Green ghost, Mother Mary, Smokey the Bear, fimble famble. These are all terms that have never to my knowledge been used to describe marijuana, the most commonly used illegal substance in the world. Recently, Bloomberg, the New York Times, and many other high-scale news publications have been gathering like flies on rotting garbage around a study just revealed at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual conference showing that, as the New York Times put it, “Marijuana Smokers Who Start Early Are at Greatest Risk”. Risk of what, you might ask?

Well, here is where the story gets interesting. The study, lead by Staci Gruber with the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, claims that the abuse of marijuana by teenagers younger than sixteen leads to an increased risk of destructive rewiring in the brain later on, based on comparisons between smokers that started before the age of sixteen and smokers that started after sixteen. This makes sense to the lay reader, since marijuana slows you down and at that age the brain is developing a lot, right? No, it doesn’t, and I will now go through these misleading, vomit-inducing ‘news’ articles so that you don’t have to and show exactly why the people who did this study should be bashed upside the head with a crying midget until they bleed*.

*The scientists, not the midget. The midget will be wearing a football helmet.

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STUPID SHIT #1 (from Business Week) : “The findings highlight the danger posed by marijuana and the need to develop effective strategies to reduce marijuana use, especially among young people, said the researchers”.

RESPONSE : The timing of this right after the rejection of Proposition 19 in California sets off the first set of alarm bells. Then, when the supposed scientists go on to make broad statements about public policy that go beyond the findings in their study, I begin to really wonder. After all, they said that we need to develop strategies to reduce marijuana entirely, not just among young people. Could this be political? Gods, no! They are scientists! From Harvard! This automatically makes them nonpartisan, legitimate upholders of truth and dignity. Just don’t ask where their funding comes from.

STUPID SHIT #2 (from Bloomberg and the New York Times) : “The research, presented today at the Society for Neuroscience’s meeting in San Diego, also found that the group that started earlier smoked more pot more often than those who started later. People who began smoking before age 16 had 25.1 smokes a week, compared with 12.1 in those who began later, the study showed. The early-onset group smoked almost three times as many grams a week, Gruber said”. (Bloomberg)

“There were other significant differences between the two groups of smokers. Those who had been using marijuana regularly in their early teens smoked more than twice as often as those who started smoking later. The early users also smoked 14.7 grams per week, almost three times as much as the later smokers, who used 5.9 grams a week on average, Dr. Gruber said.

She nevertheless attributed poor performance on the task to early use of marijuana, not to the greater quantity smoked”. (New York Times)

RESPONSE : What the fuck am I even reading? Are they actually admitting that the two groups being compared for cognitive performance in the main study smoked drastically different amounts? And they found differing levels of cognitive functioning? Someone tell the President! Clearly this must be due to use at an early age rather than one group smoking SHITLOADS MORE. At least the New York Times admitted it overtly (albeit in the second to last paragraph), while Bloomberg words the information vaguely and then omits it when later discussing the specific demographics of the two subject groups. Many other new sources have done the same thing, positioning the statistic within such cautionary quotes as “we found that those who started smoking before 16 years old tended to smoke twice as often and three times the amount of marijuana in grams than chronic smokers who started smoking later in life” (ABC News).

And hey, do you know what’s funny? Check out these studies: Fried et al (2002), who found current heavy users decreased in IQ by an average of 4.1 points from previous tests, but light and moderate users had no effect and heavy users quickly recovered said IQ points after quitting. Pope et al (2001), who found mild cognitive defects after heavy smoking, but only within seven days of consumption. Bolla et al (2002), who disagreed, but only in that their once again “very heavy smokers” had cognitive deficits that lasted up to 28 days before the subjects returned to normal. What this seems to be saying is that heavy smokers suffer from short-term cognitive impairment while moderate smokers don’t, and that the damage is quickly reversible. Now what demographics were chosen for the early-use group in Gruber’s study? Chronic heavy smokers. Who were used for the later-use group? Chronic moderate smokers.

STUPID SHIT #3 (from Bloomberg) : “The research didn’t examine those people who had started smoking early and stopped, although those people begin to look more like non-smokers in other studies, Gruber said”.

RESPONSE : It’s like they just read my previous response! Do I even need to say anything about this? Gruber directly admits that her implied claim that use of marijuana permanently rewires the teenage brain has already been shown to be false. Now read the next one.

STUPID SHIT #4 (from The Boston Globe) : “The study, which will be submitted to a scientific journal in the next few weeks, has not been peer-reviewed, a process designed to ensure published research meets scientific standards.”

REPONSE : Every one of these articles, including The Boston Globe’s, describes the results of this study as God’s honest, true-to-life fact. The Boston Globe, however, is the only one to admit that it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. Meaning that it could be dismissed immediately by the academic community due to, oh, I don’t know, the massive confounding variables that prevent any kind of causal relationship to be inferred. Science tip: one unpublished paper is not worthy of nationwide media attention.

STUPID SHIT #5 (from The New York Times) : “The drive to legalize marijuana in many states should include age restrictions, she added”.

RESPONSE : IT DOES.

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