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College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

washingtonpost.com

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Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#21
post #9

Would love to see the same experiment repeated somehow, but for alcohol / partying. Then compare the two.

If it were possible to go back and dig up historical data, there was a time period when the drinking age in the US shifted from 18 to 21, thus reducing access to alcohol for high school students. Anecdotally, my mom noticed that her students were coming back from lunch sober. It might be a chance for a similar study.

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#22

Weed is not a panacea. Some people foolishly think otherwise. It should still be legalized, but we have to be realistic about its negatives

Nobody believes weed will make you better at studying. Nobody.

You haven't spent much time in /r/trees. If there's a nutty belief about weed, more than a few somebodies there buy into it.

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#23

Weed is not a panacea. Some people foolishly think otherwise. It should still be legalized, but we have to be realistic about its negatives

Nobody believes weed will make you better at studying. Nobody.

There can be no opinion so wrong that no one will hold on to it.

https://www.quora.com/Does-smoking-weed-help-studying

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#25

Weed is not a panacea. Some people foolishly think otherwise. It should still be legalized, but we have to be realistic about its negatives

Humans: still acting like humans, film at 11.

It also shouldn't need saying that this is hardly unique to pot. Also, it won't change. How many millennia have been spent since someone figured out fruit ferments into something that makes you feel good? And yet people continue to slide into alcoholism every day, in every culture. Even the ones where it is illegal.

That said, sure, I can see a temporary effect where legal pot is "new" (really, very old, but that's a different discussion), and so trendy, and the media feedback-loop kicks in so certain kinds of parents have something vaguely novel to upset themselves with. We'll be past that in a generation.

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody believes weed will make you better at studying. Nobody.

Not directly, but many people take weed to relax or relieve anxiety and believe that those things are helpful for their studies.

> many people take weed to relax or relieve anxiety and believe that those things are helpful for their studies

They believe it's helpful to their life in general, which this study isn't measuring. Nobody in their right mind smokes weed to improve their GPA.

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#28

I bet banning refined sugar products would have a more significant effect.

We get it you vape.

Seriously though, I don't get what we're supposed to take away from your statement. Your guess that there might be something worse than weed? Just because weed causes less problems than something else doesn't mean it causes no problems.

Re: College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

#29

It might be interesting for them to keep track of how long it takes the black market to reappear, and see whether the negatives that come along with allowing criminals to monopolize the business of dealing drugs to people in the area reappear also.

Come to think of it, given that they state in the article: drug tourism was posing difficulties for the city I wonder if they take into account the fact that these "problems" could've been affecting students and their grades as well. What happens if only the "drug tourism" disappeared?

This was controlled for by the native students, who also experienced any improvement in the city's environment, but did not experience the ban.
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