As a daily smoker (for over two decades), I definitely seek BOTH states of mind.
Regardless, glad to see you've remained fascinated with your career.
Afaik CBD counteracts the mind infatuation but leaves the body high on.
ask someone who take drugs to assess their own capacities, instead of measuring those from an objective perspective.
Obviously, "yes cannabis affects your ability to self-report your cognitive abilities";
it's a psychoactive drug that is mainly used for its cognitive effects, it's the main use/"advantage" of it ! (more rarely for pain management)
It's like if you ask alkaloidal cocaine (crack) users how they feel about their abilities.
They may report amazing bodily control enhancement, and seen from the outside it may be very different.
Even alcohol users, at the exit of night clubs, you sometimes see them report self-report increased abilities and decide to drive.
In that case, asking them to self-report doesn't give you much info on their actual abilities.
Let's have them be clean for a month or two and then do some cognitive assessments that could still be biased (microscopic testing sample), but at least could give some useful info.
Another point where folks (even scientists) often do a basic reasoning mistake - life has to be extremes, you either smoke 0 never ever or are high every day, often all the day yet reality is mostly in between.
Case point 1 - I've done the best, most important decisions of my life when high. Additional perspective was extremely valuable since its a different viewpoint of a person with exactly same experience as you, same dreams, goals, fears. There is literally nobody else like that in whole world and never will be. The connection to subconsciousness becomes a massive highway, you are still only on receiving end but oh boy you get some feedback on various topics from life. But you have to actually listen, hard to do when the goal is only to get wasted and giggle.
Those decisions stood the test of time when looking back even 2 decades. To put some facts into highly opinionated topic - as software dev I've increased my full time 100% classic employment salary from first job till now cca 30x, moved countries 3x (never escaping anything, just curious for challenges and adventures till I found the spot which works for me 100% and raising kids here).
Now I've met folks who when high started seeing blood running down the walls or panic schizophrenic attacks, but these were broken people to begin with. I've seen very similar effects from long term alcohol use (actually life-long schizophrenia triggered by it). So, can we please stop making stupid 1-liner know-it-all statements when clearly topic, and people, are way more complex?
All signal, no noise. Entire disciplines would be absent from it
It would appear that many researchers are aware the system is suboptimal but are resigned to it, or even benefit from it.
Maybe we should pitch a tech billionaire to fund a journal like this.
“The reason for cannabis use, but not frequency and method, is associated with SCD.”
The finding is clearly an artifact of the methodology. BRFSS is probably not the right way to study this.
One thing I've noticed with pot smokers is that many seem to be almost in love with the drug. I have had people try to explain to me the manifold benefits of hemp fibers or CBD or how cannabis kills cancers. I think this could quite plausibly extend to survey answers, where saying they suffer from cognitive decline would be a kind of admission of defeat and go against their core beliefs of cannabis as purely positive godly thing.
So basically some kind of psycho-cultural defense mechanism?
It's always a game of social influence at the beginning, and sometimes later on.
Eventually, you may be pushed to smoke if you want to feel part of a social group and culture, and then, once inside, you have to follow the codes of it.
A large part of the cannabis cult(ure) is to preach the substance to everybody around you, to get it depenalized, legalized, and want everybody to have good views on it so they can take it more in public, and be socially more accepted, not considered like a junkie.
The end-game of it, is to do everything to get more of it, consciously or not.
Then, from that perspective, now you have someone that asks you: "is cannabis good for you ?" (just in other words).
Your goal to consume cheaper and higher quality of the substance, without legal risks, and to have approval of your friends, then what do you say ?
Of course "yes it's great".
There is also a survivorship bias in the study: once you feel that your cognitive abilities decline, you typically stop smoking cannabis.
The extreme case: people with dementia are automatically excluded because they cannot even smoke or purchase the product.
Most adults are busy reducing brain cell count thru use of alcohol and other poisons. Marijuana on the other hand is proven to increase brain cell count thru neurogenesis in the hippocampus [1].
This is not possible for adults without marijuana [2].
EX: https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/44/2/zsaa173/5986548
However, growing evidence suggests that new cells are not only “born” constitutively in the adult hypothalamus, but many of these cells also differentiate into neurons and glia and serve specific functions.
1) Weed dramatically reduces cognitive impairment.
2) Weed dramatically reduces an individual's ability to accurately asses their cognitive ability.
3) People who use weed are, for some other reason, dramatically less likely to suffer from cognitive impairment, or dramatically less able to accurately evaluate their own cognitive state.
4) The study itself is biased or flawed somehow.