A true control is a control group that is physically indistinguishable from the experiment group.
You mention monkeys and rats, this is precisely why they use knockout mice for many studies and the same reason why demonstrating something in mice doesn’t always translate to demonstration in another organism.
Math is a formal system, it admits no experiments.
Seeing science, humans and control, cybernetics comes to mind. You're in for a surprise if you still hold the unsubstantial belief social science is not real science.
What is "Real science"? May you're thinking something that follows a specific method or satisfies some specific requirements. If you want to challenge that view, see this: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-method/
PS: That's not to say that this specific study is not bullshit.
Here's a repeatable experiment in the social sciences:
Do Conditional Cash Transfers Improve Child Health? Evidence from PROGRESA's Control
Randomized Experiment
Author(s): Paul Gertler
Source: The American Economic Review, Vol. 94, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the One
Hundred Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association San Diego, CA,
January 3-5, 2004 (May, 2004), pp. 336-341
From Section IV (you're gonna have to Sci-Hub it):
"The randomization and the fact that the control and treatment samples are well balanced in
the observed characteristics imply that a simple
comparison of mean outcomes post-intervention
will likely provide an unbiased estimate of program impacts. However, I also control for other
observed socioeconomic characteristics in order
to reduce idiosyncratic variation and to improve
the power of the estimates."
Is this really more sus than a cell bio paper? Are the conclusions so weak that it's not real science? Were you just being sarcastic and it went over my head?
It’s not strictly repeatable because those experimental subjects are not identical to the ones you would use to repeat the experiment. Not only are they morphologically different specimens, but they are culturally/behaviorally different as well.
I’m not being sarcastic, I’m being strict about what constitutes a basis for a valid generalization.
> Is this really more sus than a cell bio paper? Are the conclusions so weak that it's not real science?
Its not necessarily that its more suspect or weaker, but that it is in a different epistemological category. Its a different kind of evidence. When you inject particles into a cloud chamber, you believe with very high confidence that those particles have fundamentally identical properties as the other particles of the same kind. We know that humans are not alike each other in the same way as particles. Therefore we are not permitted to treat them that way.
Epistemological hygeine. It encourages people to be more careful about ensuring that they understand the degree to which a particular evidence complex supports a belief, and awareness of the corresponding possibility that the evidence is an artifact of a biased sample.
So, in the category of science, that leaves Physics, and what else?
What would you call all of what we now call the biological, social, medical, sciences at the moment?
What would be your proposal for a new category for everything that uses the scientific method, but that may have variations in the individual elements of the treatment and control groups?
Maybe it would be more practical to change the name of Physics to something else, rather than re-categorizing all of the other fields.
We could refer to physics as 'Invariant Studies' or something like that, and keep calling everything else science. That way might be easier across the board.
I would propose as an alternative that we work to improve general scientific literacy so that the general public might be more familiar with the methods used in each field. For example, if more people knew how regression analysis worked they might be better able to understand it as the foundation for many of the conclusions in the social sciences, and so might be better able to understand the generalizability and potential limitations of what they are seeing when they are presented with a conclusion in one of these fields.
Its possible to do science in biology with things like knockout mice and physical limits.
Other things are more a matter of classification and interpretation and it should be clear that they are socially constructed to a greater degree than physics or chemistry.
> What would you call all of what we now call the biological, social, medical, sciences at the moment?
I don’t know, I was originally defending the comment on the basis of “real science” so I don’t see a problem calling medicine an applied science.
> What would be your proposal for a new category for everything that uses the scientific method, but that may have variations in the individual elements of the treatment and control groups?
See, what I mean is actually a point about the scientific method. Its not really possible to use the scientific method without ensuring that your experimental subjects are indistinguishable. The reason I’m gatekeeping is because its not the same method, it would be pseudoscience. Like doing experiments on football games.
> I would propose as an alternative that we work to improve general scientific literacy so that the general public might be more familiar with the methods used in each field. For example, if more people knew how regression analysis worked they might be better able to understand it as the foundation for many of the conclusions in the social sciences, and so might be better able to understand the generalizability and potential limitations of what they are seeing when they are presented with a conclusion in one of these fields.
I think it would be great if people understood these things better, I guess I see this distinction as a way of articulating those fundamental differences in the mind of the public.
I think you may be vastly overestimating the scientific literacy of the general public.
I don't mean to imply that most people are stupid or anything. Far from it I've met many tradesman (and tradeswomen) who I consider vastly more intelligent than many people I've met with PhDs.
But, I suspect the willingness of most folks to care about the distinction you're making is negligible at best.
It's sort of like being a car salesman who truly loves cars. And the type of car you're selling has a brand new oil-pump bearing design that is 30% more efficient than the prior bearing design. It doesn't make much of a difference in the overall performance of the car, but you're fascinated by the engineering prowess of it. Unfortunately, 99.9% of the people who walk in the dealership simply don't care about the oil pump bearing. They care about the heated seats, and the bluetooth audio, and if they can get it in seafoam green with the black trim package.
In a similar fashion, although I find knockout mice to be absolutely fascinating (to steal your example), my friends and family simply glaze over when I start to ramble on about such things. They simply don't care. But when they need the gene therapy that resulted from studies performed with the knockout mice for their weird cancer, well, then they're interested (but not too much).
And, so, most people don't know a for loop, from a plasmid, from a cloud chamber, from a difference-in-differences regression equation in economics research. And as a result, they're not even remotely interested in the degree of stochastic factors that may be influencing the research design of the study poorly-summarized in the Medium article that pops up on their Facebook feed.
I would love for people to be more savvy in interpreting the products of the scientific method (or any variation thereof) that they may encounter. But most people are so far behind in being able to approach such detours into the methodology that such a semantic distinction would prove useless. Hell, I have more years in grad school under my belt than I care to admit, and even I will tell anyone who will listen that I barely understand most stuff outside of my field. A political science paper utilizing network models to analyze trade fluctuations with third-party nations following bilateral trade agreements. Maybe I could get the gist of it, but I'm probably not confident enough to definitively say if it's bullshit or not.
Rather, I argue that we focus on piquing the public's curiosity, and doing our damndest to act as scientific ambassadors to the next generation. Rather than changing what we classify as 'science' in the colloquial sense, give a nephew or niece a copy of Calculus Made Easy (and actually help them get through it), show them how to use a metal lathe, give them a brief demonstration of OLS regression by hand, get them a decent microscope to look at pond water with, build a TTL flip-flop with them on a breadboard, and read them The Logic of Collective Action as a bedtime story for the hell of it. The only way we lift the ability of the general public to understand the application of the scientific method in all of it's forms, is by teaching the general public to give a shit about it in the first place. For most people, it's just too late, but it's certainly not too late for us as a collective society.
You ignore the variability of KO mice? You'll never get the exact. same response between two mice. nor will you between two cloud chambers. so the real science left is the one someone makes up in their mind maybe...
I’m not sure what you mean. Variability in physically identical specimens is handled as probability. KO mice are basically the same organism, when they react differently to the same stimulus it indicates something about all KO mice. When two humans react differently to the same stimulus it tells us something about two humans, but nothing about the rest of the humans.
The person you're replying to didn't say anything about whether or not sociological studies are or are not real science.
Being unable to make that distinction, do you think you're in a good position to explore the scientific demarcation problem as it pertains to sociological studies?
