New Study Shows Pot Shrinks Brain->Makes You Stupid

Back in my college days, when I regularly partook in consuming cannabis we didn't call it getting stoned, or getting high, we would call it getting stupid.  New findings, reported Monday in the journal PNAS reveal that the term we used was closer to the truth than we thought.

Experimental mice have been telling us this for years, but pot-smoking humans didn't want to believe it could happen to them: Compared with a person who never smoked marijuana, someone who uses marijuana regularly has, on average, less gray matter in his orbital frontal cortex, a region that is a key node in the brain's reward, motivation, decision-making and addictive behaviors network.

More ambiguously, in regular pot smokers, that region is better connected than it is in non-users: the flow of signal traffic is speedier to other parts of that motivation and decision-making network, including across the superhighway of "white matter" that connects the brain's hemispheres.

Apparently the "better connections" is a compensation for the smaller frontal lobe.

The researchers who conducted the study speculate that the orbital frontal cortex's greater level of "connectedness"--which is especially pronounced in people who started smoking pot early in life--may be the brain's way of compensating for the region's under-performing gray matter. Whether these "complex neuroadaptive processes" reverse themselves when marijuana use stops is an important unanswered question, they added.

The question is now what came first the chicken or the egg? Because the study examined people who were already regular pot smokers, there is no way to discern whether or not the pot caused the smaller frontal lobe or the smaller frontal lobe caused the pot smoking.

This study, conducted by researchers from the University of Texas' Center for Brain Health and the Albuquerque-based Mind Research Network, did not follow subjects over time, so it is at a disadvantage in showing cause and effect. Instead, it compared 48 "chronic" marijuana users (at least four times a week over the past six months) with 62 non-using control subjects who were matched for age and gender with the using group. Subjects were an average age of 28 to 30 years old.

Researchers noted that the IQ of the marijuana-using group was significantly lower than that of the non-using group--not a finding of the study, but an incidental factor that might be indirectly linked to marijuana use.

This does not change anyone who is using pot for real medical reasons, but perhaps those states who are making the drug legal should make sure to alert voters the possible side effects of regular usage.