I used to wish to be a professional drummer. When I was 14 I attended a drum camp for a week to meet and learn from some of the world’s best drummers, along with other children and adults from around the UK with similar ambitions.
I became friends with one kid who was exceptionally talented as a musician, but also had a chronic marijuana habit. He was a better drummer than me at the time, but the drum camp was held every year. I attended the following year, and to my surprise, so did he.
As I am a huge nerd, I spent the entire year obsessively practicing. My friend spent the whole year smoking marijuana and being complacent. We were excited to see each other and catch up, but it wasn’t long before we started showing off our skills on the drum sets. His heart sank when he realised how dramatically my skills had surpassed his. I think he had a bit of an identity crisis, and likely as a consequence of the frequent substance abuse he developed a deep and blatant paranoia. He tried to commit suicide in his room the following day, and had to be removed from the camp.
I didn’t speak to him much after that — kids weren’t quite as connected as they are today back in 2005 — but to my surprise he did manage to contact me a couple of years ago. I asked him how he was, and he said he was doing better now after rehabilitation, but that life got much worse for him since we last met, explaining that he had been addicted to heroin.
I recognise that this is an extreme case, but I grew up with a lot of kids like this, and marijuana is scary as shit to me, despite some nerds today being adamant that it’s excellent and certainly better than alcohol.
This is an interesting story, but you have to wonder what led to this kid starting to smoke weed in the first place. It sounds to me like he may have had bigger underlying mental health issues that caused him to start smoking, rather than the weed being the cause of his subsequent suïcideer attempt and heroin addiction.
I started my drug usage in my mid-20s (including alcohol) and I highly recommend it. My brain was done cooking and I had enough self-confidence + self-awareness to not make dangerous decisions.
14 year olds don't get access to weed without someone either giving it to them or giving them the money to do it. I doubt you showing him up had much to do with the suicide attempt, so don't worry.
If you begin a habit from an unhealthy place -- then yeah, it can be the beginning of a negative feedback loop. Sounds like this kid started from a bad place, and I'm not sure that a 14 year old could possibly begin a weed habit from a healthy place. Hell, even 20 seems a bit early.
nerds today being adamant that it’s excellent
Well, it's certainly a tool. Tools can help you or hurt you. I think a lot of people have success with it. But, people hurt themselves with it too.
I really wince when people talk about weed as some kind of magic cure.
Why is it that everytime a bad story about MJ is mentioned, there are always so many people in comments doubting authenticity and relevancy? It is almost like an agenda or something
People are skeptical on any side about purely anecdotal experiences. I've posted pro-marijuana anecdotal experiences in here, but I don't expect people to take it as gospel, and frequently specifically call it out as a personal anecdote. In the past, have seen the exact sort of response your replying to directed towards me.
And that's fine, because anecdotes aren't data!
But it's just hard to separate correlation from causation here. Not all people who drink or smoke or do other drugs are depressed, but plenty of depressed people will drink or do drugs.
Plenty of people that have natural talent or skill, or who worked long enough to get to "the top of their game" get complacent even if they do not regularly engage in any of the vices we're talking about here. Arrogance and complacency are hardly unique to drinkers and smokers.
Even from an anecdotal perspective, assuming that marijuana was a contributor to the person becoming complacent, it seems unlikely that the marijuana was a strong causative factor in the suicide attempt. There are a lot of people that smoke pot regularly, and by definition, most of them are not the best person at their hobbies or professions, and they're not committing suicide. There's obviously some deeper issues in play here. (And I think it might be totally reasonable to say that people that have those deeper issues should avoid mind-altering substances)
Most positive anecdotes are not nearly as extreme as this one, but there's certainly skepticism for even mild positive statements.
You can look in the comment section for this very article for multiple examples - I replied to someone who indicated that another person must have "depressing" nights because they stated that they sometimes enjoy having a night with friends listening to music while high, for example. Subjective opinions of how to enjoy an evening are greeted with being told they're wrong - a bit beyond even skepticism, even!
