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Lothar121

Behavior: Marijuana and a Slower Mind and Body
Nicholas Bakalar | The New York Times | 03/20/06

New York -- Long-term heavy users of marijuana perform significantly worse on tests of mental agility and physical dexterity than short-term users or nonusers, even when they have abstained from smoking for more than 24 hours, new research shows.

Scientists, led by Lambros Messinis, a neuropsychologist at University Hospital in Petras, Greece, tested three groups.

They were 20 long-term users who had smoked four or more marijuana cigarettes a week for at least 10 years, 20 short-term users who had smoked a similar amount for 5 to 10 years and, finally, 24 people, representing a control group, who had used marijuana no more than 20 times in their lives and not in the prior two years.

The long- and short-term users were drawn from participants in a drug rehabilitation program.

Even after controlling for I.Q., other drug use, age, sex, depression and other variables, long-term users scored significantly lower than control group members and shorter-term users on tests of verbal fluency, memory and coordination.

The exercises included naming objects when shown pictures of them, thinking up words with the same initial letter, listening to lists of words and later recalling them and drawing lines in the proper order among numbers and letters randomly spread on paper.

The study appears in the March issue of Neurology.

Dr. Messinis acknowledged that the results might have differed with marijuana users from the general population. Still, he said, the study was carefully controlled, and frequent heavy use appeared to have significant negative effects on performance.

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reggie_the_dog

"Even after controlling for I.Q., other drug use, age, sex, depression and other variables, long-term users scored significantly lower than control group members and shorter-term users on tests of verbal fluency, memory and coordination."

did they control for such factors as

1. the number of times these people work out each week
2. the number of times these people read books, news articles etc. per week

"The exercises included naming objects when shown pictures of them, thinking up words with the same initial letter, listening to lists of words and later recalling them and drawing lines in the proper order among numbers and letters randomly spread on paper."

I would have done great on naming objects when shown pictures of them, I can answer in 2 languages.

I could also make a list of words in 2 languages that start with a letter

D

Door
dans
dame
dieu
dig
donner
donne
donnes
donnons
donnent
donnez
donnerai
donneras
donnera

damn
dam

Dunc the funk

this sounds very much the same as another test that appeared in this forum a couple weeks ago. It has all the same flaws.......same stupidity. I like how they call 5-10 years short term usage then call 10+ long term usage. So if you've been smoking ten years, are you a long term, or a short term user. what the hell is wrong with these "scientists"? they keep publishing these studies but none of them means much when a 12 year old could recite the proper scientific method and pick out all the flaws.

dude123456

Maybe smoking does make you slower. Who cares? It's not permanent.

The study only involved 40 marijuana users. Twenty of them are long term users, 20 short term users. Out of 20 million current users in the US alone, that accounts for 0.002% of the marijuana using population. WTF?

Toking Jedi

The terms "long-term" and "short-term" do nothing to tell us how much these people actually smoked. "4-or more" joints doesn't tell us the factors of how much they smoked: how big the joints were, for example. And 4 or more in itself is a broad term. How much more than 4 joints a week did they smoke? It just isn't a specific or even useful parameter.

Ya think, Dr. Messinis? He took 40 from Rehab. Rehab is hardly representative of the actual population of marijuana users. A better study would look like this:

-1,000 people total
-250 heavy smokers (at least 1 joint or bowl daily)
-250 moderate smokers (once a week)
-250 infrequent smokers (once a month to once every 3 months)
-125 rare smokers (once or twice, or up to 20 times and stopped)
-125 non-smokers

Of course, this isn't realistic because Marijuana research is enormously underfunded, and not that many people would sign up. But don't you think that it would be a lot more representative of the entire population of tokers? Logic is the nemesis of political slant.

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HookedonChronic

What if you are a 1, 2, 3, or even a 4 year smoker they say nothing about those people you could have smoked for 3 years and have smoked more frequently and in more amounts than someone who has done it for 10 years. They need to have a better experiment before they start making conclusions out of these.