Smoking Weed Is Bad for Your Paycheck

It hasn't been a great week for enthusiasts of the happy smoke.

First, Canadian researchers said smoking marijuana even once can increase the chance of a psychotic event by 41 percent.

Then, another study claimed that one joint is as damaging to your lungs as five cigarettes.

Now, a new study finds that men of prime working age (26 to 50) who smoked up in the past year earn less than their ganja-free counterparts.

The study, conducted by Jan C. van Ours, a professor of labor economics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, looked at the pot smoking habits of working men in Amsterdam where pot is quasi-legal.

(Women were excluded from the study because of inexact earnings data.)

Van Ours found that the earlier a person started smoking marijuana, the less he would be paid compared to a person who had never smoked.

Men who started using weed at 25-years-old had wages that were 6 percent lower than their counterparts, while those who started at age 15 earned 14.3 percent less.

Marijuana has been linked to truancy and school dropout, so the surprising result here is that even if you finish school without having smoked pot, you're still susceptible to the negative wage effects.

But the study doesn't have an answer for why the negative effect on wages exists: Are men who use marijuana by their nature more interested in immediate pleasure and therefore put off doing things that could help them get higher wages? Or is there something in the wacky tobacky that's harmful to people's ability to function on the job?

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