science

There has been many, many, many decades of attempts, since the 1920s, at deeply flawed studies to prove some weak link between marijuana use and some bad outcome. Of course, it's quickly found out that it was using rats, or some other small animal using fucked-up dosage:mass ratios, or the sample size was 20, or they were using the (literally) rotted garbage that was the government-grown marijuana stash, or it was funded by some DARE group, or funded by the nicotine industry, or the alcohol industry, or they didn't prove causation, or they forgot to factor mental health, or social class, or racial factors, or a thousand other obvious problems.

I'm not going to go around and say cannibus doesn't have its problems. But, given the track record of obviously flawed studies that land on this forum, and even more so with cannibus research, I'll default to a position of extreme skeptism until proven otherwise.

As someone that came out of a CSA victim position, most everyone I knew that was using in High School - the girls most of all - were dealing with similar issues.

Whether it was low-key sexual assault - being groped, or pressured to "put out" or even family friends or relatives, (in my own case it was "Uncle Touchy" in 1978, when I was 13.. He was 34, hairy, chicken-chested and gross and thought he was God's Gift to women..) in the late 70's / early 80's there was a lot of sexual abuse that was part of the landscape for girls "growing up".

Much of it came out of the social norms of the time - the fallout of the "swinging" 70's where it was all about sex. 24/7 sex, preferrably with 14 year olds, as that was the age in which the consensus was that there was something wrong with you if your cherry hadn't been popped.. Just a dreadful era, honestly.

The pot use was to numb the pain and forget what they'd gone through. I chose not to forget.. and got stoned anyhow.

Ah yeah thank you! Im used to stuff like SSRN where you can’t miss the link

Thanks a lot, this is what I’ve been wondering. I know that there’s a link and that cannabis can trigger e.g. psychoses especially if there’s a genetic predisposition, but this is extremely tricky data to work with and to draw inferences from.

They do mention the bidirectional nature and I think that’s where it becomes really hard to model. If you would properly try to isolate the cannabis effect you’d need to identify a cohort of individuals similar to those that got diagnosed and that have (self-reportedly) not consumed cannabis as a control group and then compare these two groups to their overarching population and then determine if the mean difference (if there’s any) is statistically significant.

Here you could argue that this is what they’ve already been doing and I may have a flaw in my thinking, but I think there’s just some control variable missing.

Of course if we knew how to describe such population this would be an easy exercise, but since all we know is that the population is teenagers living in the same area, along with some other demographic metadata this is a limitation that I‘m not sure can be overcome so I don’t blame the authors of the study.

I think that the connection is there in some way or another is an interesting finding and probably a good reason to try and stop teenagers from smoking weed. Personally it also helps me against depression but also I‘m not 14 anymore.

wait hold up. i know one of those authors. they're a hack. i certainly hope they were not the one processing or analyzing the numbers.

It’s not. They disclose the conflict of interest and source of funding part but that doesn’t tell me who the funding sources are and what’s their agenda? I only have this question because I read the article information.

Also this doesn’t tell me anything about journal ranking, I don’t even know if this is a proper journal, let alone if it’s peer reviewed. If you drop a link to the Lancet it’s cool I know it, I’m still not going to abandon my critical thinking but I will give the benefit of the doubt.

It’s not so much that I necessarily think their findings are implausible or anything, it’s just that I want to discuss science in a scientific way in a science community, and those are normal things to ask.