2) Weed dramatically reduces an individual's ability to accurately asses their cognitive ability.
3) People who use weed are, for some other reason, dramatically less likely to suffer from cognitive impairment, or dramatically less able to accurately evaluate their own cognitive state.
Marijuana tends to affect people in one of two ways: they either get subdued or they get infatuated. Many people appear to get calmed and relaxed, they could just go to sleep, with pot affects them. Those that marijuana infatuate tend towards creative, intellectual, and creative intellectual pursuits. I am one such infatuated pot smoker, which I keep pretty much secret, because due to my pot smoking infatuations I've gradually made my way into uber secure work environments simply because I'm competent and fascinated by the work; while my counterparts are constantly burning out. It's a job to them. To me, it's fascinating play.
It's pretty well established that using cannabis while the brain is still developing has a negative impact on brain development. Additionally, from what I've observed among a few dozen people I've known over the years, people who start smoking in high school and continue without any substantial breaks through to adulthood tend to have a less healthy relationship with cannabis. They have a stronger tendency to fall into the pattern of using all day every day, and tend use much larger amounts than people who started using as adults or have taken substantial breaks (year +) from cannabis consumption as adults.
Another explanation is that weed smokers are less likely to self-report cognitive impairment, as that suggests it’s self-inflicted, which would cause feelings of regret and shame in many I suppose.
Imagine if academic success were measured by having studies in such a library. Not just the original, but also the replications! Somehow we'd also need to incentivize publications of non-successful replications just as much though.
I have a sort of alternative explanation to your four.
One thing I've noticed with pot smokers is that many seem to be almost in love with the drug. I have had people try to explain to me the manifold benefits of hemp fibers or CBD or how cannabis kills cancers. I think this could quite plausibly extend to survey answers, where saying they suffer from cognitive decline would be a kind of admission of defeat and go against their core beliefs of cannabis as purely positive godly thing.
So basically some kind of psycho-cultural defense mechanism?
It's really a culture. People smoke cannabis to feel part of a clan or a cult, and then get hooked to the psychoactive effects.
It's always a game of social influence at the beginning, and sometimes later on.
Eventually, you may be pushed to smoke if you want to feel part of a social group and culture, and then, once inside, you have to follow the codes of it.
A large part of the cannabis cult(ure) is to preach the substance to everybody around you, to get it depenalized, legalized, and want everybody to have good views on it so they can take it more in public, and be socially more accepted, not considered like a junkie.
The end-game of it, is to do everything to get more of it, consciously or not.
Then, from that perspective, now you have someone that asks you: "is cannabis good for you ?" (just in other words).
Your goal to consume cheaper and higher quality of the substance, without legal risks, and to have approval of your friends, then what do you say ?
Of course "yes it's great".
There is also a survivorship bias in the study: once you feel that your cognitive abilities decline, you typically stop smoking cannabis.
The extreme case: people with dementia are automatically excluded because they cannot even smoke or purchase the product.
Most adults are busy reducing brain cell count thru use of alcohol and other poisons. Marijuana on the other hand is proven to increase brain cell count thru neurogenesis in the hippocampus [1].
This is not possible for adults without marijuana [2].
However, growing evidence suggests that new cells are not only “born” constitutively in the adult hypothalamus, but many of these cells also differentiate into neurons and glia and serve specific functions.
A few thoughts after having read only the abstract:
1. The decline (which is reported to be less frequent in cannabis users) is self-reported subjective cognitive decline based on users’ experience.
2. I think that one of the hallmarks of cannabis use is an immediate decline in short-term memory. I believe this usually reverses itself after some time (hours or days).
3. I have used a lot of cannabis in the past. I stopped entirely - for now - for quite some time and I think my mental acuity is currently at its peak over my lifetime and may be growing.
4. Not only is cannabis a very highly cultivated plant whose potency has been increasing a lot for decades (citation needed), there are a ton of cannabis-derived products out there today that have just a ton of THC, way more than one could get by smoking even the highest potency bud. I think this has prohably changed the game entirely. I used a few of them and I would absolutely recommend caution, far beyond the legitimate caution I would recommend for even smoking cannabis bud.
CBD on the other hand in "mid range" doses decreases REM sleep latency and (any dose?) also decreases REM sleep suppression related to anxiety. This is something that I imagine needs more study, as there is a huge variability in THC to CBD ratios in legally available cannabis.
Although most recreational cannabis is high THC : low CBD, there is ever-growing demand for more balanced strains. There's no telling what the average looks like in black and grey markets (although high THC is certainly the default assumption given its intoxicating effects). Before we make blanket statements about the impact of cannabis on sleep, we should probably seek to answer questions like, what is the overall impact on REM sleep with cannabis that has a 4:1 ratio of THC to CBD or lower?
First: REM sleep etc. is not a proven cause-effect relation. Second: THC or some other compound might negatively affect that. Third: cognitive decline is broader than memory. Fourth: it was self-reported impression of cognitive decline.
I don't think there's reason to expect any relation between REM sleep and the outcome to hold.
Thanks. I was having such a hard time parsing this that I was beginning to have my own experience of subjective cognitive decline. Glad to know I'm not alone.
So those that get stoned are more confident in their mind's ability than those that don't?
> Compared to non-users, non-medical cannabis use was significantly associated with 96% decreased odds of SCD (aOR=0.04, 95% CI=0.01-0.44, p<.01). Medical (aOR=0.46, 95% CI=0.06-3.61, p=.46) and dual medical and non-medical use (aOR=0.30, 95% CI=0.03-2.92, p=.30) were also associated with decreased odds of SCD, although not significant.
I'm not a native speaker but if non-medical use of cannabis has a different outcome than medical and mixed use than it seems plausible that there are other - more important - factors at play or do I misunderstand the paragraph?
The issue with this is if you have memory loss, you may also have memory loss about the memory loss, so lower numbers here may actually not reflect a real increase in memory retention.
> The reason for cannabis use, but not frequency and method, is associated with SCD. Further research is needed to investigate the mechanisms that may contribute to the observed associations between non-medical cannabis use and decreased odds of SCD.
Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD) refers to an individual's self-perceived experience of worsening or more frequent confusion and memory loss, not necessarily confirmed by clinical diagnostics.
If continuous use removes all possibility for being bored, or displaces your hobbies instead of enhancing them, then cognitive progress is stagnated, imo.
1) Weed dramatically reduces cognitive impairment.
2) Weed dramatically reduces an individual's ability to accurately asses their cognitive ability.
3) People who use weed are, for some other reason, dramatically less likely to suffer from cognitive impairment, or dramatically less able to accurately evaluate their own cognitive state.
4) The study itself is biased or flawed somehow.