As 2016 GOP hopefuls Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina came out this week with opposing views on legalization of marijuana in the U.S., a new Dutch study shows college students who smoke weed performed worse in school than those who stopped smoking.
Researchers were able to conduct a unique study in the Netherlands, where pot has been legal for many years, when authorities in the city of Maastricht placed temporary restrictions banning foreigners from buying weed in “coffee shops.”
The six month ban was part of an attempt to curb “drug tourism” in the college town and allowed professors Olivier Marie and Ulf Zolitz to compare the academic performance of foreign students who could not legally buy pot with nationals to determine if the policy change affected their grades.
After looking at more than 54,000 test grades for almost 5,000 students, the researchers found students who were banned from buying pot had a five percent better chance of passing classes. Students who already had poor test results showed higher levels of improvement after the ban, demonstrating a nearly 8 percent increase over pre-ban classroom performance.
The question of legalization has caused a rift within the Republican Party, and U.S. policy in general. This week Mr. Christie said he would crack down on marijuana and enforce federal drug laws, even in states where pot is already legal like Colorado, while Ms. Fiorina said individual states and voters should have the right to legalize pot.
“I think Colorado voters made a choice, I don’t support their choice, but I do support their right to make that choice,” Ms. Fiorina said on Fox and Friends on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, experts on both sides of the legalization debate are using the Dutch study in different ways. Pro-weed advocates say that the results of the study are minuscule and demonstrate the affects of restricting access to legal pot are on par with banning alcohol, having a better professor or a smarter roommate.
But opponents of marijuana legalization argue the study reaffirms several previous studies which indicate smoking weed negatively impacts productivity and brain function.
“Legalization efforts are still growing and popular wisdom out there is that marijuana is not harmful, that’s its relatively benign and the affects are no more serious than having a beer. Science does not support that, and those who believe in legalization have done an excellent job marketing and convincing people otherwise and it’s growing in support,” said Arthur Dean, chairman and CEO of Community Anti Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA).
This is not the first study to show that marijuana negatively impacts brain function, he said. In 2013, the Maryland School of Public Health released a study that followed 1,200 college freshman over a 10-year period and found that marijuana use contributed to college students skipping more classes, spending less time studying, earning lower grades, dropping out of college and being unemployed after college.
“[The Dutch study] is just one more study that reinforces what we keep trying to educate people about, that marijuana does have an impact on the brain and there are studies that show that it actually changed the physical structure of the brain,” said Calvina Fay, executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation.
But legalization advocates say the research is faulty because the authors only compared test scores during the ban and did not actually ask students if they had stopped smoking pot.
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“That’s pretty nuts given that all they need to have access[to marijuana] is a friend who is a national,” said Amanda Reiman, manager of marijuana law and policy at the Drug Policy Alliance.
Mason Tvert, director of communications at the Marijuana Policy Project, said that the Dutch study shouldn’t be applied to American students because it evaluates grades for younger pot smokers, whereas all of the legalization efforts in the U.S. call for restricting weed sales to individuals 21 and over.
Mr. Tvert argued that this study, and previous studies documenting marijuana’s effect on academic performance don’t prove that weed is “causally related to poor school performance. It doesn’t make someone a worse student, it simply suggests that people who use marijuana may be likely to be worse students.”
The new study is important because it’s the first time researchers have been able to look at both groups, smokers and non-smokers at the same time instead of being restricted to a “before pot” and “after pot” analysis, according to Mr. Marie, one of the authors of the study.
Although the researchers were only able to study the short term affects of the temporary ban on pot, Mr. Marie said that policymakers should definitely take into account some of the negative affects on productivity and cognition documented in the study and said lawmakers should focus on educating people about the potential short-term negative effects of smoking pot.
“People that want to smoke will always find a way, but people who are hesitating, the people in the margin, might change behavior because of the legality of the drug,” Mr. Marie said.
Recent polls show that over half of Americans think that marijuana use should be legal and that number continues to grow as more polls are conducted. A CBS News poll released in April found 53 percent of Americans supported legalization of weed, the highest CBS number yet.
Arizona and California are currently debating their own reforms for marijuana regulation and polls show that the majority of residents in both states support legalization.
• Kellan Howell can be reached at khowell@washingtontimes.com.
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