If us potheads start posting anecdotes about how smoking took us from being unsuccessful and contemplating suicide to successful and having wonderful personal happiness and contentment - basically the reverse of the original post in this thread - I'm sure we'd see similar levels of skepticism. As it is, the positive anecdotes are basically "It's fun and helps me relax", "I feel more creative while high", "It sometimes helps me approach things from a different perspective" and similar.
I've had the same reaction from sharing a story about bad experiences with mushrooms. It wasn't in the context of evidence either, but still got people saying it sounded like anti-drug propaganda.
I think it's just the result of a cultural perception shift swinging hard the other way from the decades that drugs were demonized to now people looking at many drugs (mdma, marijuana and psilocybin especially) as miraculous substances that will solve all our issues. This happens with most shifts - it starts on one end of the extreme, then gets a reaction which swings the pendulum to the other extreme. In a decade I'm sure it will even out and we can have open conversations without reactions being so dogmatic.
I wouldn't call it a 'bad story', rather a story giving false impression of the general situation, even if from your perspective its how it looks like. But things are almost always more complex than first glance makes them look like, as in this case. Why - MJ being a gateway drug is mostly about being one of the most accessible and 'light' drug for people desperately wanting to escape/avoid reality of their lives.
Kids growing up in dysfunctional families (who might actually look OK from outside), or with some mental issues often desperately seek any kind of escape in whatever comes around. For many Alcohol, cigarettes and MJ are most accessible but sooner or later they find these substances don't work as they thought, the ugly reality is still there. So they move up the ladder for stronger escape.
Its false to paint MJ as cause of this, taking perfectly fine and balanced young individuals and bending them on path of addiction. Yet this is how it has been sold to public for past 60 years all around the world.
I think its the fact that a story about a 14 year old using drugs is not an example of what 99.9% of the "nerds who think weed is excellent" have in mind when they talk about using cannabis
Ok. An anecdote about cannabis use producing persistent cognitive impairment seemed to me to be relevant to an article describing cannabis use producing persistent cognitive impairment.
Did you miss the part where the kid became a heroin addict? Heroin will certainly provide long term impairment in the form of a lifelong addiction. Hard to find the effect of MJ in that long shadow.
Because that doesn't seem to be factoring into your analysis of the source of the impairment.
If I told a story about a kid who showed back up at band camp and had become 50 pounds heavier and hadn't progressed as a drummer, then went on to become a heroin addict etc. you wouldn't be blaming cookies. You'd stop and wonder what the hell was going on in his life.
I wasn't aware that cookies cause paranoid delusions.
Marijuana on the other hand…[0]
As I mentioned, I grew up with several kids like this. Most didn't attempt suicide (as far as I'm aware, anyway), but the possibility of confirmation bias aside, I certainly feel as though I recognised a pattern of paranoid delusion among young stoners that I knew.
I grew up in a super poor neighborhood, and I knew maybe 10-15 kids who started smoking MJ before age 16. The only ones who had any kind of extreme cognitive fallout were the ones that dabbled in more extreme stuff (like PCP). Even in those cases though, it's hard to point at the drug as opposed to the reason they were using. (In the PCP case it was three brother with a mentally ill single mother)
I'm not discounting the possibility that MJ can cause such things, but even the studies put the risk fairly low, and it's hard to separate environmental and genetic risks in the population they have available to study.
> after he smoked his ambition to be a goos drummer away.
This is the part that doesn't follow. We have no actual indication that smoking pot had anything to do with his lack/loss of ambition.
I could give plenty of anecdotal studies where people became complacent because they got a promotion, or made it to a certain landmark, or realized that they were the smartest person in the room at the time, or a million other things. Complacency is not something that requires smoking pot to feel.
Like, I don't want to denigrate the person in the anecdote - but if your sense of identity is so tied up in being the best drummer among a certain peer group that when you lose that title you are going to attempt suicide, you have more fundamental psychological problems to deal with.