> It compared adulthood life outcomes at age 35, including alcohol use, tobacco smoking, illicit drug use, relationship status, financial hardship, depression, anxiety and employment status.
As always, remember that correlation is not causation.
For example, maybe people with depression or anxiety are using cannabis to self-medicate.
Additionally:
> The research project followed 1792 Australian high school students aged 15 in 1992, investigating patterns of cannabis use across 20 years.
So, mix in the confounding factor of it not being legal during those years.
Keep in mind that correlation doesn't prove causation, but it does go along with it. Any time you find correlation, something goes along with it. Maybe A causes B. Maybe B causes A. Maybe A and B have a common cause C. Each of those is interesting, even if you don't know which is which from just the correlation.
Consider if the data had fallen out the other way: if there was no correlation between these measures of harm and cannabis use, that would have been evidence of a lack of harm from cannabis use.
So even if you can't draw any strong conclusions from this study, it's still an interesting data point.
It might also just be a coincidence like the correlation of the "Per capita consumption of cheese (US)"
with the "Number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets" [1]
Eh, correlating two time-series trends is almost a gimmick.
If you saw that the per-capita cheese consumption of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets was twice or ten times that of the baseline population, that could still be a coincidence, because hey, that's always a possibility, but it would be a much more suggestive correlation than just observing that any two monotonic time series correlate.
Best way to sum this article: correlation does not imply causation.
It is implying people who are regular users, are masking deeper psychological issues without going further into what the "harmful" effects are, of course if anyone is abusing anything it is because of a deeper problem.
If you're on HN, chances are, you're not very correlated to the sample from this research study... which looks entirely at correlation, not causation. I'm interested in a long-term study that identifies real differences in health outcomes, not just population bias.
In the 1970s there was the Shaffer (sp?) study in Jamacia.
Since then there have been hundreds of studies.
Generally cannabis, and recreational drugs generally, have not much in the way of negative measurable effects.
Remember it is only good drugs that have to be banned: There are no laws (generally) against Atrpine (datura), digitalis (foxglove) et. el. Just the good, fun, safe drugs have to have laws against them.
Well from my understanding a lot of the reason some of the “good, fun, safe” drugs were criminalized in the first place had to do with targeting specific groups. I don’t think there are any large enough groups crazy enough to use datura regularly the government would want to target lol.
"Consequences" sure does imply causation, but this doesn't say that. It says "linked to negative life outcomes" which sounds a lot more like correlation to me.
Or maybe the causality is reversed, and it is not that weed causes higher alcohol consumption but rather people who would choose to consume more alcohol would also be more likely to choose to consume more weed? Maybe there is no causality and only correlation? Has this been explained in the article?
Maybe having paid job makes you use weed less (for possible consequences of being high at work)?
Maybe cannabis doesn't cause depression but rather it is just correlated for some other unknown reason?
That's again, very poorly written article by a confused author who does not understand causality and correlation.
Yeah, there are quite a lot of evidence hinting at cannabis being bad for you long term, especially when used as a kid. Doesn't mean it should be illegal, but just like with alcohol or smoking it almost surely isn't good for you and trying to ignore that doesn't do you any good.
Part of the issue here is that anti-cannabis groups here have absolutely cried wolf. The stories of the purported harms of cannabis has been so long and ridiculous that most people instinctively disregard such warnings as nonsense.
> but just like with alcohol or smoking it almost surely isn't good for you
I dont think we should compare the two so blithley. We have very strong evidence alcohol and tobacco is super bad for you, especially if you use it constantly. We have what is basically conjecture, rat studies, and correlation that doesnt paticularly control for confounding factors for marijuana [despite a concerted political effort to make it scary]. That doesn't make it "safe" but its just as wrong if not more so to say its comparable to things which we are very sure are unsafe.
well, we do know that combusting plant matter and inhaling the smoke is bad for any plant (although particularly bad for tabacco). For the actual effects of the active ingredients though it's definitely not clear cut either way.
Maybe the problem is trying to frame something as complex as drugs as good or bad.
We know there is an effect. That's why people use them. Seems to miss the point to just say "this is harm" and ignore whatever factors would influence the decision to use.
Why is that prescription drugs come with a long list of "side effects" but most of society doesn't see the "harm" in those?
Sociery certainly sees the harm in prescription opiods.
I imagine a lot of it is due to many prescription drugs not being habit forming or generally pleasurable, thus people are more likely to use it in cases where the benefit outweighs the harm in a much more objective fashion.
Everyone I knew who used weed regularly in high school and college had ghosts. Either issues with depression, neglect, and lot of abuse.
Sometimes it's not the drug use that causes the problems, it's the problems that cause the drug use.
Not bashing folks who smoke weed here. I partake on occasion. But this study is bullshit.
“Overall, regular use of cannabis – more than weekly and especially daily use – was found to have harmful consequences, regardless of the age people began using it.”
Regular use of anything, particularly if it's mind altering, is likely to cause harmful long term effects. Particularly if it starts at young ages. That said, the study doesn't seem to even attempt to ask why these people were regularly smoking weed in their teens.
This study followed "Australian high school students aged 15 in 1992." It was only last year that a single territory passed laws legalizing "possession and growth of small amounts of cannabis for personal use" [1].
There are a lot of confounding variables around this paper.
Same, but in SoCal; it was easier to get high grade weed than it was to get beer, so most house parties were always well stocked with weed they seldom had alcohol unless they knew or were paying off certain places that sold them to minors in large quantities which carried lots of costs and risks, so a house party of 200+ guests would always be a challenge
Culturally weed was way more tolerated than alcohol as a result growing up, but still had a negative stigma as a 'losers drug of choice' despite its wide legal use, which is what made me gravitate toward hard alcohol as it had some exclusivity but also just better experience in a social setting than weed.
Flash forward a decade and I get involved in the hemp Industry and travel all over Europe and then return to the US (Colorado) where Hemp was starting to make inroads, and I realized a lot of the people in the Industry were former MJ (including my cofounder) and weren't 'lazy stoners with no ambition' as they were farmers as well as entrepreneurs, but they simply used a drug that I associated with decompression and relaxation in what I regarded a hyper competitive social setting like a conference or Industry party.
My point is that I think it varies culturally now that its been decriminalized and legalized in many parts of the World, and to be honest asking people if they want to smoke a bowl is just as common in some cities if they want a cup of coffee, and since I don't like caffeine and have a low THC tolerance I usually have to carry high CBD/CBN/CBG strains so as to no completely fall asleep due to the high THC strains most regular users smoke.
It's odd because in my teens and early 20s I felt that DARE indoctrination creep in and felt were were doing 'something bad' and we were going to get caught despite living and working in a legal state (CA or CO), but upon further analysis the truth is what I was putting into my body during a 2-3 Martini 'power lunch meeting' followed by a double espresso as a pick me up somewhere in between was way worse for me personally than if we had just took a drag from a joint outside before diving in and talking business and finalizing deals.
It's odd, and the stoner reputation is real in many cases, but I think a lot of it as in most sweeping generalizations, is conflated with a lot of misguided stereotypes.
I have been outpaced by 50+ year old couple with kids who drank and smoked weed on a regular basis as a a fit 20 something with no real responsibilities other than myself. Nothing I could do short of not sleeping made me as productive as that couple, even on an individual basis and I learned a lot about my own preconceived biases and confirmation biases. Most of it forced upon me by convention but also personal experiences that I'm glad to say I challenged and have become a better a person as a result.
