Australian Study Indicates Link Between Pot and Brain Damage

A recent study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry seems to suggest that long time marijuana use is associated with structural changes to the brain. Read the WebMD article on it here.

Like many other similar studies attempting to demonize marijuana this study has a few very glaring issues that the researchers seem to be overlooking:

1. Sample size; the study examined only 15 heavy users and 16 abstainers
2. Sample group; the sample group consisted of marijuana abusers not your typical marijuana user, to qualify you had to use five or more joints a day every day for the past 10 years. Hardly indicative of your average user.
3. No causality; the study does not demonstrate if the brain differences were caused by marijuana or if the brain differences caused an increased risk of marijuana addiction.

With these oversights it is apparent that the researchers set out to prove that marijuana was bad for you, and not to find the effects of marijuana. Scare tactic studies like this are counter productive, they demean true studies, and they make informed people question doctors as a whole.