Cannabis Access and Academic Performance

101 点作者 herendin超过 9 年前

16 条评论

_98fj超过 9 年前

It appears that regular cannabis use [0] decreases dopaminergic brain-activity [1].Dopamine is often referred to as "pleasure"-transmitter, but it's function in certain parts of the brain is better thought of as "regulating expectation", therefore influencing drive & motivation. It makes it possible to work on stuff you don't particularly enjoy by focussing on an expected long-term reward. This works by enabling your conscious thoughts to silence other, more excitatory and emotional parts of your brain via a feedback-loop. [2]People with ADHS have trouble concentrating because this feedback-loop doesn't work well when they're not moving. Sitting still, they are constantly being flooded with inappropriate and negative emotions. They calm down when taking stimulants like Ritaline, because the "calming"-function of the brain starts working properly.Bottom-line: Cannabis has many good effects, but it definitely blunts motivation. [3][0] rule of thumb: more than once weekly[1] <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/111/30/E3149.abstract" rel="nofollow">http://www.pnas.org/content/111/30/E3149.abstract</a>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontostriatal_circuit" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontostriatal_circuit</a>[3] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeYsTmIzjkw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeYsTmIzjkw</a>

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compbio超过 9 年前

As this is framed more as the results of a policy change, there are some things to consider when banning weed:- Street sales to tourists and foreigners exploded. Small-time dealers reported weekly income of 2k Euros during the prohibition.- Dutch teenagers use less weed than German, UK and Belgian teens. Legal availability seems inversely correlated with actual use.- In France there is no clear distinction between hard drugs and soft drugs. A dealer will sell you pot, but also heroin.- There are other ways to get weed, without using a weed pass. Home growers will not check the age of the person they are selling to.Smoking weed in Holland has a social stigma attached to it. It is not cool, it is for chumps. Policy changes like these may make it dangerous, hidden and cool again, actually raising our usage to the levels of neighboring countries.As to the results, I shudder and think: Imagine what Feynman would have been able to achieve, if he had no access to weed or bongos for seven months...

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DarkContinent超过 9 年前

The real concern with this study is not the possible negative effects of marijuana (which are already known) but the moral correctness of its legalization. I personally have not and never will smoke pot, but that doesn't mean I support the continuing ban in America. Everyone has the right to determine his own destiny, and if engaging in personally (but not socially) destructive behaviors like smoking pot is a person's chosen destiny, he shouldn't be held back by dated laws restricting personal freedom.

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zmk_超过 9 年前

One thing that jumps at me in this study is the high risk of investigating two different populations with different characteristics. Foreign students are more likely to be high achievers (and high-achieving women), quantitative degrees are also in higher demand from foreigners and more likely to be in English. If you are Dutch you can pick whatever university/field you want and they will admit you (exception is medicine); thus there is a higher chance of low-achievers (who drive the results) to be in that part of the sample. I am suspicious of results which are driven by the tail of the distribution and die out in time (when that tail drops out).

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tpllaha超过 9 年前

Well... I can see how it can be easy to reach conclusions like this. The same result (most likely even worse) would be reached even if the effect of alcohol was studied instead of cannabis. This is not surprising, but neither is it interesting in my opinion. Of course there is a correlation between time spent doing mentally engaging activities and success, and surely smoking weed is not a mentally engaging activity. But this does not imply anything about moderate consumption in leisure time, neither does it mean that we should never engage in activities in which we do not exercise our brain.

cnp超过 9 年前

Like all (good) drugs, they get better when you age. When you're young and blasted there's no way to make sense of things and responsibilities become more difficult. When you're older its like a whole new wonderful world to explore.

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acomjean超过 9 年前

I think things like drugs and alcohol are worse for growing brains. From a NYC teacher (One reference point)"I’ve taught high school for 25 years and I hate what marijuana does to my students. It goes beyond missing homework assignments. My students become less curious when they start smoking pot. I’ve seen it time and time again. People say pot makes you more creative, but from what I’ve seen, it narrows my students’ minds until they only reference the world in relation to the drug. They’ll say things like: “I went to the beach and got so high,” or “I went to a concert and got so high.” They start choosing their friends based on the drug. I hate when people say that it’s just experimenting. Because from what I’ve seen, it’s when my students stop experimenting.” ' <a href="http://www.humansofnewyork.com/post/129574836736/i-hate-pot-i-hate-it-even-more-than-hard-drugs" rel="nofollow">http://www.humansofnewyork.com/post/129574836736/i-hate-pot-...</a>

