To understand why trying to suggest that marijuana and IQ loss are linked is silly on its face and indicative of a lack of understanding and imagination we first need to debunk the big lie of the standardized IQ test. This might come as a staggering shock to some who are devoted to the idea that a single standardized test can produce a number indicating a level of total intelligence and comprehension a person is capable of. No test could ever factor for all the diversity and possibility of human intelligence. The notion is absolutely absurd on its face.
Does the IQ test consider street smarts? Does it ask questions relative to the experience of a person living in all the countries of the world, in every possible profession and lifestyle? Of course not. No such thing is possible. If you are clinging to the idea that your IQ score has a meaningful bearing over your abilities you are only limiting yourself by holding yourself to someone else’s arbitrary standard.
The human mind is a wonderful and complex organ capable of incredible wonders and vastly stupid mundanity. One of the most simultaneously brilliant and necessary but often also stupid and mundane traits of our minds is our tendency to need to categorize and understand things. It makes people generally uncomfortable if things – including people – don’t all conform to their particular place or standing in the greater schema.
Thus we invent class systems, IQ tests and every other kind of hierarchy imaginable and routinely obsess over them as though they are the only real and true options. People devote their entire lives to these illusory ideals with nothing tangible to prove them but the nodding agreement of the others desperate to have a label or a category for everything.
Someone who you might consider stupid, slow or even completely backwards may very well have a rich inner life that you know nothing about. If their lifestyle is enhanced by the use of cannabis products to expand the mind or to sooth the aches and pains of physical and mental existence then your judgement or concern over their level of intelligence suggests a lot more about you then it does about them.