A couple of alcoholics who have had to dry out the alcohol, and nicotine has gotten a lot of victims around here, but generally recreational drugs (particularly MDMA, Cannabis, and LSD) are a huge boon.
The biggest danger is the police, but they are reforming and relaxing.
People use drugs because they are good. They are not idiots
People have problems. When they have problems abnd use drugs they say they have drug problems. Maybe they do. But it is far more common for people to have no problems, just loads of fun.
Tripping on LSD with a thousand other people is magical experience.
> less harmful than any negative effects observed in this study.
There are other effects, effects on the brain and on sleep quality, for instance, that are not mentioned in this study. Effects on the lungs and cardiovascular system.
None of that has anything to do with 10 years in jail to me. Life sentences for possession are stupid and Boomer.
Glib reply really does not do justice to the harm of the war on drugs.
I mentioned it elsewhere, but where is the panic over prescription drugs and their harmful side effects?
This is a non story. Marijuana is popular because it's potent. Compare it to other legal drugs, the obvious being alcohol, and again tell me about the relative harm.
If anyone wants to learn more about this, or is struggling with this themselves, I'd highly recommend looking up the talks of Dr Gabor Mate.
He is trained as a medical doctor, but has learnt a lot about the psychology of addiction from his own experiences and those of patients. He worked in a drug treatment center in Vancouver and one of the things he often says is that of all the hard drug users he has seen, those who are female were all sexually abused as children.
His viewpoint is that addiction itself is not a problem - contrary to what the media would like you to believe - it's merely the minds way of dealing with whatever other traumas have been going on in your life. (When he talks about addiction he is not just talking about drugs, but all forms, including why you check HN every 20 minutes :D)
Applying that to this article implies this is just correlation, those who start smoking weed at a young age do it to cope with other traumas in their life, but they never deal with the trauma so move on to other coping mechanisms.
We've experimentally reproduced a similar effect in mice [1].
Mice who "underwent cognitive training [and] received rewards while exploring a training arena" reduced "one measure of drug-seeking behavior" in comparison with those who "remained in their home cages." The researchers conclude, right in the abstract, that "deprivation may confer vulnerability to drug-seeking behavior and that brief interventions may promote long-term resilience."
There's a famous series of studies from the 1970s about this. Basically, rats stuck alone in metal cages with access to unlimited morphine will consume a hell of a lot more drugs than those in "Rat Parks" with other rats and things to play with.
Although purely anecdotal, I strongly agree with that point of view. Alcohol, drugs, and other kind of addictive things, for a great part turn into addictions with negative impact on people's lives, when they are a coping mechanism.
I have yet to meet an alcoholic or drug addict that has an otherwise perfectly normal life. I don't mean "highly functioning alcoholic", I'm talking about your stereotype addict. So far all of them have had one thing in common: their life was not headed in a direction they desired, and they couldn't see (an easy enough) way to get moving in that direction. After that, any substance or excuse or anxiety was "just" a coping mechanism.
Not sure if this makes sense, just needed to say this I guess.
Fully agree with you here. I remember it being drilled into my head in middle school science class that "correlation does not imply causation," which seems to have been forgotten or ignored when writing these headlines.
I think they pointed out that based on their experience, it's probably not even possible to separate correlation from causation cleanly and I think I agree. Even though I never smoked I spent a lot of time around people who did and I could have told you even at age 14 before they took their first puff that they were, on average, much more likely to exhibit some of the things the study listed as "findings" like "more likely not to have a job", etc.
I think he's trying to say the stronger statement that not only does correlation != causation, but he also believes there are known confounding factors that weren't accounted for.
A lot of science is dismissed here with a "sample size too small" complaint. That's usually invalid... power depends on sample size and effect size together.
But the problem with observational studies is real, especially here. Let's complain about that and also investigate childhood trauma and regular cannabis use.
I find it hard to believe that a study can conclusively establish these relatively subtle effects when it took many decades to causally connect tobacco smoking to cancer.
The study may be bullshit but the findings may still be accurate. We’ll know in 20 years after a plethora of better studies are completed, the impetus of which is the legalization all over the USA.
Everyone watches TV but only a few of them become addicted to TV. Everyone eats but only a few become addicted to eating, etc. What makes the difference between normal and compulsive use is an inherent susceptibility.
Mate says that usually that increased susceptibility comes from developmental issues / mental health issues / trauma, etc.
It depends on the person. Alcohol triples my anxiety, while it has the opposite effect on my roommate.
For me, the only non-medical stress reliever is reading light novels or even trash novels. For some weird reason, the shallow narrative style plus corny plots take my mind away from reality.
I know people that don't have those tough backgrounds. They've smoked a lot and now in their late 60s. Mostly successful people and maybe it's just old age but they have signs of significant cognitive decline. Is an anecdote not data but it scares the crap out of me.
My favorite theory is that people who use drugs demonstrate: 1) much more openness and 2) much less conscientiousness (in the form of breaking the law, being rebellious, etc). than average.
Drug use itself may harm, esp harder drugs, but drug use almost certainly correlates with the kind of decision making that would lead to things like hard drinking, relationship problems, and work problems in moderately severe cases.
Never had any myself but know plenty who have. However as an Australian I want to point out that this study uses Australian people as it’s dataset.
Therefore it’s tainted by the implication that cannabis is an illegal drug and the people in this study spent some portion of their life associated with regularly performing a illegal act... This is basically worthless from the foundation up since they can’t possibly account for all the ways this might have influenced a persons upbringing, from the socially acceptable nature of taking risks with the law, to associating with drug dealers who may (or may not) try to push harder more addictive drugs on their customers.
It’s going to be a while until we get similar studies from the parts of America where it was made legal for recreational use, but until then, we have to remember that everything has been tainted with the implications of the subject participants in any study being involved in socially “unacceptable” illegal behaviour which is connected to a huge tangled web of second order effects.
"By the mid‐30s, both young‐adult and adolescent‐onset regular users were more likely than minimal/non‐users (63.5%) to have used other illicit drugs (odds ratio [OR] > 20.4), be a high‐risk alcohol drinker (OR > 3.7), smoked daily (OR > 7.2) and less likely to be in relationships (OR < 0.4)."
So this study basically shows that cannabis users are more likely to experiment with other drugs -- meanwhile, the "less likely to be in relationships" factor might not even be statistically significant (the OR is < 0.4). I'm not sure how one defines "anti-social behaviours" either, other than conforming into some societal box.
Public school anti-drug programs told kids that cannabis use often leads to other drugs, and also said that it would make you peal your skin off to get rid of the spiders.
They casually mixed truth with lies to create the most frightening narrative possible. But once the lies became apparent, everything they ever claimed came into doubt.
This is exactly the non-argument people use for antivax, religions, cults, ... "who needs science when I know I'm right?" Anyone can say this about anything and it leads nowhere.
There's a fundamental difference between beliefs stemming from faith (or gut feel, anecdotes etc) and results from rigorous and falsifiable experiments, even if they happen to agree.
It's not faith, it's called experience. Every single one of my friends that regularly smoked weed, regardless of social or economic status, ended up using harder drugs. Despite the fact that we had a very strong culture of looking down on people using hard drugs as junkies. But sure, I have to deny my own senses, because they're not peer-reviewed and I should smoke weed by default until some scientists will tell me otherwise.
