Weed lowers IQ

I have always felt I have been slower in speech and just overall less cunning with my friends and especially with word recollection since I started smoking.

Cannabis smoking 'permanently lowers IQ' - Telegraph

Now this article comes out, do you believe it? Either way, I'm done smoking for life.

The sample was 1000 New Zealanders, and the nature of the experiment means it impossible to control for other variables, like if they drank alcohol, for instance.

So we've got small sample size, uncontrolled variables, and scientists saying the results aren't definitive and there needs to be more research done.


This is interesting, but it's nothing to quit smoking over man. That's a huge overreaction to a single flawed study.

no i know, but it does get me thinking man, many times i feel guilty for smoking, and sometime i just say what the fuck am i doing with myself? why keep smoking something that could possibly damage my mental capacity when i can just stay sober and maximize my iq?

I also read that today...thought that was pretty interesting. The whole time I was reading it I was wishing I was blazing hah.

i feared this would happen, it's heath/tulan all over again (study in 1974, monkeys got suffocated, look it up) .. this is bad for the legalization movement, know they have something to use! even if it is a small sample size and end's up being bullshit. all the people who read this are not going to find out. most of them will just say "oh, it lowers iq. that's now a fact" and change their opinion on cannabis. due to this..

god dammit haha i wanted to smoke and now im second guessing it...lol too many fucking articles that contradict each other.

IQ means nothing when determining a persons true intelligence.

god dammit haha i wanted to smoke and now im second guessing it...lol too many fucking articles that contradict each other.

Dude go ahead and smoke. My brother smoked since age 12 and now he's an engineer.

Weed doesn't make you fucking stupid, it's going to take more than one little study to convince me it does.

I've been top of my class since the third grade
So if ganja lowers your iq, than I must be a fucking genius sober

I feel as if my intelligence has increased since I began smoking, but then again there are many variables that go along with this (refer to JuanRing's post). One key variable for me would be the fact that I've went from age 12-16 during my smoking career.

Marijuana opens your mind and allows you to view things from a different perspective than you otherwise would have been able to do before. So, intelligence being lowered from Marijuana does not seem too practical to me.

There is tons of scientific research that makes sense in theory, while not at all being practical. Watch out for those.

Done smoking for life of one study that has other studies that contradict it? Bye-bye more weed for me.

Choice is yours man but I'll stick to smoking =)

Bro, even if this is true, which is highly doubtful and not at all proved by this article, what does lowering your IQ mean? What does IQ even measure?

Cause IQ definitely doesn't measure common sense. And you can't lose something you've already learned just by sparking a joint.

Also if you want to stop something because people who are already against it release some article saying that it's bad for you than be our guest.

im a mc on the side & i be livin proof weed doesn fuck up ur vocab

The sample was 1000 New Zealanders, and the nature of the experiment means it impossible to control for other variables, like if they drank alcohol, for instance.

So we've got small sample size, uncontrolled variables, and scientists saying the results aren't definitive and there needs to be more research done.


This is interesting, but it's nothing to quit smoking over man. That's a huge overreaction to a single flawed study.

That article doesn't say it, but in the actual study they did control for other factors such as alcohol and other drug use. I found it interesting but I think it could possibly be because when your high everyday in class you don't learn much so therefore your IQ is lower. Nevertheless it is very interesting and makes me want to cut back even more on my smoking habits.

Tbh, the only real effect is on young teenagers who, in my opinion, shouldn't be smoking it anyway. I am an extremely academic person who smokes weed every day and I do not think it has had any effect on my IQ. Besides, IQ is a completely meaningless test. As a politics student, smoking weed has turned me into a much more open minded person, allowing me to broaden my academic horizons. It has lead me to delve deeper into many aspects of study that I would have never bothered with before. If anything, smoking pot has done wonders for my grades.

I feel that since I started blazing I occasionally have a harder time coming up with a structured cohesive sentence when sober.

However, I feel that as a whole smoking pot has made me see things differently, I'm more open to try things, more opinionated and I enjoy having deep life chats with friends.

In a way I see that the actual IQ could go down but that doesn't mean you are brain dead, I get 80s and 90s in school...... when I try . Its only one study I dont think there is a point in overacting when there are many other studies that contradict it.

Teenagers shouldn't smoke pot in the first place
When it becomes legal I'm betting the legal age will be 21
Should be 18 though.
Idiots shouldn't smoke pot either, makes the rest of us look bad

I think more complex/deep thoughts when I'm stoned, but I'm horrible at putting them into words when I'm stoned.

Smoking ANYTHING is bad for the brain! Get a vaporizer! Cuts way back on the CO2 and carbon monoxide that is messing with the brain cells!

And this study says that we adapt to cannabis use! (Skip the italics and read the bold)

Functional connectivity in brain networks underlying cognitive control in chronic cannabis users. Functional connectivity in brain net... [Neuropsychopharmacology. 2012] - PubMed - NCBI

The long-term effect of regular cannabis use on brain function underlying cognitive control remains equivocal.

Scientists are still arguing over the effects of cannabis on the brain.

Cognitive control abilities are thought to have a major role in everyday functioning, and their dysfunction has been implicated in the maintenance of maladaptive drug-taking patterns.

Your brain controls everything and it's dysfunction has been linked to drug use.

In this study, the Multi-Source Interference Task was employed alongside functional magnetic resonance imaging and psychophysiological interaction methods to investigate functional interactions between brain regions underlying cognitive control.

We used a MRI to look at brains and tested our subjects to see how their brains worked.

Current cannabis users with a history of greater than 10 years of daily or near-daily cannabis smoking (n=21) were compared with age, gender, and IQ-matched non-using controls (n=21).

We matched 21 heavy cannabis users with 21 non users.

No differences in behavioral performance or magnitude of task-related brain activations were evident between the groups.

No major differences were noted between the two groups!

However, greater connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the occipitoparietal cortex was evident in cannabis users, as compared with controls, as cognitive control demands increased.

However, as our tests got harder, the cannabis users showed more activity between 2 parts of the brain.

The magnitude of this connectivity was positively associated with age of onset and lifetime exposure to cannabis.

This increased activity was associated with the age they began toking and how long they had used.

These findings suggest that brain regions responsible for coordinating behavioral control have an increased influence on the direction and switching of attention in cannabis users, and that these changes may have a compensatory role in mitigating cannabis-related impairments in cognitive control or perceptual processes.

We think that heavy cannabis user's brains compensate for being stoned.


And I have been toking for over 40 years! My brain works just fine, thank you!


Granny