New Study Says Young Adults Use Cannabis To Stay Focused And Motivated, Wait, Say What?

College students who use cannabis are more motivated, study finds

Lazy couch potatoes.

This is the most common way cannabis users are stereotyped, and it couldn’t be further from the truth.

Also, cannabis can energize the mind and body in a way that nothing else can, so why do we end up with such a stereotype of cannabis users? It all goes back to 1936 when a movie called Reefer Madness was released. It featured marijuana users being portrayed as criminals, enticed into sex because of their cannabis use, and even committing suicide.

This movie should scare people. In fact, however, the production was funded by a church group trying to spread misinformation and fear about cannabis. Then, when President Nixon was elected to power, the stereotyping got worse; He believed cannabis fueled efforts against the war and the blacks who fought it.

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either anti-war or anti-black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and black people with heroin. And then if we heavily criminalize both of them, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and slander them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we lied about the drugs? Of course we did,” said John Erlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief.

There you have it.

Cannabis users are actually more motivated, studies say

Now there are many studies that prove the opposite: cannabis users can actually be motivated.

One of the most recent studies, found in the journal Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, was conducted by researchers at the University of Memphis. They analyzed 47 college students, 25 of whom were classified as frequent cannabis users while 22 were non-users. They were then asked to take part in the Effort Expenditure for Rewards task assessment, which is a type of behavioral test, reports Marijuana Moment.

The researchers said there were older studies analyzing whether cannabis users were more motivated than none, although these studies “used different methods and did not control for important confounding variables.” Therefore, this new study adjusted for these variables and found that “cannabis days over the past few months and cannabis use disorder symptoms predicted the likelihood of selecting a high-effort study.” In layman’s terms, they found that frequent cannabis users had a higher chance than the control group of choosing tasks that required a higher level of motivation.

“The results provide preliminary evidence suggesting that college students who use cannabis are more likely to make an effort to receive a reward, even after controlling for the amount of the reward and the likelihood of receiving the reward,” the researchers said . “Therefore, these results do not support the amotivational syndrome hypothesis.”

“Contrary to the amotivational syndrome hypothesis, college students who used more cannabis were more likely to choose the high-effort option, regardless of reward size, likelihood, and expected value of the overall reward. Although there was no significant difference between the cannabis use groups, there was a moderate-sized effect that consistently supports an association between cannabis use and greater effort decisions,” they wrote.

older studies

There are other studies that support this, like one from 2021 conducted by researchers associated with Florida International University.

They analyzed the associations between marijuana use and motivation in a population of 401 adolescents aged 14 to 17 over a two-year period. They found that cannabis use was not associated with significant loss of motivation, commitment, or apathy. The researchers controlled for other factors such as tobacco and alcohol, as well as potential confounders such as depression, gender and age.

“Despite a significant increase in cannabis use in our sample, change in cannabis use did not predict a change in motivation, suggesting that cannabis use may not lead to a decrease in motivation over time,” the authors report.

“Our results do not support an association between cannabis use and declining motivation over time in a sample of adolescents at risk of escalating cannabis use… The current study adds to the existing literature by examining these associations in a large sample of adolescent Cannabis longitudinally studies users while controlling important and often overlooked disruptive factors, including sex and depression,” the authors concluded.

“Modern science is putting things right and exposing much of the ‘reefer madness’ of the last decade. Unfortunately, many of these myths are still pervasive in our society and are often thrown up by politicians in their efforts to justify failed policies of marijuana prohibition and stigma. It’s time for America to dispel these myths and enact a cannabis policy based on facts, not fears,” commented Paul Armetano, Associate Director of NORML.

Additionally, studies show that cannabis users are actually more physically active. A study, also from 2021, was conducted by researchers at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Longevity Science at the University of California, San Diego. They analyzed data from the 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

It was the first study to quantify levels of sedentary behavior or physical activity using accelerometers. The researchers categorized the participants as light, moderate or frequent cannabis users, then there were also non-cannabis users based on their reported use over the past 30 days. At the end of the study, they found that overall activity rates of cannabis users were not “significantly” different from non-users. But “frequent cannabis users engage in more physical activity than non-users,” they wrote.

Interestingly, they found that participants became more sedentary once they stopped using cannabis. “Light cannabis users were more likely to self-report physical activity compared to non-users,” they wrote.

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