Comments on Pot: Good for Teenagers

Wait. Help me out here. Do you think pot should be legal, Dan? I'm confused.

This goes completely opposite of everything and what we've been told!!
Who do we believe????
It's all so confusing!
Who paid for that study?

This study is major bullshit.

Sensitively, a pot smoker.

pot should be legal, definitely, 113%. social conservatism should be illegal, and subject to imprisonment and HUGE fines. death maybe, depending. social conservatism is a crime against humanity that perpetuates ignorance and violence and war, and has deep rooted connections to global warming. so there.

yeh, who ya should I believe, a Swiss study or my own lyin eyes?

This study is consistent with my high school experience - I was a student athlete, finished in the top 20 of my graduating class (roughly 400 people), had many friends, and smoked a shit-ton of pot my junior and senior years. AP english was my favorite class to attend while baked off my ass.

This study is consistent with my high school experience - I was a student athlete, finished in the top 20 of my graduating class (roughly 400 people), had many friends, and smoked a shit-ton of pot my junior and senior years. AP english was my favorite class to attend while baked off my ass.

Carl Sagan was brilliant while being constantly baked... so can the rest of us.

"I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves," wrote the former Cornell University professor. "I wrote the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down."
from http://www.druglibrary.org/think/~jnr/sagan.htm

Just to make the points a social scientist should:

1) The teenagers in the study are Swiss. While it is possible, even probable, that these results would be comparable in the US, we can't assume that: maybe there's something different about Swiss teenagers that helps them to better handle their pot than US teens would; maybe US teens will handle their pot even better than the Swiss teens, or handle it better in different ways.

2) Correlation is not causation. That is, we don't know the reason why the results came out the way they did. Maybe Swiss students who are already more social, more successful as students, better atheletes are somehow more predisposed to smoke pot than Swiss students who are not. Maybe pot makes them more successful.

Support social science! Let's reproduce the study in the states. Let's find the cause of the marijuana achievement gap in Swiss teens. Don't give your kid a joint just yet.

@6
Cool Hernandez. That's what I tell my son about drugs in order to give an honest picture. There are kids who don't seem to be slowed down by it and have a lot of fun. But my experience also tells me that there are also kids who go from being A students to C students within a year and stop doing things they love and lose ambition for their passions. Is it worth the risk?

I support full decriminalization, but I don't think kids should be smoking dope any more than they should be drinking Jim Beam at lunch.

FooFootheSnoo:
It is interesting to note the primary concern of the study is the hypothsized relationship between marijuana use and smoking and life success. Apart from looking purely at physical health affects, the question itself doesn't seem like one that would come to mind as the most important way of considering marijuana use for most Americans. Just seems like a kind of weird European question to me.

I never believed Dan's assertion that he wasn't a pothead until this post cause thats a medium sized doob at the very most :).

When you need to take 30 minutes to build your paper just to start rolling, now THATS a big joint

Where were the Swiss Researchers when I was in High School?

Could have saved me a lot of bullshit...

dan, i've been smoking way bigger joints that that near-daily for years.

and my teenaged-relationships have never been better.

Let's analyze the raw scientific papers that created this news, from Swiss scientists.

1. Smoking pot does not make your grades go down. At reasonable levels.

2. Smoking pot does not make you smarter.

3. One possible conclusion is that typical teenage angst and depression are overridden by positive biochemical actions of MJ.

Please realize the study meant participants had to be blind to whether they actually were on pot or not. So the social impacts - good or bad - were not measured. Hanging out with dealers and pot addicts - probably bad. Hanging out with other kids and getting high and talking out stress stuff - probably good. Not measured.

validated my parenting - we told them 'don't get arrested, stay from the hard stuff, and call us for a ride home, whenever, wherever, & no judgements because we did it too'

result: 2 dean's list, pot smoking UW students who still like us.

good job, max.

Yes, sometimes government campaigns overstress things. That said, potheads are losers. Pot is a drug, potheads are drug addicts. One thing I hate about the otherwise fabulous city of Seattle is that there seem to be so many potheads who live here.

I know I'm expressing a very unpopular opinion, and I'll probably get flamed, but I'm really tired of the glorification of drugs in our culture. Maybe some people can live functional lives with pot in their systems, but many more cannot.