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| Occasional Toke Won't Send Your IQ Up in Smoke |
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Posted by FoM on April 05, 2002 at 12:22:29 PT By Robert Preidt, HealthScoutNews Reporter Source: HealthScout.com 
If you smoke fewer than five joints a week, your IQ should stay intact. However, if you toke more, your IQ could go up in smoke. A new Canadian study has found that heavy pot use decreases a person's IQ by an average of four points, while the occasional joint doesn't seem to damage intelligence. But the study also found that if you stop smoking marijuana for at least three months, your IQ may benefit: Former users gained an average of 3.5 IQ points after they quit." The most intriguing finding, certainly, is the recovery of function in these individuals," says study author Peter Fried, a professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa. This is the first study that actually measures the intelligence of people before and after they started using marijuana. It is published in the current issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Fried and his colleagues studied 70 people and compared their IQ scores from when they were 9 to 12 years old -- before any started using marijuana -- to their IQ scores when they were 17 to 20 years old. The researchers found the IQ scores of the heavy marijuana users decreased by 4.1 points on average, while light users had an average gain of 5.8 points, former users showed an average increase of 3.5 points, and nonusers had an average increase of 2.6 points. While it may appear that the findings show light users have higher IQ increases than nonusers, Fried says that the people in the study were middle class and that sort of IQ increase is expected and "perfectly normal" for them during those years. It has no connection to whether or not they used pot, he adds. The group included 37 people who never used marijuana, nine light users who smoked less than five joints a week, 15 heavy users who smoked more than five joints a week, and nine former users who'd shunned marijuana for at least three months. The people in the marijuana study are part of the Ottawa Prenatal Prospective Study, which started in 1978. Pregnant women enrolled in that study and their children have been monitored since. Data collected from the study let Fried make the before-and-after IQ comparisons. As a standard of measurement, Fried notes that an IQ score of 100 is considered average; students with an IQ no higher than 77 are generally offered special education. And he adds that a four-point shift in IQ wouldn't really be apparent. "If you were walking down the street, you wouldn't be able to tell if somebody had an IQ of 104 or 108," he says. Although his study indicates your IQ can recover when you quit smoking weed, Fried emphasizes it may not apply to a 50-year-old reformed pothead who smoked dope for decades. "These are 17- to 20-year-olds and they've only been smoking, on average, for three years. I don't know if we would see a recovery of function in folks who were older, and who had perhaps been smoking for 15 to 20 years," he says. Fried adds this study doesn't tell the whole story about how marijuana affects your brain. "IQ is a relatively insensitive measure of drug effects. Thus, I do not know whether things like memory or attention or information processing speed would in fact recover," Fried says. He offers an interesting aside about the longtime marijuana users in this study who gave up the habit. "When we asked them why they quit, the most common statement was that they felt it impacted negatively on their memory," Fried says. This study offers important new information about the effects of marijuana, says Richard Garlick, the director of communications for the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse. "I think what this study does is give us one more piece of information on what has been a somewhat cloudy aspect of cannabis use," Garlick says. He says research seems to show marijuana isn't physically addictive. Advocates who want marijuana legalized say that proves it's benign. However, Garlick says that argument overlooks other potential dangers, like the effect on IQ noted in this study. "It's safe to say that anybody in this age group who's consuming at a rate of five joints a week, according to this study, is having some reduction in IQ, and therefore in their ability to learn and absorb information. It is something we should be paying attention to and be concerned about," Garlick says. Almost 69 million Americans over the age of 12 have tried marijuana at least once, says the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. Marijuana is the most frequently used illegal drug in the United States. Source: HealthScout.com Related Articles & Web Site: Ethan Russo M.D. - Chronic Cannabis Use Smoking Pot No Risk to IQ, Study Says Heavy Marijuana Use Lowers IQ, Only Temporarily Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help |
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| Comment #5 posted by boppy on April 05, 2002 at 14:13:06 PT |
| The Healthscout website has an area for "alternative" medicine. Guess what's missing? [ Post Comment ] |
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Comment #4 posted by Dan B on April 05, 2002 at 13:50:30 PT:
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| HealthScout is a subsidiary of MDChoice.com, which provides (among other things) a search engine that includes the capability of searching Medline (HealthScout also has this function). As far as I can tell from the banners at both the HealthScout and MDChoice sites, both sites are sponsored/funded exclusively by advertisements from pharmaceuticals companies--thus the bias. If I find out more (like whether MDChoice is owned by another entity), I'll let you know. By the way (off topic): did anyone see David Brock on the interview segment of The Daily Show the other day? He mentioned that the right-wingers have their own television network, and Jon Stewart asked him "which one"? Brock replied, "Fox," and Jon Stewart laughed, then said "I thought so." Thought this might give some of you a chuckle, or at least a grin knowing that someone is willing to say what nobody in the mass media has yet been willing to say. Dan B [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #3 posted by FoM on April 05, 2002 at 13:37:42 PT |
| I'd like to know too! [ Post Comment ] |
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Comment #2 posted by Dan B on April 05, 2002 at 13:33:10 PT:
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| What this article says is that the 4.1-point IQ loss is only attributable to the heavy use of cannabis, but the 5.8 percent gain for light users (which is 3.2 points higher than the gain for nonusers) is merely a sign that these people are middle class. In a (censored) word: bulls#!t. If they are going to attribute the net loss to cannabis use, they must also attribute the net gain to cannabis use. The fact that they do not treat both score changes the same is a direct indication of the bias these "researchers" had before they ever conducted the "study." They were searching for negative effects, they came up with positive effects for light users, and they dreamed up an excuse for the positive while attributing the negative to their preconception that cannabis disturbs thinking. This article is pathetic, which is what I have come to expect from HealthScout. I think HealthScout means that they scout out the interpretations of studies regarding health that reflect the opinions of their corporate backers. Who owns HealthScout? I intend to find out. I'll be back soon. Dan B [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #1 posted by E_Johnson on April 05, 2002 at 13:06:26 PT |
| And he adds that a four-point shift in IQ wouldn't really be apparent. "If you were walking down the street, you wouldn't be able to tell if somebody had an IQ of 104 or 108," he says. That basically means the study found nothing but an imaginary number that is going to be used to continue projecting the same kinds of attitudes on marijuana users that have traditionally been projected upon African Americans. [ Post Comment ] |
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