FUZZY NUMBERS? STUDY FINDS POT LOWERS MATH SCORES

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Future engineers, mathematicians and economists
beware. A new study finds that high school students who smoke marijuana are
likely to see lower math scores, and ultimately, lower wages, than peers.

Poets and literary types may have less to fear however. Scores showed no
difference on reading scores between potheads and those who abstained from
the weed.

Economist Rosalie Pacula from the public policy group RAND presented her
findings at a conference on global health economics in San Francisco this
week and detailed her work in an interview on Thursday.

"It makes a lot of sense that it (marijuana) would affect certain types of
cognitive functioning, particularly things that are hard to grasp like
math," she said.

Her study looked at 6,000 standardized test scores of those who started
using marijuana after the 10th grade in 1990 and compared with results when
they were in the 12th grade in 1992.

Those who started smoking marijuana had 15 percent lower scores in math than
non-smokers but no difference in the reading test, Pacula said. That lower
math score could result in a salary 2 percent lower later in life, her
research found.