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Comment by jlawson | Hacker News Reader

>Smoke too often, cut down and get sharp again.

Unfortunately not. If you spend a long time smoking you'll end up permanently slower in the brain.

Also, let's not forget our friend lung cancer.

I've seen research that smoking can impact the brain development of adolescents, but nothing that shows it permanently impairs the cognition of adults. Please post that research, I'd like to take a look at it.

As for lung cancer, that's a straw man, vapes and edibles make that a non-issue.

>As for lung cancer, that's a straw man, vapes and edibles make that a non-issue.

Isn't that kind of like saying "drunk driving is a straw man, Uber makes it a non issue"?

Of course we know there's less harmful ways to consume these substances. We also know many, many people will not make use of those less harmful ways.

Again, show us the evidence that a non-tobacco-smoking average pot smoker has increased risk of lung cancer.

inhaling any type of smoke is bad for your lungs. Combustion of organic material releases carcinogens. That is pretty basic science.

https://www.lung.org/stop-smoking/smoking-facts/marijuana-an...

ZERO mention of cancer on that page.

Smoking WHILE on cancer therapy: "A number of small studies of smoked marijuana found that it can be helpful in treating nausea and vomiting from cancer chemotherapy."

Anti-cancer benefits: "More recently, scientists reported that THC and other cannabinoids such as CBD slow growth and/or cause death in certain types of cancer cells growing in lab dishes. Some animal studies also suggest certain cannabinoids may slow growth and reduce spread of some forms of cancer."

Source: https://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatments-and-side-effects...

Note: The American Cancer Society page on "marijuana and cancer" doesn't mention lung cancer at all.

I was blown away when I first discovered this. I smoked weed when I was younger and my only gripe about it was the possibility of lung cancer. Luckily my non-weed-smoking friend debunked that for me. Props for spreading interesting info!

You can't stop people from being stupid and self destructive, just look at the prevalence of obesity. If the law required that people eat beans and kale, there would be a lot less obesity, but would you really want to live in that society?

There's evolutionary reasons people prefer less healthy food. Obesity and weed smoking are not equals. You have to go out of your way to get weed. You can become obese with passive inaction.

I'm pretty sure eating is an action.

A family member of mine basically smoked away her future, in a sense, throughout middle and high school. She wasn't always the brightest candle in the box, but the heavy marijuana use certainly didn't help. She has the cognition and mental maturity of a 14-year old, now at 30 years.

Seeing how it affected her prompted me to "take a hint" and I've avoided the stuff since. That's not to say I avoid alcohol at all, however, but my family seems to handle the latter much better.

Edit: this is complete anec-data - I don't have any hard-and-fast evidence of long-term impairments like I describe above. Just what I've seen.

Your anec-data is pretty common. Most people went to high-school with a couple people who have basically the same story you describe. One of the people in my class "smoked himself stupid" over the course of sophomore and junior year. He tried to clean up his act and he cut back a lot toward the end of junior year and did manage to graduate but he was certainly not the same person. Maybe those changes would have happened regardless of the pot (he smoked at least daily), maybe not. I have no idea where he is now.

Funny right? My story is different: Lots of friends in my area (it) do smoke, have good jobs, well paid.

And also let's not forget that about everyone with big psychological problems in my peer group started to smoke early on (and developed mental health problems later).

That's just correlation. Maybe they started smoking early on because they had big psychological problems already.

There might also be some risk of psychological damage when you use a criminalized substance that has anxiety as a common side effect. For example, it's easy to see how that could make you a bit reclusive.

So anyone who's really concerned about the mental health of cannabis users is obliged to consider the damaging effects of its very criminality.

(There are all kinds of other factors. Like cannabis use being correlated with higher trait openness, which has its own particular correlations with certain personality disorders, et cetera.)

Not to mention that such criminalized substance might well have been mishandled by criminal resellers with no regard for public health. Any time one buys a criminalised substance, it's like he was going to eat a box of unlabelled chocolate: maybe it's safe to eat, or maybe it's full of rat excrement - you don't know until it's too late.

It might "just" be a correlation but it might be heavily interconnected. If you have data proving your "just correlation", please provide them.

Correlation without causation is a lack of data — the burden of proof is on the claim not the questioning of it

What you have mentioned amounts to correlation only. If it's also causation, you're the one that should provide the proof.

I suspect this is a big factor. Self-medication is a real thing. When people don't feel good, they start looking for things to make them feel better. And adolescence is a time when a lot of people don't feel good.

> Unfortunately not. If you spend a long time smoking you'll end up permanently slower in the brain.

"permanently slower" based on what evidence? By what measure? Are you speaking from personal experience? (i stopped a few years ago after decades of smoking. Memory as sharp as it's ever been. Creative spark is lower than when i smoked. Will resume when our laws change.)

> Unfortunately not. If you spend a long time smoking you'll end up permanently slower in the brain.

I'm sorry, but what? You can't make claims like that without providing evidence to back it up.

Here you go: https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2016/09/reg...

"Permanent" implies that you'd have to look at people who did pot a while ago and then stopped. This data (and any data on current users) is consistent with the alternative hypothesis that the changes are temporary and will revert after ceasing use.

Long lasting effects are harder to study obviously, but here is one that confirms that there are long term consequences:

https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201744

There are clinical trials that show the effects of cannabis consumption are reversed in adults and now recently young adults as well.

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