Here, I'll elucidate:
UC Davis project???!!! Dude you have no concept of the academia paper game. I shall repeat, UC Davis had nothing to do with said study other than the prinicpal author is recently employed there. Principal author had nothing to do with the original Dunedin study.
Edit: Principal author's academic background is in Public Health, a very agenda driven field of study
"The study, conducted by an international team of researchers led by
Magdalena Cerdá at the University of California, Davis, Health System, and Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt at Duke University, appears online on March 23 in the journal
Clinical Psychological Science ." (
https://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/publish/news/newsroom/10874, 2nd paragraph)
If you actually
read the article, you'd realize it used more information than just the New Zealand based Dunedin study.
And again, to quote the same
article you supposedly read: "
The authors assessed the frequency and duration of cannabis use among participants in the long-term Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study — a four-decade project maintained by the University of Otago that has been following the development of a group of 1,037 children born in 1972-1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand from birth to age 38. The Dunedin study includes participants who represent the full range of socioeconomic status and health in the general population and have had follow-up examinations at ages 3, 5, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 21, 26, 32 and, most recently, at 38.
For the current study, the authors included 947 participants who had completed at least three of the five adult cannabis assessments from ages 18 through 38. They measured both persistence of cannabis dependence, as defined by the total number of study periods out of five that the participant met criteria for cannabis dependence, and persistence of regular cannabis use as the total number of study periods out of five that a participant used cannabis for four or more days per week.
Eighteen percent, or 173 participants, were considered marijuana dependent in at least one wave of the study, and 15 percent (140 participants) fell into the regular cannabis use categories, in at least one wave of the study. Results were similar for persistent cannabis dependence and persistent regular cannabis use. (See
summary of research methodology or the
paper for more details.)
Other universities involved in the research study include the University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ; Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, UK; Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.
This has been a really good 4 hour troll discussion but I'm gonna retire now lol. You guys definitely win.