I don't know how much we should read into this:
"Stoned young rats fail memory tests
Researchers at the University of Sydney have found that adolescent rats are more vulnerable to adverse effects of cannabis than adult rats.
Professor Ian McGregor says rats' brains basically respond to drugs the same way as humans but they are easier to work with because they are not polydrug users.
He says his team gave the rats cannabis then took them off the drug for two weeks before testing their long-term memory.
"We found that the adolescents that had been given cannabis had impaired memory, relative to adolescent rats that hadn't had cannabis exposure," he said.
"Then when we compared them to adults we found there was very little memory deficits in the adults rats that had been given cannabis."
Professor McGregor says cannabis exposure also caused more permanant changes in a certain part of the adolescents' brains that was not really affected in the adults.
He says the grown-up rats avoided cannabis when they could but the young ones seemed to enjoy the new sensations and experience.
"In the wild, it's a time when rats have to leave their mother and father and will nest and go out and explore the environment and learn to fend for themselves," he said.
"There's a large amount of risk taking associated with that developmental stage."
But it would be nice to have some human studies done to see if a similar effect is shown in adolesent people... In the mean time we should err on the side of caution.
