[Hoot Gibson]

The jury is still out on whether low IQs make chronic marijuana use more likely or marijuana makes smokers more stupid - but their is a link between smaller brains and marijuana.

[URL="http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-regular-marijuana-shrinks-brain-20141110-story.html"]Regular pot smokers have shrunken brains, study says

Experimental mice have been telling us this for years, but pot-smoking humans didn't want to believe it could happen to them: Compared with a person who never smoked marijuana, someone who uses marijuana regularly has, on average, less gray matter in his orbital frontal cortex, a region that is a key node in the brain's reward, motivation, decision-making and addictive behaviors network.

More ambiguously, in regular pot smokers, that region is better connected than it is in non-users: the flow of signal traffic is speedier to other parts of that motivation and decision-making network, including across the superhighway of "white matter" that connects the brain's hemispheres.

The researchers who conducted the study speculate that the orbital frontal cortex's greater level of "connectedness"--which is especially pronounced in people who started smoking pot early in life--may be the brain's way of compensating for the region's under-performing gray matter. Whether these "complex neuroadaptive processes" reverse themselves when marijuana use stops is an important unanswered question, they added.[/URL]