If pot was causing people to want to kill themselves because they weren't the best at something, we'd have a lot more suicides in the world. It's a massive claim, and one that requires proof beyond an anecdote.
When someone who retreats from their hobbies, tries to kill themself, and engages in risky behavior like heroine use and drug use, I think its reasonable to suspect that person has some problems in their life beyond smoking marijuana.
Did the anecdote provide any evidence or argument linking cannabis use to presistent cognitive impairment? I must have missed it. Can you quote the relevant parts?
I'm not sure how a suicidal heroin junkie fucking up their life with hard drugs is relevant in a thread about cannabis. The whole "gateway drug" nonsense was debunked decades ago.
I don't know if the "gateway" concept is true or not but this fact (if true) doesn't dispute it. If you imagine hard drug use as a funnel with an optional step at the top - marijuana, with a very low conversation rate, the fact the conversation rate is low doesn't mean it's not the top of the funnel.
All of which would equally apply to alcohol or tobacco. And the data to support such a link for alcohol or tobacco is apparently just as strong, if not stronger.
But this whole line is a canard. The question is, would prohibiting any or all of those help anyone? Does prohibition help or not?
Because prohibition is the one part of the equation that a debate could actually have any affect on.
But I think it is quite clear why so much time, energy, and dubious argumentation is spent avoiding that question.
> The "gateway drug" argument is that any amount of cannabis is sufficient for becoming a skin-popping fentanyl junkie
That's an extreme, and not representative of what most people mean when they say "gateway drug".
My understanding of the gateway drug argument is this: someone who starts with a seemingly-innocuous mind-altering substance is more likely to end up wanting more and going for harder stuff than someone who has never used any drugs at all. By normalizing the light drug, some percentage of the new users will end up addicted to hard drugs that wouldn't have otherwise.
I'm not familiar enough with the evidence to have an opinion on the accuracy of this argument, but it's not helpful to take the most idiotic framing of it and attack it, even if it is the framing with the greatest meme value.
The correlation is that those who use "hard" drugs have often also previously used other drugs, including alcohol and prescription medication. Flipping that around to say the using cannabis leads to injecting heroin is the classic post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy.
Perhaps the correlation is a result of cannabis being illegal in your country: if you break one law (cannabis use), the barriers are down and you may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb and explore stronger remedies for your troubles.
So the questions that need to be investigated are these. Is there in fact any kind of correlation? If there is a correlation, is it causative? Of course, no true believer needs these questions answered, which is why the research into these things in not legal in countries where prohibition enforcement and punishment is big industry.
Is caffeine also at the top of the funnel? How about melatonin?
The fact that most heroin users have used caffeine previously does not mean that caffeine is a gateway drug to heroin, or at all correlated with hard drug use. The same applies to cannabis.
yup. It's an interesting story, but the article is about generalizable impacts of cannabis, and this person in the story is certainly not an example of that. Granted, it was acknowledged that this was an extreme case.
I became friends with one kid who was exceptionally talented as a musician, but also had a chronic marijuana habit. He was a better drummer than me at the time, but the drum camp was held every year. I attended the following year, and to my surprise, so did he.
As I am a huge nerd, I spent the entire year obsessively practicing. My friend spent the whole year smoking marijuana and being complacent. We were excited to see each other and catch up, but it wasn’t long before we started showing off our skills on the drum sets. His heart sank when he realised how dramatically my skills had surpassed his. I think he had a bit of an identity crisis, and likely as a consequence of the frequent substance abuse he developed a deep and blatant paranoia. He tried to commit suicide in his room the following day, and had to be removed from the camp.
I didn’t speak to him much after that — kids weren’t quite as connected as they are today back in 2005 — but to my surprise he did manage to contact me a couple of years ago. I asked him how he was, and he said he was doing better now after rehabilitation, but that life got much worse for him since we last met, explaining that he had been addicted to heroin.
I recognise that this is an extreme case, but I grew up with a lot of kids like this, and marijuana is scary as shit to me, despite some nerds today being adamant that it’s excellent and certainly better than alcohol.