That's called anecdotes, and I have exactly the opposite experience in South Africa, England, New Zealand and Germany - maybe there's a cultural factor rather than something intrinsic to cannabis?
So, who's right now? By what process should we try to get to the bottom of this?
As a thought experiment, consider if coffee (caffeine is very much an addictive mind altering substance that can be harmful in large doses) were illegal and bought and used the same way people use cannabis. So you go to your coffee dealer, and he offers you some weed. Do you try it? Maybe. Ok, now he offers you some heroin. This is where studies should step in, but my not very meaningful belief / gut feeling is that most people will say holy crap, no thanks man, I just wanted my boring old beans and weed. This has been my experience (and that of people I know) for decades, and again I'd like to stress that that doesn't necessarily imply a great many general statements I might wish to conclude from it, no matter how "obvious" it seems to me.
I'm right, because what I'm saying is reasonable. Recreational drugs are not necessary for you to survive and thus you shouldn't risk using them if there is a possibility of them ruining your life. It's common sense.
edit: This isn't some though experiment, it's real life with real life consequences. Science might be helpful, fun and all, but I don't need a rigorous science to make my life choices and stay away from things that can potentially harm or kill me. Even if I'm basing my judgement on anecdotes. Life simply doesn't work that way and it doesn't matter if you think it's not 100% reliable.
All of the people that I know that have used hard drugs also use cannabis. The opposite is not true at all, though.
Living where weed is legal, I know dozens of people who regularly smoke weed and do no other hard drugs.
Some of them are health nuts who don't even use caffeine or alcohol. (Caffeine and alcohol are proven to cause more bodily harm than cannabis at any dosage)
With few exceptions, the entire population of weed smokers that I know have successful careers, are social, and have good family lives.
It would be interesting to see how legalization in countries like Canada curbs this. Weed dealers are rarely just selling weed, and often harder drugs. To me it's not clear if this means "cannabis use leads to higher risk behaviour w.r.t drug use" or "exposure to drug dealers increases risk of trying other drugs". I see no clear reason to believe this over the other hypothesis.
Australia is not a country where cannabis is legal, so its system, and therefore impacts, are much less useful for study than a nation which takes a more modern approach to cannabis.
My theory is that using cannabis as a coping mechanism to dull your mind to some other sort of trauma or despair will often lead to harder drugs. Cannabis is not a good drug for such coping because with sustained heavy use it will inevitably lose it's efficacy. When a well adjusted healthy person develops a cannabis tolerance, they can take a break for a few weeks to reset their tolerance. Not a big deal. But somebody who's using cannabis to cope? Going sober for a few weeks may be intolerable, but weed is no longer helping them, so many turn to another drug. Consider that coping with problems instead of addressing them directly often leads to worse outcomes in the long run, since many problems can get worse the longer you ignore them. This makes the apparent need for another drug feel even stronger in this sort of person.
In brief, cannabis cannot solve your problems and trying to mask your problems with cannabis is often the start of a downward spiral.
This comment really is at odds with a lot of current research, especially with respect to harm reduction and medical usage.
The exact opposite of your theory is pretty clearly demonstrated in the medical literature with respect to risk escalation. Cannabis use is correlated with reduction in mortality rates, and lower frequency use of hard drugs in chronic substance abusers. It facilitates a risk deescalation for hard drug users.
Literature does indicate that those abusing a substance are more likely to abuse other substances, however there is consensus that there is no gateway effect. Essentially, there's no way to determine causality in these situations, as poly-drug addiction is a complex illness. Lastly, these results were for people who's use disorder escalated to the point where they were checked into an inpatient care facility. That's not the type of quasi-medical use you describe.
I've noticed a trend where if a study has unpleasant conclusions the people trot out correlation does not imply causation. On the other hand, a study with a pleasant conclusion is taken as evidence for causation in a preferable direction. E.g. a study showing positive correlation between atheism and IQ scores is considered evidence that atheists are that way because they are smarter than most people.
It is a very interesting correlation, but guess I cannot infer causation in this case ;)
The issue with this study is that it is pigeon holed on psychological issues, which is not really a great metric to go by as all of our mileage varies and it really is an individual journey - if the study were more focused on the physical health related issues then this discussion would have a different tone.
What do you think the comments here would be like if the study found extensive marijuana use is strongly correlated with extreme happiness, strong relationships, and fantastic libido? Would we see as much correlation does not imply causation canard?
Reading these comments is strange. I thought it was well accepted that regular marijuana use in adolescence leads to all kinds of negative health implications.
I'd be more interested in excluding daily users and seeing the impact of recreational use, say once or twice a week.
> “Compared to non-users, regular cannabis users were more likely to engage in high-risk alcohol consumption, smoke tobacco, use other illicit drugs and not be in a relationship at age 35,” Dr Chan said.
[...] They were also at higher risk of depression and less likely to have a paid job.
> “Overall, regular use of cannabis [...] was found to have harmful consequences, regardless of the age people began using it.”
I am skeptical that this study is actually representative of the effects of cannabis, and does not instead depend on other, highly correlated effects, which are then presented as the reason. From my general (non-user) perspective, I would assume that there is probably a bias towards groups of people who have a higher chance to use substances in general, or live in a comparatively poor environment.
For example: Children of smokers often become smokers themselves (as numerous credible studies show). If they now start with cannabis, they would be included as the victims of cannabis in the discussed study. However, the causality is probably reversed here.
> Compared to non-users, regular cannabis users were more likely to ... not be in a relationship at age 35
In 20 years of various relationships, the only girlfriend who didn’t request that I quit smoking weed was extremely naughty and experimented with all kinds of substances, as she completed her residency at a children’s hospital. She married someone with more money, God help him.
So, it doesn’t surprise me that people not in a relationship tend to smoke more weed.
These's not a word in abstract of the study [0] that they have controlled for anything. (and I don't say that assuming anything about a study is a bad scientific practice, but I do assume it)
>one would assume they controlled for this. Its a scientific study.
My priors have shifted in the opposite direction over time. When I hear studies like this I'm tempted to assume mediocrity in both the collection and analysis of the data that puts the results into questionable utility for me. And not just mediocrity but potential bad faith tricks like p-hacking and its cousins.
It would take a substantial effort from high quality scientists (meaning individual reputation) including replication studies to get me interested.
I can't see how this study is measuring the harms of regular cannabis use. This is measuring how many people who experienced problems in their early 20s dealt with them. More depression / hard drug use / more likely to take weed daily / etc.
Other headlines they could have used.
Being a relationship doesn't affect your depression / hard drug use / etc
The contrast between the discussions around the social media study posted earlier[1] and this study is pretty interesting. I guess it's only causal if it confirms one's priors?
I live in Sydney and all the people I know who smoke weed have jobs. I’m not sure how much they indulge but the illegality does not really pose a problem and I’ve never seen anyone deterred because of that.
In certain areas you can smell it regularly. There was one street I used to walk down after work and the residents would be smoking weed everyday at the same time.
This study "followed 1792 Australian high school students aged 15 in 1992". I lived in Sydney 1992-4 and saw very little weed smoking. Legal status may not be stopping anybody now, but perhaps it was different then?
Certainly here in California, legality makes a significant difference. Previously, my weed-smoking friends would have to have a connection to a drug dealer, and it was not what you'd call a convenient commercial experience. It's a different thing now that there are a variety of cheerful, brightly lit shops that anybody can just walk into.
