Are the Egyptian findings an artefact of a biased composition of the control group?
Fletcher and Satz underlined the fact that our control group had a better standing than users on literacy. We admit that it would have been preferable to have the two groups, the experimentals and controls, exactly equated on this parameter. However, the argument the two authors presented, based on that fact, does not seem convincing. To begin with, the way Fletcher and Satz paraphrase our first hypothesis does not do justice to our original formulation. Following is the way they put it: “The first of Soueif’s 3 hypotheses states that deficits in brain function are associated only with higher literacy levels”. But our original formulation reads as follows: “The lower the level of literacy the smaller the size of function deficit associated with cannabis taking” (Soueif, 1976 a). It would be readily seen that whereas the first statement suggested dichotomy the latter implies gradation. The former formulation makes it easy for Fletcher and Satz to present their argument which would run s
