How Many IQ Points Will You Lose If You Smoke Pot And Read Ayn Rand Books At The Same Time?

Yesterday all the English papers carried news stories about how long term pot use by teenagers can permanently lower their IQs. Take it from me, DMT is much worse. I haven't used any in over 4 decades and I'm still suffering from having spent a semester smoking it in a redoubt in the woods behind a cluster of dorms when I was pretending to be "a student." I haven't smoked pot for almost as long. The desire just disappeared but I have no regrets I ever smoked it. (DMT, on the other hand... stay the hell away from that!)

The link above is to the BBC story. This one comes from a fella named Leaf writing for The Guardian and commenting on the same report and the same conclusion, namely that "cannabis has a deleterious effect on intelligence, attention span and memory for youngsters under 18 who use the drug." The study followed pot smokers starting in 1972. Leaf's experience was something like mine, except I started when I was 16 instead of 18. I did it intensely for a few years and quit permanently a couple months before my 21st birthday. Leaf started in 1967 and quit last year. He says he "enjoyed the experience-- it seemed to heighten my sense of aesthetic appreciation and stimulate my creative juices. He found the governmental warning about pot hypocritical because society condones tobacco and alcohol and, like everybody, he ignored them.

I believe that my long-term use of cannabis, while being bad for my lungs, has had no adverse effect on my mind, but two factors have made me consider again the potential problems of cannabis. I was an adult when I began smoking hash and grass and so were the friends I smoked with. Cannabis at this time was little known outside the Jamaican community in the UK and was not a drug taken by children or youngsters. That changed with time.

The other change is the wider availability of high-strength varieties of cannabis, known as skunk. These produce a range of effects which vary from the psychedelic to the catatonic. It is difficult to think, let alone talk, under the influence of many of these powerful substances. Even so, experienced adult users can generally handle and enjoy the mind-bending effects of skunk. It's a different matter with neophytes and youngsters.

I smoked openly in front of my daughter, but never encouraged her to follow my example, thinking that she would be able to make up her own mind when she was an adult. She did, deciding it wasn't for her. At that stage I had no scientific basis for my decision, it just seemed right.

All parents know that teenage brains don't work in the same way as adult brains. If you accept the findings of this study-- as I do-- it would appear that the best thing you can do for your children is to explain to them why premature use of these psychoactive substances could have a negative effect on their future prospects.

That's what the study-- which included around 1,000 New Zealand potheads-- finds that the risk of "significant and irreversible reduction in their IQ" is very real-- and the more one smokes and the younger one starts, "the greater the loss of IQ." Average IQ drop for long-term pot smokers who started in adolescence was 8 IQ points and stopping doesn't bring the points back. The study seems to indicate that pot smoking after 18 doesn't do any harm to the brain.

The researchers, writing in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that: "Persistent cannabis use over 20 years was associated with neuropsychological decline, and greater decline was evident for more persistent users."

"Collectively, these findings are consistent with speculation that cannabis use in adolescence, when the brain is undergoing critical development, may have neurotoxic effects."

..."It is such a special study that I'm fairly confident that cannabis is safe for over-18 brains, but risky for under-18 brains."

Robin Murray, professor of psychiatric research [explained] "There are a lot of clinical and educational anecdotal reports that cannabis users tend to be less successful in their educational achievement, marriages and occupations.

"It is of course part of folk-lore among young people that some heavy users of cannabis-- my daughter calls them stoners-- seem to gradually lose their abilities and end up achieving much less than one would have anticipated. This study provides one explanation as to why this might be the case.

Not all Ron Paul supporters started smoking weed as young as I did, and Newark Star Ledger political columnist Paul Mulshine, a Paulite himself, suggests that it's Paul and his followers who are stopping the conservative movement from completely falling off the cliff into idiocy. He seems to be implying that without the Paulistas, the whole movement could wind up as dumb and irrelevant as Sean Hannity.

Where is the fresh thinking and intellectual direction? This guy's gotta be kidding. The Ron Paul candidacy has half the college kids in America talking about ideas that were unknown on campuses just a few years ago.

There's the entire attack on crony capitalism, for example. Both the Democrats and Republicans love making deals with the ethanol interests, the energy industry and so forth. Only the Ron Paul crowd criticizes this rent-seeking and all the other ways in which businesses collude with politicians to defraud the public.

The intellectual ferment's never been stronger among conservatives-- though you certainly won't hear it from mainstream Republicans and the mainstream media. Both did their best to bury the Paul candidacy. 

But there's no excuse for a writer not to know about this. Where could John Cassidy learn about that sort of thing?

He could click the link right next to his piece and read Amy Davidson's write-up of Ron Paul's speech to the faithful in Tampa:

They listened attentively while he talked about novels (“I remember one line in there, when Lara was talking to Zhivago…”); cheered when he said our troops shouldn’t be “the policemen of the world” (including in Syria), chanting in unison, “Bring them home!”; seemed amused when he talked about “the zinc standard”; booed on cue when he said “what about 1913?”; and applauded both when he attacked F.D.R.’s monetary policies and when he promised that, with the victory of “personal liberty,” “once again, you’ll be able to drink raw milk.” (Raw milk came up a couple of times; so did drug legalization.) There was praise for Bradley Manning and Steve Jobs, which the crowd welcomed, and, notably, none for Mitt Romney, which no one seemed to miss. But some of the loudest roars came when Paul talked about how the leadership of the Republican Party-- at whose convention many of his followers will be delegates—could not be trusted.

So there is your conservative intelligentsia. The problem is that liberals don't want to acknowledge its existence. If they did, they'd have to acknowledge they have a lot more in common with the neocons like Bush and Lieberman than we genuine conservatives do.

I bet this yacht flying the Cayman flag-- or the Bermudan flag-- on which Romney fundraisers had an exclusive blast off the coast of Florida today, only smuggles cash out of America, not drugs. Well... maybe I wouldn't bet on that, now that I think about it.