One obvious way that makes a difference to a study like this, which measures use of other illegal drugs, is that marijuana shops just sell marijuana, whereas I'm given to understand that drug dealers can connect their customers to a variety of stuff.
The people I know range from very casual users to more regular users. Varying range of jobs from professional to shift workers. I think you guys are really trying to poke holes in the study without having actually read it.
If you’re covering 1792 users, that could be a decent cross section of society. Could also not be. But I can’t read the study.
Because the study pushes the narrative that correlation is causation, and that's just not true. The data is interesting, but the spin is irresponsible. Many people with mental health issues feel a stigma to seeing therapists and reach for something to numb the pain.
Plus, just because something has percieved negative effects on life outcome doesn't mean we outlaw it. For example, alcohol, prescription meds, having children before completing your education, the lottery, cigarettes, etc.
Hm, good points. But maybe we should at least raise the minimum age ? ( I feel the same about minimum age of gun ownership ... don’t ban guns but raise the age ... how many school shootings are committed by 25 year olds? I digress)
Was glad to be the opposite of this study, been consuming cannabis since 13-14 pretty much daily, a few breaks here there maybe 6 months total not consuming in that time span. Happily married with a kid and full time job. BUT I will say it became a crutch and a money sink.
Heading into my 40s with the plan to stop daily consumption, currently only have CBD strains in the house, my friend likes to the call it methadone for pot heads. Wish me luck.
The one person from our group of friends is schizophrenic and it was heavy cocaine use that seemed to have opened that pandoras box. He's many many years sober and steady eddy on his medication doing really well.
Another friend is bipolar schizoaffective and his relationship with cannabis is toxic at best. He knows it's the last thing he should be indulging in, but unfortunately in his mind he can't find any other way to fall asleep. Heavy indica strains tend to bring on mania for him.
> He knows it's the last thing he should be indulging in, but unfortunately in his mind he can't find any other way to fall asleep.
I used to use indica to sleep, due to absurd levels of restless leg that only kick in as soon as I lie down. Then a physician friend recommended trazodone.
I really enjoyed being able to dream again. I hadn't quite noticed that I had basically entirely stopped dreaming when using pot. And mostly, I like being able to smoke purely recreationally and sporadically, not relying on it medicinally and regularly.
Blue Dream is a wonderful strain. I am (was) a sucker for Haze cultivars. There tends to be Haze in a lot of CBD strains.
I live in Canada and we have legalization rocking already, a friend of mine works at a licensed producer, their sole focus is terpenes, the India vs Sativa and THC % is more marketing vs truth at this point. Wonder if the terps would unlock more reality into your points.
>The one person from our group of friends is schizophrenic and it was heavy cocaine use that seemed to have opened that pandoras box.
Opened the box indeed. I wonder how many latent schizophrenics never experience symptoms thanks to never hitting a precipitating event, pharmaceutical or otherwise.
Good luck to you. I'm 15 years ahead of you, had some friends in similar situations.
A couple of my friends have since died (caused by substance abuse). I truly believe human beings are best off with fewer recreational chemicals in their bodies.
Yes, the last 15 years have been good. I was a pretty heavy drinker in my younger days, I quit completely about 20 years ago. I feel much healthier.
I've had several friends that didn't fare so well. (Including a couple that took their own lives. One died of natural causes after very heavy drinking.)
I totally understand recreational use (obviously), but think life is much better without.
> “This is particularly important for jurisdictions that have already legalised recreational cannabis, such as Canada and some US states.”
What a joke. How many studies have been done on the negative effects of alcohol with no comment on the "importance for countries who have already legalised" recreational alcohol use?
I quit smoking because I was getting gum infections all the time. It wasn't the only reason, just that last one that pushed me to quit. Inflamed gums don't feel so good.
I still have a recessed gum line around a tooth where I would hold the cigarette. I have to believe that hot smoke from a joint causes the same type of irritation to tissue.
I concur. It seems obvious to me that at the very least, pouring copious amounts of hot smoke into your mouth/lungs on a regular basis is not good for your long term health. It's humorous to me that so many of the 'pro-science' crowd become strong skeptics when it seems the facts might reflect poorly on thing they care about.
It gets pretty confusing when cannabis itself is thought to have anti-cancer properties and the actual amount and temperature of the smoke is much less than that of tobacco. Yeah breathing in any smoke is not good for you, but is it like smoking a pack of cigarettes? Or is it like enjoying a campfire and breathing in a small bit of smoke? One is profoundly bad for you, the other is of such little concern that nobody should be worrying about it unless they have serious lung conditions.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadGet back to me with some real science, please.
Please defined "no true control" because you may only make science on Math then.
You mention monkeys and rats, this is precisely why they use knockout mice for many studies and the same reason why demonstrating something in mice doesn’t always translate to demonstration in another organism.
Math is a formal system, it admits no experiments.
PS: That's not to say that this specific study is not bullshit.
Do Conditional Cash Transfers Improve Child Health? Evidence from PROGRESA's Control Randomized Experiment
Author(s): Paul Gertler
Source: The American Economic Review, Vol. 94, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the One Hundred Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association San Diego, CA,
January 3-5, 2004 (May, 2004), pp. 336-341
From Section IV (you're gonna have to Sci-Hub it):
"The randomization and the fact that the control and treatment samples are well balanced in the observed characteristics imply that a simple comparison of mean outcomes post-intervention will likely provide an unbiased estimate of program impacts. However, I also control for other observed socioeconomic characteristics in order to reduce idiosyncratic variation and to improve the power of the estimates."
Is this really more sus than a cell bio paper? Are the conclusions so weak that it's not real science? Were you just being sarcastic and it went over my head?
I’m not being sarcastic, I’m being strict about what constitutes a basis for a valid generalization.
> Is this really more sus than a cell bio paper? Are the conclusions so weak that it's not real science?
Its not necessarily that its more suspect or weaker, but that it is in a different epistemological category. Its a different kind of evidence. When you inject particles into a cloud chamber, you believe with very high confidence that those particles have fundamentally identical properties as the other particles of the same kind. We know that humans are not alike each other in the same way as particles. Therefore we are not permitted to treat them that way.
What does it ultimately accomplish?
So, in the category of science, that leaves Physics, and what else?
What would you call all of what we now call the biological, social, medical, sciences at the moment?
What would be your proposal for a new category for everything that uses the scientific method, but that may have variations in the individual elements of the treatment and control groups?
Maybe it would be more practical to change the name of Physics to something else, rather than re-categorizing all of the other fields.
We could refer to physics as 'Invariant Studies' or something like that, and keep calling everything else science. That way might be easier across the board.
I would propose as an alternative that we work to improve general scientific literacy so that the general public might be more familiar with the methods used in each field. For example, if more people knew how regression analysis worked they might be better able to understand it as the foundation for many of the conclusions in the social sciences, and so might be better able to understand the generalizability and potential limitations of what they are seeing when they are presented with a conclusion in one of these fields.
Its possible to do science in biology with things like knockout mice and physical limits.
Other things are more a matter of classification and interpretation and it should be clear that they are socially constructed to a greater degree than physics or chemistry.
> What would you call all of what we now call the biological, social, medical, sciences at the moment?
I don’t know, I was originally defending the comment on the basis of “real science” so I don’t see a problem calling medicine an applied science.
