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>>>Do other teachers notice this too when the school year starts up again? Buzzed out students<<<<

Oh, yeah. The cognitive damage is up front when you’re asking kids to read and write every day. Every teacher sees it, too. Symptoms include leaving out words when writing a narrative; sluggish response time; inability to recall simple, one-step directions; difficulty retrieving information taught the previous year; and, if the students stops using, bitchiness and irritability about four to six weeks after stopping. (I’m comparing these kids to those who spend all or most of the summer sober - hey, they’re teenagers, so a certain robust amount of spacing out and attitude is normal. However, you can target those getting high. With the advent of computer-assisted reading programs, you can even measure it. And since I live in a remote village, most of the time, a kid will just honestly fess up about drug habits once he or she gets to know you, so you can compare what they say with the evidence on the page.)

I know a lot of us expect weed to produce a crowd of Obama zombies (which might be the zeitgeist leading to the popularity of the zombie motif), but anything could happen, from complete collapse to Puritan rebellion. The advent of brain-interface technology might make marijuana intoxication seem like a quaint Paleolithic habit, too. All I know is that I don’t know, I’m not Nostradamus, and even Nostradamus isn’t Nostradamus.