Teen Pot Use Could Mean Less Success as Adult

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on HealthDay.

Teenage pot use can hamper a kid’s future chances of landing a good job with a large salary, mainly by interfering with his or her education, a new study of twins has found.

A teenager who uses more marijuana than their identical twin is less likely to wind up in a highly-skilled occupation with better pay than their brother or sister, according to the report.

That’s not because pot use has caused irreversible damage to their developing brain. Researchers found no evidence of lasting damage to a kid’s thinking, memory, or mental health from teenage marijuana use.

But twins who smoked more pot did more poorly in school, which set them on a rockier life path moving forward, said lead researcher Jonathan Schaefer, a postdoctoral researcher with the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development.

Those teens had a lower GPA, on average, less academic motivation, and more discipline problems, and were more likely to hang out with antisocial peers, researchers found.

“These study findings suggest that when you’re talking about long-term effects of adolescent cannabis use, they may be limited to short-term drug effects with longer-term impacts,” Schaefer said. “It could be the case that cannabis use causes temporary decreases in motivation, which leads your teen to get poorer grades, which eventually leads to lower educational attainment.”

For this study, Schaefer and his colleagues analyzed data on 2,410 identical twins gathered from three different long-term studies at the Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research.

The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Source: HealthDay
https://consumer.healthday.com/3-29-pot-use-in-teens-could-mean-less-success-as-adult-study-2651198167.html