> What would be your proposal for a new category for everything that uses the scientific method, but that may have variations in the individual elements of the treatment and control groups?
See, what I mean is actually a point about the scientific method. Its not really possible to use the scientific method without ensuring that your experimental subjects are indistinguishable. The reason I’m gatekeeping is because its not the same method, it would be pseudoscience. Like doing experiments on football games.
> I would propose as an alternative that we work to improve general scientific literacy so that the general public might be more familiar with the methods used in each field. For example, if more people knew how regression analysis worked they might be better able to understand it as the foundation for many of the conclusions in the social sciences, and so might be better able to understand the generalizability and potential limitations of what they are seeing when they are presented with a conclusion in one of these fields.
I think it would be great if people understood these things better, I guess I see this distinction as a way of articulating those fundamental differences in the mind of the public.
I don't mean to imply that most people are stupid or anything. Far from it I've met many tradesman (and tradeswomen) who I consider vastly more intelligent than many people I've met with PhDs.
But, I suspect the willingness of most folks to care about the distinction you're making is negligible at best.
It's sort of like being a car salesman who truly loves cars. And the type of car you're selling has a brand new oil-pump bearing design that is 30% more efficient than the prior bearing design. It doesn't make much of a difference in the overall performance of the car, but you're fascinated by the engineering prowess of it. Unfortunately, 99.9% of the people who walk in the dealership simply don't care about the oil pump bearing. They care about the heated seats, and the bluetooth audio, and if they can get it in seafoam green with the black trim package.
In a similar fashion, although I find knockout mice to be absolutely fascinating (to steal your example), my friends and family simply glaze over when I start to ramble on about such things. They simply don't care. But when they need the gene therapy that resulted from studies performed with the knockout mice for their weird cancer, well, then they're interested (but not too much).
And, so, most people don't know a for loop, from a plasmid, from a cloud chamber, from a difference-in-differences regression equation in economics research. And as a result, they're not even remotely interested in the degree of stochastic factors that may be influencing the research design of the study poorly-summarized in the Medium article that pops up on their Facebook feed.
I would love for people to be more savvy in interpreting the products of the scientific method (or any variation thereof) that they may encounter. But most people are so far behind in being able to approach such detours into the methodology that such a semantic distinction would prove useless. Hell, I have more years in grad school under my belt than I care to admit, and even I will tell anyone who will listen that I barely understand most stuff outside of my field. A political science paper utilizing network models to analyze trade fluctuations with third-party nations following bilateral trade agreements. Maybe I could get the gist of it, but I'm probably not confident enough to definitively say if it's bullshit or not.
Rather, I argue that we focus on piquing the public's curiosity, and doing our damndest to act as scientific ambassadors to the next generation. Rather than changing what we classify as 'science' in the colloquial sense, give a nephew or niece a copy of Calculus Made Easy (and actually help them get through it), show them how to use a metal lathe, give them a brief demonstration of OLS regression by hand, get them a decent microscope to look at pond water with, build a TTL flip-flop with them on a breadboard, and read them The Logic of Collective Action as a bedtime story for the hell of it. The only way we lift the ability of the general public to understand the application of the scientific method in all of it's forms, is by teaching the general public to give a shit about it in the first place. For most people, it's just too late, but it's certainly not too late for us as a collective society.
Being unable to make that distinction, do you think you're in a good position to explore the scientific demarcation problem as it pertains to sociological studies?
- smoke alone instead of meeting up with friends
- be less productive/successful
- smoke as an aid for emotional pain
As always, remember that correlation is not causation.
For example, maybe people with depression or anxiety are using cannabis to self-medicate.
So, mix in the confounding factor of it not being legal during those years.
Consider if the data had fallen out the other way: if there was no correlation between these measures of harm and cannabis use, that would have been evidence of a lack of harm from cannabis use.
So even if you can't draw any strong conclusions from this study, it's still an interesting data point.
[1] http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=7
If you saw that the per-capita cheese consumption of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets was twice or ten times that of the baseline population, that could still be a coincidence, because hey, that's always a possibility, but it would be a much more suggestive correlation than just observing that any two monotonic time series correlate.
It is implying people who are regular users, are masking deeper psychological issues without going further into what the "harmful" effects are, of course if anyone is abusing anything it is because of a deeper problem.
Since then there have been hundreds of studies.
Generally cannabis, and recreational drugs generally, have not much in the way of negative measurable effects.
Remember it is only good drugs that have to be banned: There are no laws (generally) against Atrpine (datura), digitalis (foxglove) et. el. Just the good, fun, safe drugs have to have laws against them.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dar.13239
Maybe having paid job makes you use weed less (for possible consequences of being high at work)?
Maybe cannabis doesn't cause depression but rather it is just correlated for some other unknown reason?
That's again, very poorly written article by a confused author who does not understand causality and correlation.
https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/mari...
We wont know for sure until this bigger study is done, but if you care about your brain you probably should stop with cannabis until we know its safe:
https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/adolescent-brain/longi...
I dont think we should compare the two so blithley. We have very strong evidence alcohol and tobacco is super bad for you, especially if you use it constantly. We have what is basically conjecture, rat studies, and correlation that doesnt paticularly control for confounding factors for marijuana [despite a concerted political effort to make it scary]. That doesn't make it "safe" but its just as wrong if not more so to say its comparable to things which we are very sure are unsafe.
Around drugs there is no dispassionate reasoning these days.
We know there is an effect. That's why people use them. Seems to miss the point to just say "this is harm" and ignore whatever factors would influence the decision to use.
Why is that prescription drugs come with a long list of "side effects" but most of society doesn't see the "harm" in those?
I imagine a lot of it is due to many prescription drugs not being habit forming or generally pleasurable, thus people are more likely to use it in cases where the benefit outweighs the harm in a much more objective fashion.
Your answer just further illustrates my point.
Have you ever been cycled through different antidepressants? Anti anxiety meds? ADHD meds? Meds for sleep, meds for wakefulness?
These drugs are all very potent and your body cannot distinguish between intended and so-called "side" effects.
Sometimes it's not the drug use that causes the problems, it's the problems that cause the drug use.
Not bashing folks who smoke weed here. I partake on occasion. But this study is bullshit.
“Overall, regular use of cannabis – more than weekly and especially daily use – was found to have harmful consequences, regardless of the age people began using it.”
Regular use of anything, particularly if it's mind altering, is likely to cause harmful long term effects. Particularly if it starts at young ages. That said, the study doesn't seem to even attempt to ask why these people were regularly smoking weed in their teens.
This was an affluent suburb of a Canadian city.
“Don’t drink don’t smoke what do you do?”
Not cool if you don’t smoke pot.
What crap. I wish I had known that when I was younger.
There are a lot of confounding variables around this paper.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_Australia
Same, but in SoCal; it was easier to get high grade weed than it was to get beer, so most house parties were always well stocked with weed they seldom had alcohol unless they knew or were paying off certain places that sold them to minors in large quantities which carried lots of costs and risks, so a house party of 200+ guests would always be a challenge
Culturally weed was way more tolerated than alcohol as a result growing up, but still had a negative stigma as a 'losers drug of choice' despite its wide legal use, which is what made me gravitate toward hard alcohol as it had some exclusivity but also just better experience in a social setting than weed.
