A study of the residual effects of cannabis on memory is currently awaiting approval by Washington State University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB).

Carrie Cuttler, a clinical assistant professor in the department of psychology at WSU, plans to start collecting data for her cannabis and cognition study later this semester after the IRB approves her research.

“The goal of my research is going to be to examine individual differences in the influence of cannabis on cognition,” Cuttler said. “I will be conducting research in order to try to understand who cannabis has negative effects on and who cannabis doesn’t seem to have effects on.”

Cuttler has received an award from the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research program to fund her cannabis research. These funds will be released pending the IRB’s approval.

Approximately half of the studies conducted on cannabis have shown no residual effects on memory, Cuttler said.

“When people just smoke kind of on a regular basis and then they come in and they do our cognitive tests when they’re not high, about half of studies find small effects and about half of studies don’t find any effects,” Cuttler said.

Additionally, Cuttler states that most cannabis studies are carried out on undergraduate students, potentially creating a bias in the data.

“One of the issues in the literature is that a lot of the research is done on undergraduate students, and they maybe haven’t been using it long enough to show detrimental effects,” Cuttler said.

Cuttler wants to bridge this gap by using volunteers from the community who are older and have used cannabis for a longer time.

“The other variable we think might explain this discrepancy is when people start using cannabis,” Cuttler said. “The literature seems to indicate that if you start using cannabis regularly during adolescence that it could have far greater detrimental effects than if you start using it in adulthood.”

This factor is considered because the brain is still developing during adolescence, Cuttler explained.

“So, what I’ll be doing is comparing people who use cannabis on a daily or near-daily basis with people who don’t use cannabis, or don’t regularly use cannabis, on a series of tests of memory, attention, and executive functioning,” Cuttler said.

Cuttler plans to divide the volunteers into two groups, undergraduate and community volunteers, and then subdivide the groups into users who started as adolescents and users who started as adults.

“That will just help me to tease out whether part of the reason people haven’t found effects of cannabis on cognition in the past is because of the overreliance on these undergraduate students,” Cuttler said.

Reporting by Alysen Boston