Sorry, blowhards at Fox News — newly legal weed in Colorado doesn’t make you dumb. But living in crushing poverty with shitty schools and awful, boring jobs definitely does.
Scientific American reported on a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that debunked a previous PNAS report saying that teenage potheads saw their IQ drop by middle age.
[jump]
The original study found the pot use-IQ link by looking at a group of people from New Zealand who were tracked over their lives. But the study’s author acknowledged that the results might be caused by other factors.
Then, “Ole Røgeberg, a labor economist at the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Oslo and the author of the latest paper, ran simulations which showed that confounding factors associated with socioeconomic status could explain the earlier result. For example, poorer people have reduced access to schooling, irrespective of cannabis use.”
“Røgeberg’s paper shows that within a set of reasonable assumptions, this is indeed possible.”
We’re not saying weed will make you a genius. If you want to unplug from reality and float, weed’s always there to assist.
But if conservatives are truly interested in America’s precious IQ, they would boycott Fox, invest in schools and strengthen our social safety net — as opposed to promoting a disastrous drug war on the poor that expels kids from school over a little weed and dooms them to a lifetime of poverty and lost economic opportunities.
