You notice how that guy in your block of flats who hits the reefer regularly always seem a little mentally slower off the mark? Shockingly, a new study has revealed that smoking weed regularly lowers cognitive function, especially if you started smoking before you were 16.

I think (the irony) I can speak for all of us when I say we were all  younger than 16 when we started smoking weed. That’s just how we rolled at Camps Bay High.

Nonetheless, the study conducted at the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital examined the effects of chronic marijuana use on brain function. Participants who began smoking weed before they were 16 performed significantly worse on cognitive function tests than both non-smokers and those who became chronic smokers later in life.

What is chronic smoking you might ask? Smoking weed at least five of the last seven days at a minimum of 3,000 joints in a lifetime. Oh!

“The average age of study participants was 22 years old. The data showed that chronic pot smokers repeated errors more often than the two other groups, even after the authors corrected them. They also had more trouble maintaining a set of rules, suggesting an inability to maintain focus.”

I know people who have this problem who don’t smoke weed. Wonder what their reason is?

They also found that “Even before any behavioral differences, those who started smoking before 16 years old tended to smoke twice as often and three times the amount of marijuana in grams than chronic smokers who started smoking later in life.”

So what about the moderate smokers? Dr Staci Gruber who led the study says, “”It’s impossible to tell whether our results would be the same in moderate smokers, but there are even more of those people out there, so that will be the next place we go for our research.”

They’ll find me? Paranoia…

[Source: ABC News]

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