It''s amazing what science can teach us. According to the Associated Press, researchers in New Zealand have released the results of a study showing that teenagers who regularly smoke pot before their 18th birthday grow up to have lower IQs than those waited until after they turned 18 to start smoking.
Specifically, the study gave IQ tests to a group of 1000 13-year-olds from the same town, and then again 25 years later when they were 38 years old. Between those two tests, they interviewed the subjects at age 18 about their marijuana-smoking habits. Those who stated that they were regular smokers by that age turned out to have an 8-percent drop in IQ by the time they turned 38 years old.
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There's nothing earth-shattering about the notion that smoking too much weed can make you stupid. More noteworthy is this apparent fact that came out of the study: the drop in intelligence suffered by chronic teenage pot smokers appears to not have any correlation to whether they stopped smoking pot later in life.
In other words, the brain damage from smoking too young is permanent, although doctors quoted in the AP story claim that anybody who smokes too much pot is at higher risk of memory loss and long-term cognitive impairment. According to the AP, 23 percent of high-school kids regularly smoke pot, making it more popular than cigarettes, which might not make you stupid, but which will kill you, thus ironically making the teens who smoke them objectively stupider than the teens getting stupid smoking weed.
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Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).
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