Ok. An anecdote about cannabis use producing persistent cognitive impairment seemed to me to be relevant to an article describing cannabis use producing persistent cognitive impairment.
Did you miss the part where the kid became a heroin addict? Heroin will certainly provide long term impairment in the form of a lifelong addiction. Hard to find the effect of MJ in that long shadow.
Because that doesn't seem to be factoring into your analysis of the source of the impairment.
If I told a story about a kid who showed back up at band camp and had become 50 pounds heavier and hadn't progressed as a drummer, then went on to become a heroin addict etc. you wouldn't be blaming cookies. You'd stop and wonder what the hell was going on in his life.
I wasn't aware that cookies cause paranoid delusions.
Marijuana on the other hand…[0]
As I mentioned, I grew up with several kids like this. Most didn't attempt suicide (as far as I'm aware, anyway), but the possibility of confirmation bias aside, I certainly feel as though I recognised a pattern of paranoid delusion among young stoners that I knew.
I grew up in a super poor neighborhood, and I knew maybe 10-15 kids who started smoking MJ before age 16. The only ones who had any kind of extreme cognitive fallout were the ones that dabbled in more extreme stuff (like PCP). Even in those cases though, it's hard to point at the drug as opposed to the reason they were using. (In the PCP case it was three brother with a mentally ill single mother)
I'm not discounting the possibility that MJ can cause such things, but even the studies put the risk fairly low, and it's hard to separate environmental and genetic risks in the population they have available to study.
> after he smoked his ambition to be a goos drummer away.
This is the part that doesn't follow. We have no actual indication that smoking pot had anything to do with his lack/loss of ambition.
I could give plenty of anecdotal studies where people became complacent because they got a promotion, or made it to a certain landmark, or realized that they were the smartest person in the room at the time, or a million other things. Complacency is not something that requires smoking pot to feel.
Like, I don't want to denigrate the person in the anecdote - but if your sense of identity is so tied up in being the best drummer among a certain peer group that when you lose that title you are going to attempt suicide, you have more fundamental psychological problems to deal with.
If pot was causing people to want to kill themselves because they weren't the best at something, we'd have a lot more suicides in the world. It's a massive claim, and one that requires proof beyond an anecdote.
When someone who retreats from their hobbies, tries to kill themself, and engages in risky behavior like heroine use and drug use, I think its reasonable to suspect that person has some problems in their life beyond smoking marijuana.
Did the anecdote provide any evidence or argument linking cannabis use to presistent cognitive impairment? I must have missed it. Can you quote the relevant parts?
