Smoking cannabis can make people less willing to work for money while “high”, finds a study.
The research, published in Psychopharmacology, demonstrated the short-term effects of cannabis on motivation in humans and tested motivation in people who were addicted to cannabis but not high during the test.
It was found that their motivation levels were no different to volunteers in the control group.
The researchers compared people dependent on cannabis to similar controls, when neither group was intoxicated and did not find a difference in motivation.
This tentatively suggests that long-term cannabis use may not result in residual motivation problems when people stop using it. However, longitudinal research is needed to provide more conclusive evidence.
For this study, 57 volunteers were involved, which consisted of two separate studies. The first involved 17 adult volunteers who used cannabis occasionally.
Straight after, they completed a task designed to measure their motivation for earning money. This was a real-life task as the volunteers were given money they had earned at the end of the experiment.