A report issued the following month by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs claimed just the opposite.
   
In 1972 both the annual Health, Education, and Welfare report on marijuana and health and the Shafer Commission took issue with the idea of the amotivational syndrome. The Shafer Commission also released data from the Jamaica study, which concluded that users in that country who had smoked several joints a day for many years were, if anything, more motivated than nonusers.

In 1971 Joel Hochman and Norman Brill of UCLA studied the drug habits of fourteen hundred UCLA students and found no statistically significant differences in grade point average or educational achievement between users, even daily users, and nonusers.

They did discover that chronic marijuana users were more likely than other people to drop out of school, but upon their return they were as successful as nonsmoking students. A similar study at Berkeley during the early 1970s produced like results.
   
In 1974 Canada's Le Dain Commission concluded that there was no connection between the use of marijuana and a lack of motivation, and a 1975 report by the Drug Abuse Council stated that after one year of decriminalization in Oregon, there was no evidence of decreased motivation among the users in that state.

It should be noted, however, that most marijuana smokers do not feel especially motivated to work while under the influence of marijuana, preferring instead to listen to music, watch television eat, or socialize.

An exception are those smokers who sometimes smoke marijuana deliberately before working, using it as a light stimulant. But most users do not smoke in circumstances in which a high degree of motivation is required.
   
In addition, there are many people using marijuana who were a-motivated long before they began smoking. Marijuana is a convenient symptom for an already unmotivated person to add to his list; a-motivation is more often the cause of heavy marijuana use, rather than its effect.

 By William Novak

Adapted from the original document entitled "Marijuana in the Lives of Americans" - http://www.psychedelic-library.org 

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