Marijuana opponents constantly claim that marijuana harms your brain. When pressured for proof, marijuana opponents always offer up the same studies that have been debunked numerous times over the year. Why they keep using those studies, knowing they have been debunked, is beyond me. Maybe someone should check their brains. A new study was released which found that daily marijuana use is not associated with brain shrinkage. Per Reuters:
“So far, there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that you have these gross volume changes” in the brain due to marijuana use, said Kent Hutchison, a clinical neuroscientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the senior author of the study.
“We found no evidence of differences in volumes of the accumbens, amygdala, hippocampus or cerebellum between daily versus non-users, in adults or adolescents,” Hutchison’s paper said, referring to parts of the brain.
A study was released last year which found the opposite to be true, but there were flaws in that study in regards to how alcohol was factored into the study. This new study looked at brain images, like the previous study, and compared users to non-users, like the last study. However, they also matched marijuana users and non-users with people that consumed a similar amount of alcohol on average, which helped eliminate the influence of alcohol on the study. Unlike marijuana, alcohol can have drastic effects on the brain, and any study that doesn’t take that into account will have flawed results, which is the case with most marijuana studies that involve the brain.
