Thank you for your well informed and considered response. You got right to the root of what I was getting at. I’m sure that I developed a few synapses while tripping in my youth. I hope so anyway.
So… my takeaway is that youth is the best time for brain damage.
That is when I did most of mine, though I suppose I ran over the plasticity age limit by 10 or 15 years.
“traditionally”?
Sure. (But is Papasan traditional?)
Hence the need for substances to control the slow but inexorable awakening to the existential horror of life.
We had the conversation the day my daughter came home high the first time. She had super red eyes and couldn’t stop giggling. The convo went like this:
Me: You’re high!
Her: nuh-uh. Giggles. More giggles. Hiding her face and giggling.
We talked about use and abuse the next day. Turns out, she’d known about our usage for years (even when you hide it, kids find out) and I had to not be hypocritical. We talked about the fact that it’s illegal, and therefore “wrong”, but how it helped me stay calm. We agreed she wouldn’t do it anymore until she was an adult. Like a good teen, she hid it for the next few years.
And we’ll both be getting medical cards as soon as the procedure is in place in our state.
God damn right.
I do so enjoy the lengths people will go to justify stupid/foolish/addictive behavior to their kids and at the same time try to convince the kids they should not do it…
My parents did the same thing with tobacco…telling me how bad it was while they smoked a pack or two a day each.
The smarter kids will simply observe their parents’ hypocrisy and judge for themselves if the behavior has merits or not.
This is a non-sequitur
I agree–they don’t really seem to be aware of what’s being talked about
Welcome to the Internet! Buckle up–you are in for a bumpy ride.
Considering the vast majority of cannabis users started when they were in high school or earlier, it seems a bit silly to try to convince kids today they shouldn’t use it until their brains “stop developing.” Especially when so many kids are drugged up on physician-prescribed speed cocktails far more dangerous to mental & physical health. Cannabis has a great many health benefits, including but not limited to helping people relax, deal with stress, and detach from the dysfunctional construct field of modern life and modern schooling. I believe a lot of kids medicate quite safely and effectively with cannabis, if often (by necessity) out of sight of their parents.
As a general rule, one should approach anti-pot studies with a healthy skepticism as many are funded by a very biased and unscientific government system designed to malign the plant and justify its suppression. Furthermore, correlation doesn’t prove causality, of course. The contention that kids who smoke cannabis may have worse outcomes later in life (a questionable one in any case) in no way proves cannabis is the causal factor. It’s just as likely kids in high-stress, high-anxiety situations are also more prone to medicate with cannabis.
Parents should be totally honest and up-front about their cannabis use. The plant has a noble 10,000 year history of use as a botanical medicine. Shame around its use is entirely based on a century of government lies and propaganda propping up a racist crime against humanity.
Please cite source. Might as well say that vaccines cause autism because you can’t trust studies showing that there’s no risk. Just because you don’t want to at least consider that studies in negative effects of pot consumption at a young age might be on to something doesn’t mean all the studies done so far are completely wrong. If i had a kid i would encourage them to try it later in life, same for alcohol, but ultimately the decision is up to them to weigh the risks. If you smoked pot at a young age and you feel there’s no cause for concern that’s cool, but you should still want to advocate for responsible use of intoxicating substances.
http://www.popsci.com/article/gender-differences-found-brain-wiring-insight-or-neurosexism
“Also missing from the study is any mention of experience-dependent brain plasticity. Why?
As prominent feminist neuroscientists have noted, the social phenomenon of gender means that a person’s biological sex has a significant impact on the experiences (including social, material, physical, and mental) she or he encounters which will, in turn, leave neurological traces.
Yet the researchers do not pay any attention to the gendered experiences (such as hobbies, subjects studied at school or higher education, or participation in sporting activities) of the young males and females in their sample.
This absence has two consequences. First, the researchers miss an opportunity to investigate whether gendered experiences might influence brain development and enhance the acquisition of important skills valuable to all. The second consequence is that, by failing to look at gendered social influences, the authors guarantee that no data will be produced that challenge the notion of “hardwired” male/female neural signatures.
These characteristics of the PNAS study are very common in neuroscientific investigations of male/female sex differences, and represent two important ways in which scientific research can be subtly “neurosexist”, reinforcing and legitimating gender stereotypes in ways that are not scientifically justified. And, when researchers are “blinded” by sex, they can overlook potentially informative research strategies.
Returning to the popular representations, we can now see a striking disconnect with the actual data. The research provides strong evidence for behavioural similarities between the sexes. It provides no evidence that those modest behavioural sex differences are associated with brain connectivity differences. And, it offers no information about the developmental origins of either behavioural or brain differences.”
“I”. Because the full phrase would be “than either my wife or I am”. “Than either my wife or me am” would be… non standard. 
