Pot use does not lower teen IQ, study finds
Photo of The Choom Gang, including
the current President of the U.S. used on the cover of the Nov.
18 issue of The Nation.
Drug warriors obsessed with the teen brain should apparently be focusing on cigarettes, alcohol and poverty.
A new study undermines marijuana prohibitionists’ chief argument: that America needs a drug war to protect teen brains from harm.
The results of a large study of 2,235 teenagers over two years found no decrease in IQ among modest users of pot, the Journal of Psychopharmacology reported Saturday.
“Modest cannabis use in teenagers may have less cognitive impact than epidemiological surveys of older cohorts have previously suggested,” researchers concluded.
Drug warriors have long-trumped up specious data from New Zealand in 2012 showing an IQ drop of eight points among long-time pot smokers. The data has been used to support pot policies like: arresting children; saddling them a criminal record which prevents obtaining financial aid for college or job placement; suspending them from school; expelling them from school; and forcing children into mandatory rehab, an unregulated California industry where they are introduced to hard core drugs and addicts.
But further research on the IQ drop study showed lower lifetime IQ has more to do with poverty than pot. (Read more: “Poverty impedes cognitive function“)
In 2015, researchers found cannabis use alone had no effect on academic performance, when controlling for persistent alcohol and tobacco use.
In the newest study, researchers from the University College London said “there is much debate about the impact of adolescent cannabis use on intellectual and educational outcomes.”
So they looked at links between teen pot use, IQ, and grades in a sample of 2,235 teenagers from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. By age 15, one in four teens reported trying pot.
The researchers analyzed the data and adjusted them for “potential confounds” like “cigarette and alcohol use, childhood mental-health symptoms and behavioral problems”, in order to test the links between pot use and IQ at age 15 and educational performance at age 16.
Teens who smoked pot equal to or more than 50 times “did not differ from never-users on either IQ or educational performance,” researchers found.
Researchers isolated cigarette smoking as the one thing that drove IQ down, and “further analyses demonstrated robust associations between cigarette use and educational outcomes, even with cannabis users excluded.”
Researchers conclude:
“These findings suggest that adolescent cannabis use is not associated with IQ or educational performance once adjustment is made for potential confounds, in particular adolescent cigarette use. Modest cannabis use in teenagers may have less cognitive impact than epidemiological surveys of older cohorts have previously suggested.”
Still, the IQ drop myth is as fashionable as ever. This year, Santa Clara county began a campaign to shame teens who use pot, called WeedisDumb.org that repeats the discredited data.