Long-Time Pot Users Show Mental Deficits

[Guest]

I've smoked pot for 24 years and it hasn't affected me. Except I can't remember my password.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Long-time, heavy marijuana users may eventually see their memory and attention span go up in smoke, new research suggests.


Investigators found that, among pot smokers seeking treatment for marijuana dependence, long-time users performed more poorly on tests of memory and attention than shorter-term users and non-users.

The findings show that over time, marijuana smoking can cause intellectual impairments that "endure beyond the period of intoxication" and worsen the longer a person uses the drug, the study authors report in the March 6th issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

 

[riff]

Legalize it. We'll make a fortune and piss on all the stoned poor people.

 

[claude_moveml]

I know a lot of people who smoke a lot of pot, most of them are fine. One of my friends had some memory trouble for a while, but that passed when he cut down a bit. I had no memory trouble or attention span trouble, in fact I found that I could concentrate better and "lose myself" in the maths I was doing.

However, I did suffer more serious mental problems - about a month after the first time I stopped I got really paranoid (I thought the owner of the kebab van across the street was in collusion with some of my friends to bootleg my album - which now I would have taken as a compliment, it's now online) and starting hearing voices, I started smoking pot again and got progressively worse over a period of about six months, checking car number plates as they drove past to check if I was being followed (I was dealing to support my habit, so it's not all that far-fetched). When I stopped for the second and last time I went completely mad, losing touch with reality completely for about a month. Luckily by this point I had got in touch with health service professionals and started on treatment (anti-depressant and anti-psychotic), so was well looked after. There is about a week of which my only memory is going downstairs in the morning and being given my medication by my mother.

Anyway, I'm pretty much fully recovered from that now and it makes a good story to tell, and it was quite fun in a way. I don't mind people around me smoking, I enjoyed my time smoking pot. All in all I think that cannabis should be legalized - it's a social problem not a criminal one.