Marijuana Use In College Students Linked To Worse Grades, According To Science

Skip Rush7 years ago

Everyone has an annoying stoner friend who smokes way too much weed and loves to talk down to the common man who just wants to drink his beer in peace. He doesn’t care about your feelings; he just wants to get high. This guy loves to tell you about the benefits of marijuana while also always being a lazy asshole. And I’ve got some news for him.

A totally shocking new study on cannabis use among college students in Netherlands found that students who had lost access to cannabis received, on average, better grades than students who were able to keep legally accessing marijuana. Who’da thunk it?!

From Washington Post:

The most rigorous study yet of the effects of marijuana legalization has identified a disturbing result: College students with access to recreational cannabis on average earn worse grades and fail classes at a higher rate.

Now I’ve never really been a connoisseur of the devil’s lettuce, but am I supposed to be surprised that people who actively partake in an activity that makes you sleepy, lethargic, and sometimes paranoid causes you to get bad grades? Color me shocked.

Netherlands allows for the sale of cannabis at cafés and shops around the country to anyone who can legally buy it. Due to its close proximity to Netherland’s border, however, the Dutch city of Maastricht recently decided to go against the grain and only allow for citizens of Netherlands to legally purchase cannabis in the city. This is an interesting move considering how much money they were probably making from drug-related tourism, but that’s neither here nor there (it’s dumb as hell, is what it is). Some of the people most affected by this decree? Maastricht University’s population of international students, who can no longer engage in puff, puff, nor pass while at school.

One benefit(?) of this new law is that it allowed for researchers to easily study the effects of the change on students. These were kids in the same schools, same classes, and same situations. Some lost access to marijuana, others kept it.

This will blow your mind, but the study found that students who lost access to marijuana did “substantially better” in classes, especially those classes that involved numerical and mathematical skills.

The research on more than 4,000 students, published in the Review of Economic Studies, found that those who lost access to legal marijuana showed substantial improvement in their grades.

The study also found that low performing students benefitted most from the change. Call me a narc, but maybe you should stop using marijuana on a regular basis if you’re considered to be a “low performing” student.

Low performing students benefited even more, which the researchers noted is particularly important because these students are at high-risk of dropping out.

So, we’ve learned from this study that students without easy access to cannabis are going to do better in school than students with easy access to cannabis. GROUNDBREAKING!!!

It’s important to note that this study does not account for the fact that some non-citizen students were probably getting weed “illegally” from citizen students who were getting it legally. So, in a perfect study, the results may have been a little different. It is also important to remember that these were students who had access taken away from them, not students who had never used cannabis.

I’m sure there are no studies like this for alcohol, so I’ll just keep drinking..

[via Washington Post]

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