The stereotype of the lazy stoner is a common one. It brings up images of The Dude in The Big Lebowski or a teenager next to a bong covered in snacks.
These images have plagued cannabis users but researchers at UCL, the University of Cambridge and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London, have disproved this stereotype in a new study. The results show, despite popular conceptions, that regular cannabis users are just as motivated and capable of having feelings of pleasure or reward.
Researchers gathered 247 young adults and adolescents who used cannabis weekly over the course of the three months before the study started. These individuals were paired with non-cannabis users of the same age and same gender.
All participants completed questionnaires that assessed anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure, and their apathy, which is a lack of interest or motivation.
What the researchers found was cannabis users scored lower than non-users on anhedonia, meaning they were better able to have feelings of pleasure and reward. On the scale of apathy, there was little to no difference between cannabis users and non-users.
Furthermore, there was no impact from frequency of cannabis use on these results.
Zachary Walsh, professor in the UBC department of psychology at the Okanagan campus, says the study was able to avoid some of the nuances that make studies with cannabis and non-users difficult.
“This study is nice because it took a really sort of comprehensive, orderly view, ‘here are some of the mechanisms that might underlie that perceived a-motivation’ so this one, I think, did a really nice job of honing in on that,” he said.
According to Walsh, the origins of the lazy cannabis user are relatively new given the prevalence of cannabis in western and other cultures.
“The stereotypes are pretty new, but even within that limited lifespan of the stereotypes, I think they've changed a bit,” he said.
Walsh referenced the “reefer madness” in which cannabis was associated with psychosis and violence. He also sees the origins of cannabis stereotypes as racialized and used for anti-immigrant sentiments.
“It went from madness and sort of switched from that to laziness and, you know, ineptitude, stupidity and those often accompanied racial stereotypes as well,” he said.
Another factor that lends to the lazy or unmotivated stereotype commonly seen in TV or movies is the association between cannabis use and depression.
“Some people may be using it medically for depression, and that may lead to the impression that there's a subset of cannabis users who are apathetic or a-motivated but I don't think it's because of cannabis.”
Walsh also pointed out that there are now many influential figures who are cannabis users such as Elon Musk and Barack Obama. When taking into account that these are “highly productive, high functioning folks” who use cannabis, the results are not surprising, he says.
