useful properties for people dying of cancer as it allowed them to step outside themselves and perceive the pain as something separate, rather than as something that was “of” them. He was writing fiction, but he did a lot of research, so he probably got a piece of the truth.
I wish some legitimate, standardized research would be done.
My father – a lifelong republican – died of cancer. He had opiates available for the pain, but preferred marijuana.
Medically speaking, what is the risk of giving pot to a terminally ill patient?
A significant risk is lawsuits. (He was high, went out for a cheeseburger, collapses because he shouldn’t have been out in his condition. If he hadn’t been high, he would have known that. Thus, it’s the doctor’s fault.)
What I suspect is a more-serious risk is that with a large pool of users, statistically significant effects could be isolated by grad students doing research, before they’re corrupted or worn down. At a guess? It will reduce stress. Talk to a doctor. Stress puts people in the ground. Heart attacks, panic attacks, depression, it’s all from stress. And it all makes the pharmas a big big pile of money.
Medical marijuana is obviously not relevant to this discussion.
@Alex – who said anything about a doctor?
😀
I don’t like Obama’s motivations, but with his history of being a heavy toker he doesn’t show any lack of motivation.
Even if his motivation is for doing the Devil’s work.
David Foster Wallace and Hunter S. Thompson both smoked a lot of pot and they turned out all right…
Not so sure about Wallace. I mean, he did kill himself. And his work was wanky. As for Hunter, well, he was a mess.
Who also killed himself.
I confess to not having read much of Hunter at all. As for Wallace, well, I tried to read his stuff. It struck me as marketed prose: the writing wasn’t great, but the advertising machinery that shoved it down the reading public’s throat (especially overeducated, self-absorbed young people with first-world concerns) was top-notch.
“At the end of 1989, David Foster Wallace was admitted to McLean Hospital, … and had also gone from being a marijuana addict to an alcoholic…”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/09/an-excerpt-from-every-love-story-is-a-ghost-story-a-life-of-david-foster-wallace.html
Correlation is not cause.
What came first, the consciousness of a world askew, or the world merely appearing to be askew due to chemical alteration of consciousness?
Wow, well, smoked plenty of dope back in the day, and I’m OK (PhD with an academic job, happy family, blah blah). That said, I’m sure the dope didn’t help in lots of ways. Probably worse for my motivation and such than if I had been drinking, but way better for other stuff, so I would think better than a wash, if for no other reason than that drink is much more likely to kill you. That said, now that I’m an old guy I think I’m better off with a few glasses of wine with dinner rather than a bong, not that I haven’t had a toke once in a while.
As for Wallace and Hunter Thompson, they did both kill themselves, and Wallace couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag (though Thompson could when he wanted to). I do remember trying “Infinite Jest” and having a good laugh that anyone could have the nerve to compare it to Pynchon (who also smoked plenty of dope, so there’s the exception maybe).
@suetonius17, I couldn’t agree more about Wallace. I don’t understand people who think he’s competent, much less admirable. That guy had less than nothing to say. At most he was a stylist, and not a very good one.
I will grant that weed is not good for revolutionaries. Tough to smash the state when you are feeling mellow.
Precisely, Russell.
In a society that is CEO-driven by the anally retentive, what is a “significant abnormality?” Anything that is significantly abnormal from the current global paradigm of economically-exacerbated stress-suicide, I would imagine that might even be healthy.
Anyway, such “abnormalities” may actually be a very normally-induced, biological response that our (uniquely very intellectual) species has developed to the otherwise frequently self-destructive, neurological anomalies produced every time one of us human types escapes beyond our own genetically defined envelope of personal awareness.
“… Working memory, decision-making and motivation” … why do you think people drink alcohol? It wouldn’t have anything to do with the normally lousy work day that most Americans must deal with (and want to forget, at least for a while), does it? Does this study define whether such abnormalities are induced only by marijuana? Or does alcohol also produce a similar result? The conclusion presumed by Ted’s c-character is highly deceptive.
Were the young adults studied by Northwestern part of the student body? Would a cultural (or some significant physiological) circumstance appreciably alter any subject’s physical response? AND ANYWAY, what the fuck are nucleus accumbens and amygdalas?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accumbens_nucleus
Research has indicated the nucleus accumbens has an important role in pleasure including laughter, reward, and reinforcement learning, as well as fear, aggression, impulsivity, addiction, and the placebo effect.
http://www.benbest.com/science/anatmind/anatmd9.html#anatomy
Ah-hah! The biological geek-speak is neck deep! One thing though Ted, tell me, have you actually researched whether or not the identified abnormalities are in any significant way actually harmful? Or perhaps maybe it helped the test subjects forgetfully relax and actually get a decent night’s sleep?
But the message-agenda of this comic strip is already set in judicial stone, because (as you just expressed) you apparently believe that any marijuana usage is “harmful” to those who wish to remain sharp and mentally focused. I can’t imagine that any sane person would ever want to remain sharp and mentally focused ALL THE F’KN TIME. That’s how sociopaths are produced.
DanD
Medical marijuana? Actually, that will be where the first examples will come from in a few more years. But there’s simply not enough people yet. As it becomes more accepted, statistically significant numbers of patients whose illnesses can be isolated from other biological factors will become valuable as a proving mechanism for what pot “really” does to you.