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rickdale超过 9 年前

I want to note that this is how THC can effect academic performance. There are other compounds in marijuana other than THC and although THC is the leading compound in most cannabis, in the medical cannabis world there are certain strains like Cannatonic that will test 0%THC with 10-20%CBD. CBD is not like THC and has a lot of different medical benefits associated with it.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabidiol" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabidiol</a>

justifier超过 9 年前

<pre><code> A first step is to have an idea of baseline consumption rates for the particular group of individuals who were affected by the policy. To obtain rough estimates of these rates, we carried out an anonymous survey among currently enrolled students at Maastricht University. To make the question about cannabis consumption less Although these are different students to the ones on which we have performance data that we use in the rest of the analysis, their baseline consumption rates are relevant for two reasons. First, their demographic salient, we embedded it in a more general questionnaire on risky behavior. In total, 192 students answered the survey, which is over 97 percent of the students present in the lectures where it was distributed. The survey question we focused on asks students if they “have ever smoked cannabis or hashish” and if so, when: “ever”, “in the last 12 months”, “in the last 30 days” or “in the last 7 days”. </code></pre> all ridicule of the data used aside.. they fail completely to address dosegive a kid 2400mg of ibprofen and see how well children function on 'numerical skills'

papaf超过 9 年前

I would never argue against science but the following is a true anecdote:A friend of mine was up all night smoking pot and drinking alcohol. She had a University exam the next day that involved writing essays.She picked herself up, went to the exam and passed. She did so well that she got an award for the best peformance that year.True story.

willholloway超过 9 年前

Alcohol is the real threat to cognition, and we don't talk about it. [1] [2]We don't know where the line is exactly, but somewhere around 4-5 drinks over a few hours has an acute neurotoxic effect.Cannabis use in adolescents does not result in changes that can be picked up on high resolution MRI scans. [3] This is a considerable finding considering that one would expect changes just from the added stress of being a cannabis user in a prohibition environment (fear of arrest, fear of expulsion, fear of parental punishment upon discovery). It may even point to a protective effect of cannabis on the brain, as we see in Parkinson's and has been seen in other studies and in stroke. [4]A UK study on the IQ effects of moderate cannabis use on students did not find evidence of harm. The study did find significant evidence of cognitive deficits caused by alcohol use. [5]Why do young adults want to get high so much? I think the answer is that they are coping with the stress of being locked into institutions that do not serve them, do not respect them and offer them very little, while demanding very much.One of the themes of Ferris Bueller's Day Off was high school as prison. The entire movie is a jail break story, and I think it gets to the truth of what its like to be doing time in high school better than anything.It's no wonder so many teenagers cope by getting high as much as they can. And then we blame them, and treat them like criminals, when they are just sufferers of low mood.We need a radically different approach to high school education. I think we need to find a way for people to be more economically useful, economically empowered and more in control of their lives at younger ages.[1] <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25702705" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25702705</a>[2] <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3183294/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3183294/</a>[3] <a href="http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/4/1505.short" rel="nofollow">http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/4/1505.short</a>[4] <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10863546" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10863546</a>[5] <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/22/no-marijuana-use-doesnt-lower-your-iq/" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/22/no...</a>

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peter303超过 9 年前

Glad to see some sort of scientific study on this. Too much of the debate is based on ideology and hearsay, not systematic study.Colorado sets aside a quarter of its pot taxes for scientific study. Fed funding sources generally ban or highly restrict such studies. So we dont have good modern evidence for the claimed benefits or harms of drugs.

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coetry超过 9 年前

PHP fascinates me when I'm high :), I usually incline towards languages in which I can enjoy the syntax (clojure and ruby), but when I'm baked, I enjoy the pure act of coding;translating my thoughts into binary manifestations. I think there should be more studies on how weed impacts learning.

thenerdfiles超过 9 年前

"We find that the academic performance of students who are no longer legally permitted to buy cannabis increases substantially."Pfft.For my own case, when I smoke cannabis, my brain becomes hyperactive. I want to resolve all of my codesmell at once. I want to finish all of my code at once. My writing becomes "electric". My writing becomes transcendental and on fire — why do I become electric, yet all of these students become unmotivated globs? Tell me why this is the case before you moralize and vilify such a beautiful plant!So maybe it's me. Or maybe the lot of you just don't know how to smoke and ritualize the practice. Maybe you all have a flawed philosophy to begin with, or worse, you don't have a philosophy about what you're smoking — to begin with.As Kafka notes:The unfitness of the object may cause one to overlook the unfitness of the means. — Franz Kafka

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joesmo超过 9 年前

So is there evidence of this in states where cannabis access has been legal/decriminalized for at least a decade like California, Washington, and the Netherlands as a whole? It sounds like a significant portion of students from those states should be consistently underperforming each year compared to other states and to students before legal access was allowed.

guard-of-terra超过 9 年前

Steve Yegge comes to rescue:<a href="http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-marijuana.html" rel="nofollow">http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...</a>So... one minor, teeny-weeny almost insigificant caveat before I continue: I have smoked marijuana (and inhaled it, deeply) on more occasions than I can count. And yet I'm almost undoubtedly smarter than your kid that you're so goddamned worried about. I skipped three grades (3rd, 7th and 8th), entered high school at age 11 and graduated at age 14, took A.P. courses, had stellar SAT scores, was a U.S. Navy nuclear reactor operator, went to the University of Washington and earned a Computer Science degree, worked at major corporations like Amazon.com and Google for many years as a senior staff engineer and/or senior development manager, and now I'm an internationally famous blogger.I don't usually dwell on that, but today it's relevant. It's relevant because I've smoked a LOT of pot, and I dare you to prove that it has impaired me in any scientifically detectable way. We would debate, and you would lose; nevertheless I double-dog dare you.