New Study Finds Pot-Smoking Students Outperform Cigarette Smokers

 

Good news, kids in high school and college who smoke pot. And good news, retroactively, to those of us who once were in college and high school, and who toked their way through the experience.

You probably did, or can do, or are doing better than those cool kids who smoke cigarettes. That knowledge bomb is thanks to a new study out of Canada. Via CTV News:

Researchers from the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health analyzed data from a survey administered to nearly 39,000 Ontario students between 1981 and 2011. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health asked students in Grades 7, 9 and 11 about their tobacco and marijuana use, and their academic performance.

The study found that marijuana-only users did better at school than their counterparts who smoked only cigarettes or who smoked both cigarettes and marijuana.

The study believes that the more smoking cigarettes is stigmatized, the less likely intelligent people are to smoke them, which accounts for the diffence.

“The population of youth smokers right now is one that is a fairly marginalized population, quite a vulnerable population, so they are at high rates of cannabis use but also of other drugs and other behaviours,” [lead study author Michael] Chaiton says. “So the change in trends is that this is a social phenomenon. This is not that tobacco is causing this, it is something that has changed socially in the role of tobacco in society.”

Of course, both groups performed worse than people who didn’t use any substance. But fuck those nerds, I say.

[Pot via Shutterstock]