Source: Wetenschap De Jaap.nl

29 August 2012

By Marcel Hulspas

Smoking cannabis makes you dumber. We could hear it allover yesterday, in all newspapers, on the radio and on television, on all websites. Nobody could avoid the message: smoking cannabis reduces intelligence.

This statement proceeds roughly from the following fact : researchers in New Zealand have in their possession IQ scores of around 1.000 people from infance to adulthood. They have selected the big smokers, those who started smoking cannabis before they were 18 and who still smoked just before their most recent IQ test that took place for this study. The result shows that these big smokers show an average of 8 IQ points less, which is significant. That is the world news. But this loss of IQ is not surprising.

At the moment of this last test, this group of smokers was under the influence. The researchers also provide the figures for the group of those who had smoked for an equally long time, but who had stopped shortly before the study took place (some weeks). This group has been stoned during years, but did not have any trace of cannabis in their blood at the time of the test. This group showed a reduction of 2 IQ points. That is nothing, it does not mean anything. So there is no such thing as a significant QI loss in this group.

The conclusions should therefore have been:

Smoking cannabis makes you weary, that is noted in the QI tests

After having stopped cannabis smoking for a few weeks, there is no significant difference in IQ with people who never smoked.

Now that is good news. Smoking cannabis may be terrible, it can drive you mad. But it does not have a permanent impact on your IQ. However, the New Zealand researchers have not seen that. Of course not. They were not paid for that. They received money to do research on cannabis smoking, which means to prove that smoking cannabis is extremely bad. So they wrote and published this, even if their own figures proved the contrary.

I don’t want to say anything against the researchers, they need to make a living too. They probably thought that a neglected study from New Zealand would not draw any attention, that they would get away with it. But they forgot that any press article from anywhere in the world with the word “cannabis” in it makes headlines immediately. It is frenetically and blindly copied throughout the world.

All these headlines are false and dodgy but they sound good. It is so nice to scare the citizens. Readers, be aware! Your children run great risk ! The devel’s drug ! This time it attacks the sacred IQ! Your son could risk his high school diploma, shame on the family !

Smoking cannabis does not make one dumber. This press coverage is of a shocking stupidity, and an exasperating pettiness.

So I have said.

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