Casual marijuana use linked to brain changes

[FarrenH]

105. Yeah

A friend of mine who is what I can only characterize as authoritarian-left posted this study on her facebook page with the comment that, as a social worker, she's seen weed "destroy countless lives". My first thought was "Do you have any idea what you're talking about at all?". Weed? "Destroying lives"?

She went on to make claims about addiction that flatly contradicted all extant research and my considerable personal experience (I have pot-smoking friends who head up cybernetics research at major universities, ffs). The most staggering thing to me was that in the course of further discussion it emerged she had not actually *read* the study nor was she aware of how the authors conclusions were not sustained by their results. This kind of pseudo-expert, in reality-completely-fucking-clueless-bloviation from some social workers and doctors who are filtering their observations through a neo-puritan, father-knows-best lens, and despite their credentials are lack the faculty for scientific thinking (people forget general medicine and social work are applied science, not research science), drives me nuts. Especially because, while their credentials give their opinions the imperature of scientific authority, their testimonies are about as reliable as those of religious fundamentalists who claim they've seen countless cases of demonic possession.

Its Dunning-Kruger writ large. If you lack the cognitive faculties to know that your mechanism for parsing what's in front of you is hopelessly flawed, you're walking around mis-translating it for everyone else, with an unwarranted confidence. I keep thinking "people like you do more harm than good".

A dynamic I witnessed with my own eyes as a young man works like this: (1) Anti-drug crusaders come to the school and tell young people, many of whom are not particularly scientifically curious, that weed=crack cocaine. No distinctions are made. (2) Young people inevitably try weed because its ubiquitous and they're momentarily convinced by friends that they won't get "hooked" after one joint. (3) having dipped their toe in the water and realised reefer madness did not consume them, they start thinking "I was lied to". (4) Being on the left side of the Bell-curve and not of an autodidactic predisposition, they reason from that that they've been lied to about other things, like crack and (5) they get hooked on crack. And that is the ONLY way pot is a gateway drug. Its the fault of the very idiots who are trying to fight addiction with sweeping generalizations and often considerable ignorance on their own parts.

This is also why countries like Portugal, Switzerland and the Netherlands, with their vastly more honest, scientific and pragmatic approach, have all seen a drop in hard drug use, while countries like the USA and my own country, South Africa, which follows the USA like a sheep on drug policy, see almost no effect from their anti-drug campaigning. Bullshitting the kids from a position of considerable ignorance does not reduce hard drug use, it sustains it.