Flash forward a decade and I get involved in the hemp Industry and travel all over Europe and then return to the US (Colorado) where Hemp was starting to make inroads, and I realized a lot of the people in the Industry were former MJ (including my cofounder) and weren't 'lazy stoners with no ambition' as they were farmers as well as entrepreneurs, but they simply used a drug that I associated with decompression and relaxation in what I regarded a hyper competitive social setting like a conference or Industry party.
My point is that I think it varies culturally now that its been decriminalized and legalized in many parts of the World, and to be honest asking people if they want to smoke a bowl is just as common in some cities if they want a cup of coffee, and since I don't like caffeine and have a low THC tolerance I usually have to carry high CBD/CBN/CBG strains so as to no completely fall asleep due to the high THC strains most regular users smoke.
It's odd because in my teens and early 20s I felt that DARE indoctrination creep in and felt were were doing 'something bad' and we were going to get caught despite living and working in a legal state (CA or CO), but upon further analysis the truth is what I was putting into my body during a 2-3 Martini 'power lunch meeting' followed by a double espresso as a pick me up somewhere in between was way worse for me personally than if we had just took a drag from a joint outside before diving in and talking business and finalizing deals.
It's odd, and the stoner reputation is real in many cases, but I think a lot of it as in most sweeping generalizations, is conflated with a lot of misguided stereotypes.
I have been outpaced by 50+ year old couple with kids who drank and smoked weed on a regular basis as a a fit 20 something with no real responsibilities other than myself. Nothing I could do short of not sleeping made me as productive as that couple, even on an individual basis and I learned a lot about my own preconceived biases and confirmation biases. Most of it forced upon me by convention but also personal experiences that I'm glad to say I challenged and have become a better a person as a result.
A couple of alcoholics who have had to dry out the alcohol, and nicotine has gotten a lot of victims around here, but generally recreational drugs (particularly MDMA, Cannabis, and LSD) are a huge boon.
The biggest danger is the police, but they are reforming and relaxing.
People use drugs because they are good. They are not idiots
Drugs are fun. That is why people use them.
People have problems. When they have problems abnd use drugs they say they have drug problems. Maybe they do. But it is far more common for people to have no problems, just loads of fun.
Tripping on LSD with a thousand other people is magical experience.
It's not unheard of for someone to have the opinion that the consequences of drug's legal status is more harmful than the drug itself.
I doubt being sentenced to 10 years in prison over selling weed is going to be less harmful than any negative effects observed in this study.
There are other effects, effects on the brain and on sleep quality, for instance, that are not mentioned in this study. Effects on the lungs and cardiovascular system.
None of that has anything to do with 10 years in jail to me. Life sentences for possession are stupid and Boomer.
I mentioned it elsewhere, but where is the panic over prescription drugs and their harmful side effects?
This is a non story. Marijuana is popular because it's potent. Compare it to other legal drugs, the obvious being alcohol, and again tell me about the relative harm.
He is trained as a medical doctor, but has learnt a lot about the psychology of addiction from his own experiences and those of patients. He worked in a drug treatment center in Vancouver and one of the things he often says is that of all the hard drug users he has seen, those who are female were all sexually abused as children.
His viewpoint is that addiction itself is not a problem - contrary to what the media would like you to believe - it's merely the minds way of dealing with whatever other traumas have been going on in your life. (When he talks about addiction he is not just talking about drugs, but all forms, including why you check HN every 20 minutes :D)
Applying that to this article implies this is just correlation, those who start smoking weed at a young age do it to cope with other traumas in their life, but they never deal with the trauma so move on to other coping mechanisms.
Mice who "underwent cognitive training [and] received rewards while exploring a training arena" reduced "one measure of drug-seeking behavior" in comparison with those who "remained in their home cages." The researchers conclude, right in the abstract, that "deprivation may confer vulnerability to drug-seeking behavior and that brief interventions may promote long-term resilience."
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00283...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
I have yet to meet an alcoholic or drug addict that has an otherwise perfectly normal life. I don't mean "highly functioning alcoholic", I'm talking about your stereotype addict. So far all of them have had one thing in common: their life was not headed in a direction they desired, and they couldn't see (an easy enough) way to get moving in that direction. After that, any substance or excuse or anxiety was "just" a coping mechanism.
Not sure if this makes sense, just needed to say this I guess.
> Regular use of anything, particularly if it's mind altering, is likely to cause harmful long term effects
Your argument that the study is bullshit is frankly no better.
What makes a teenager year old seek out pot/ alcohol/ whatever.
If a study about long term drug use doesn't address why people started smoking/ doing drugs, then a critical piece of the puzzle is missing.
But the problem with observational studies is real, especially here. Let's complain about that and also investigate childhood trauma and regular cannabis use.
Everyone watches TV but only a few of them become addicted to TV. Everyone eats but only a few become addicted to eating, etc. What makes the difference between normal and compulsive use is an inherent susceptibility.
Mate says that usually that increased susceptibility comes from developmental issues / mental health issues / trauma, etc.
For instance, pretty much all the OTC pain relievers are bad for your kidneys and/or liver.
The question is if the positives out weight the negatives.
Getting a CAT scan imparts a non-zero lifetime increased risk of cancer, but if it finds something that would have killed you in the next 6 months...
Likewise, I'm sure cannabis has some long term negative effects, but it provides relief from pain, anxiety, nausea...
Same for alcohol.
Is there a more efficient stress reliever than alcohol? (No, exercise isn't always sustainable)
For me, the only non-medical stress reliever is reading light novels or even trash novels. For some weird reason, the shallow narrative style plus corny plots take my mind away from reality.
Drug use itself may harm, esp harder drugs, but drug use almost certainly correlates with the kind of decision making that would lead to things like hard drinking, relationship problems, and work problems in moderately severe cases.
So these are the sorts of harms i think i can ignore.
Therefore it’s tainted by the implication that cannabis is an illegal drug and the people in this study spent some portion of their life associated with regularly performing a illegal act... This is basically worthless from the foundation up since they can’t possibly account for all the ways this might have influenced a persons upbringing, from the socially acceptable nature of taking risks with the law, to associating with drug dealers who may (or may not) try to push harder more addictive drugs on their customers.
It’s going to be a while until we get similar studies from the parts of America where it was made legal for recreational use, but until then, we have to remember that everything has been tainted with the implications of the subject participants in any study being involved in socially “unacceptable” illegal behaviour which is connected to a huge tangled web of second order effects.
So if pot weren't illegal in Australia during the period being examined, perhaps their life outcomes would have been better?
Correlation.
Population bias.
Correlation.
Slow day in the academic universe?
"By the mid‐30s, both young‐adult and adolescent‐onset regular users were more likely than minimal/non‐users (63.5%) to have used other illicit drugs (odds ratio [OR] > 20.4), be a high‐risk alcohol drinker (OR > 3.7), smoked daily (OR > 7.2) and less likely to be in relationships (OR < 0.4)."
So this study basically shows that cannabis users are more likely to experiment with other drugs -- meanwhile, the "less likely to be in relationships" factor might not even be statistically significant (the OR is < 0.4). I'm not sure how one defines "anti-social behaviours" either, other than conforming into some societal box.
I didn't even need a study to know that. Why people are so in denial about cannabis?
They casually mixed truth with lies to create the most frightening narrative possible. But once the lies became apparent, everything they ever claimed came into doubt.
There's a fundamental difference between beliefs stemming from faith (or gut feel, anecdotes etc) and results from rigorous and falsifiable experiments, even if they happen to agree.
