| The actual data don't really support the claims of the authors, and certainly not the hype of the press brief: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dar.13239 If it's a topic you are interested in, I would definitely recommend checking out the original article to decide for yourself. Basically though, the authors looked at a bunch of different measures relating to "poor outcome" at age 35: Alcohol use, smoking, illicit drug use, relationship status, financial hardship, depression, anxiety and employment status. Of those, the only significant associations they found were with high-risk alcohol use, likelihood to have used other illicit drugs (with the implicit assumption that this is a bad thing), daily cigarette smoking, and lack of relationship. From the abstract: "By the mid‐30s, both young‐adult and adolescent‐onset regular users were more likely than minimal/non‐users (63.5%) to have used other illicit drugs (odds ratio [OR] > 20.4), be a high‐risk alcohol drinker (OR > 3.7), smoked daily (OR > 7.2) and less likely to be in relationships (OR < 0.4)." Excessive drinking and daily smoking are both pretty negative things, imo, but they are only showing a correlation, and that not surprising at all. People use all three substances to cope. The (small-ish) relationship association found is also interesting and could be viewed as a negative, but this too is just a correlation. Relating to the other negative outcomes like depression and anxiety, the authors find: "The distribution of having a paid job, anxiety, depression and financial hardship were similar to the percentage of each class in the population." Cool. It would be nice if in 2021 we could start being a bit more objective about how we approach studying substance use. There are real risks and harms associated with cannabis use, some of which we understand, and others we likely don't fully appreciate due to a lack of studies. Overstating things to further some agenda or to support one's subjective preconceptions helps no one and only serves to further dilute our actual understanding of the science, and is ultimately going to do more harm than good. |