Smithalicious parent
Wow, I didn't actually think weed could give someone brain damage, but I guess I've just been conclusively proven wrong!
I see a version of this reply every time somebody mentions that cannabis is not entirely harmless. Without getting into the weeds (lol) of what is and is not brain damage, surely you can recognize that habitually blazing extremely potent strains of a hallucinogenic plant is not harm-free?
Well harm has to be defined because different people use it in different ways. Would I say it cannot cause mental changes that can be negative? Of course not, plenty of people don't smoke just because of the anxiety they get from it or other things. But classifying people who smoke as stupid or brain damaged is an entirely different thing and there is very little evidence for that. Social and ideological changes that hallucinogens can cause in general are not simply good versus bad. And there is no link anywhere that makes hallucinating itself cause brain damage, there are tons of ways for people to hallucinate that don't cause brain damage so I don't know why you would automatically assume any hallucinogen is assuredly doing damage.
I hate to be that person, but neither the article nor the study makes that claim.
All we know is that people who visit the ER or who are hospitalized "for cannabis use" (not defined in the abstract; full text is behind a paywall) end up with dementia at a higher rate.
That does not mean cannabis caused it. They've accounted for many confounding factors, but you can't account for all of them. Off the top of my head, perhaps people who are in the very early stages of dementia do not tolerate THC as well? Maybe their emotional regulatory ability declines before diagnosis, and they're therefore less able to bring themselves down if they experience anxiety.