So, who's right now? By what process should we try to get to the bottom of this?
As a thought experiment, consider if coffee (caffeine is very much an addictive mind altering substance that can be harmful in large doses) were illegal and bought and used the same way people use cannabis. So you go to your coffee dealer, and he offers you some weed. Do you try it? Maybe. Ok, now he offers you some heroin. This is where studies should step in, but my not very meaningful belief / gut feeling is that most people will say holy crap, no thanks man, I just wanted my boring old beans and weed. This has been my experience (and that of people I know) for decades, and again I'd like to stress that that doesn't necessarily imply a great many general statements I might wish to conclude from it, no matter how "obvious" it seems to me.
edit: This isn't some though experiment, it's real life with real life consequences. Science might be helpful, fun and all, but I don't need a rigorous science to make my life choices and stay away from things that can potentially harm or kill me. Even if I'm basing my judgement on anecdotes. Life simply doesn't work that way and it doesn't matter if you think it's not 100% reliable.
Living where weed is legal, I know dozens of people who regularly smoke weed and do no other hard drugs.
Some of them are health nuts who don't even use caffeine or alcohol. (Caffeine and alcohol are proven to cause more bodily harm than cannabis at any dosage)
With few exceptions, the entire population of weed smokers that I know have successful careers, are social, and have good family lives.
There's some anecdotes for you.
Australia is not a country where cannabis is legal, so its system, and therefore impacts, are much less useful for study than a nation which takes a more modern approach to cannabis.
In brief, cannabis cannot solve your problems and trying to mask your problems with cannabis is often the start of a downward spiral.
The exact opposite of your theory is pretty clearly demonstrated in the medical literature with respect to risk escalation. Cannabis use is correlated with reduction in mortality rates, and lower frequency use of hard drugs in chronic substance abusers. It facilitates a risk deescalation for hard drug users.
Literature does indicate that those abusing a substance are more likely to abuse other substances, however there is consensus that there is no gateway effect. Essentially, there's no way to determine causality in these situations, as poly-drug addiction is a complex illness. Lastly, these results were for people who's use disorder escalated to the point where they were checked into an inpatient care facility. That's not the type of quasi-medical use you describe.
See, for instance:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1080/095952399967...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15265...
It is a very interesting correlation, but guess I cannot infer causation in this case ;)
I'd be more interested in excluding daily users and seeing the impact of recreational use, say once or twice a week.
> “Overall, regular use of cannabis [...] was found to have harmful consequences, regardless of the age people began using it.”
I am skeptical that this study is actually representative of the effects of cannabis, and does not instead depend on other, highly correlated effects, which are then presented as the reason. From my general (non-user) perspective, I would assume that there is probably a bias towards groups of people who have a higher chance to use substances in general, or live in a comparatively poor environment.
For example: Children of smokers often become smokers themselves (as numerous credible studies show). If they now start with cannabis, they would be included as the victims of cannabis in the discussed study. However, the causality is probably reversed here.
In 20 years of various relationships, the only girlfriend who didn’t request that I quit smoking weed was extremely naughty and experimented with all kinds of substances, as she completed her residency at a children’s hospital. She married someone with more money, God help him.
So, it doesn’t surprise me that people not in a relationship tend to smoke more weed.
But then I've just finished reading the thread about scientific misconduct.... Not sure what to trust anymore
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dar.13239
My priors have shifted in the opposite direction over time. When I hear studies like this I'm tempted to assume mediocrity in both the collection and analysis of the data that puts the results into questionable utility for me. And not just mediocrity but potential bad faith tricks like p-hacking and its cousins.
It would take a substantial effort from high quality scientists (meaning individual reputation) including replication studies to get me interested.
Well this is really a stab to the heart
Other headlines they could have used.
Being a relationship doesn't affect your depression / hard drug use / etc
Austrialians start using weed much later in life
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25928310
Because I don't have poor mental health, I don't use social media or cannabis.
Poor mental health predisposes you for social media use. Would someone with good mental health really get deeply involved with those platforms? :)
I live in Sydney and all the people I know who smoke weed have jobs. I’m not sure how much they indulge but the illegality does not really pose a problem and I’ve never seen anyone deterred because of that.
In certain areas you can smell it regularly. There was one street I used to walk down after work and the residents would be smoking weed everyday at the same time.
Legal status is not stopping anyone.
Certainly here in California, legality makes a significant difference. Previously, my weed-smoking friends would have to have a connection to a drug dealer, and it was not what you'd call a convenient commercial experience. It's a different thing now that there are a variety of cheerful, brightly lit shops that anybody can just walk into.
One obvious way that makes a difference to a study like this, which measures use of other illegal drugs, is that marijuana shops just sell marijuana, whereas I'm given to understand that drug dealers can connect their customers to a variety of stuff.
The fact that it is illegal DOES stop people from deciding to try to acquire it or even try it. Like me, for example, when I was growing up.
So that's instantly not including a segment of the population, and without knowing how big of a segment that is, the results are questionable.
If you’re covering 1792 users, that could be a decent cross section of society. Could also not be. But I can’t read the study.
Plus, just because something has percieved negative effects on life outcome doesn't mean we outlaw it. For example, alcohol, prescription meds, having children before completing your education, the lottery, cigarettes, etc.
Heading into my 40s with the plan to stop daily consumption, currently only have CBD strains in the house, my friend likes to the call it methadone for pot heads. Wish me luck.
The one person from our group of friends is schizophrenic and it was heavy cocaine use that seemed to have opened that pandoras box. He's many many years sober and steady eddy on his medication doing really well.
Another friend is bipolar schizoaffective and his relationship with cannabis is toxic at best. He knows it's the last thing he should be indulging in, but unfortunately in his mind he can't find any other way to fall asleep. Heavy indica strains tend to bring on mania for him.
I used to use indica to sleep, due to absurd levels of restless leg that only kick in as soon as I lie down. Then a physician friend recommended trazodone.
I really enjoyed being able to dream again. I hadn't quite noticed that I had basically entirely stopped dreaming when using pot. And mostly, I like being able to smoke purely recreationally and sporadically, not relying on it medicinally and regularly.
Many strains of Cannabis inhibit REM sleep.
Some do not, for some physiologies.
Blue Dream does not block my REM.
Interestingly, a small amount (2 shots or less) of alcohol will accelerate REM.
I live in Canada and we have legalization rocking already, a friend of mine works at a licensed producer, their sole focus is terpenes, the India vs Sativa and THC % is more marketing vs truth at this point. Wonder if the terps would unlock more reality into your points.
Opened the box indeed. I wonder how many latent schizophrenics never experience symptoms thanks to never hitting a precipitating event, pharmaceutical or otherwise.
A couple of my friends have since died (caused by substance abuse). I truly believe human beings are best off with fewer recreational chemicals in their bodies.
That's awesome to hear, have those 15 years been an overall improvement for you?
Less is more, but the trauma and pain some people endure is out of this world.
I've had several friends that didn't fare so well. (Including a couple that took their own lives. One died of natural causes after very heavy drinking.)
I totally understand recreational use (obviously), but think life is much better without.
What a joke. How many studies have been done on the negative effects of alcohol with no comment on the "importance for countries who have already legalised" recreational alcohol use?
I still have a recessed gum line around a tooth where I would hold the cigarette. I have to believe that hot smoke from a joint causes the same type of irritation to tissue.