Weed, Marijuana Smoking Will Not Make You Stupid After All

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Marijuana remains to be among the most controversial thing in the medical world. While the weeds have a harmless reputation for its positive effects on epileptic patients, others claim that it could affect one's IQ and mental state negatively.

According to a 2014 study, marijuana is "linked to a decreased cognitive function and could potentially lead to a slew of mental disorders," Men's Fitness reported. The study noted that the short-term effects of marijuana are not serious. However, habitual use of this plant can lead to schizophrenia and increased risk of psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations.

The drug was associated with reduced learning, memory and attention. Another study from Duke University in 2012 also revealed that persistent and heavy usage of marijuana through adolescence and young adulthood was associated with declines in IQ.

Two new reports contested the idea that marijuana can make one stupid. The studies tackled the relationship between marijuana use and intelligence from two different angles.

One study examined the life trajectories of over 2,000 British teenagers between ages 8 and 16, while the other study looked at the differences between American identical twin pairs in which one twin uses marijuana and the other does not, The Washington Post reported.

Although the two studies have different approaches, they reached the same conclusion: there is no evidence that marijuana usage leads to a decline in intelligence. The researchers concluded that "cannabis use by the age of 15 did not predict either lower teenage IQ scores or poorer educational performance. These findings, therefore, suggest that cannabis use at the modest levels used by this sample of teenagers is not by itself causally related to cognitive impairment."

The previous studies reported that continuous cannabis dependence is linked to declining IQ in a person's lifetime. However, the new study stressed that teenage cannabis use does not appear to worsen IQ results in adolescents.

The other study about twins concluded the same thing. It "fails to support the implication by Meier et. al. [the authors of the Duke study] that marijuana exposure in adolescence causes neurocognitive decline."

On the contrary, it's not marijuana making kids less intelligent but the other way around. Those kids who perform poorly in school are more likely to try marijuana at some point in their lives.

Although marijuana use does not make one stupid per these two studies, it doesn't mean that you can smoke all the weeds you want. Too much use of marijuana increases one's risk of psychosis or suicide. For those who started at an early age, they are at high risk for cannabis-use disorder, a form of drug dependency.