Teenagers and marijuana | courier-journal | The Courier-Journal
If you’re a baby boomer, don’t lull yourself into thinking that marijuana is a fading fad that represents a modest threat to today’s youth.

You’d be wrong.

Nearly half of today’s teenagers try marijuana before graduating from high school, and by their senior year more than 20 percent are regular users, Science Daily reported in May.

But according to the same figures that describe 19.8% (not over 20%) of the Class of 2005 used marijuana last month, for the Class of 1975 (baby boomers), that figure was 27.1%.  In fact, in 1979, lifetime use peaked at 60.4% and in 1978, monthly use peaked at 37.1%

More teens use marijuana than all other illegal drugs combined, and they are at greater risk than teens who smoked pot a couple of decades ago.

“It’s much more potent than what they smoked at Woodstock,” echoed Jim Cowser, a chemical dependency therapist in the Center for Behavioral Health at Baptist Hospital East.

A more recent style of smoking marijuana also is intensifying its impact. “During the ’60s, there were mostly joints,” said Dr. Elizabeth Garcia-Gray, chief medical officer of child psychiatric services for Seven Counties Services Inc.

“Now we have blunts, which are like two or three joints packed in one,” she explained.

“When they pack it up in blunts, the potency is much more, and if they smoke four or five blunts a day, it’s like 10 to 12 joints,” she explained.

Well, of course.  It’s like when you take one shot of 70 proof whiskey and you add it to another shot of 70 proof whiskey, you get a double shot of 140 proof whiskey, right?  …  No, you dolt, blunts are no more potent than joints, marijuana is marijuana!

And the size of the blunt, well, duh, that’s like saying if you drink three 40-ounce beers that’s like drinking ten 12-ounce cans.  It doesn’t follow that if boomers smoked four or five joints in a day that today’s consumers are smoking four or five blunts in a day.  People smoke to get high.  If it took a whole joint of “Woodstock Weed” or takes ten people sharing one of today’s blunts, people smoke that much and stop.

Cowser said cannabis may lead alcohol as the No. 1 substance abused by teens because it “is easier to conceal and a lot more accessible” than alcohol.

And nobody hassles you for any ID!  And you can get it at high school behind the shop building from another student!  And if you’re caught with it, they’ll take you to drug court and sentence you to rehab so Mr. Cowser can keep his bed counts up.

He said the mental health consequences of marijuana use range from transient amnesia to intensifying depressive disorders. Marijuana also may trigger an early onset of schizophrenia in those at risk for the illness.

So you’d think, then, that you’d see rates of schizophrenia, depression, and “transient amnesia” (you mean “forgetting where you just left your keys”) rise and fall relative to the rates of marijuana use and potency.  You go right ahead and find that data.  Look hard.  I’ll give you a start - over the past forty years, nationwide rates for schizophrenia stayed relatively constant at about 1.1% of the population.  Even during the 60s Summer of Love, GIs returning from Viet Nam in the 70s with killer jungle weed, the 80s advent of connoisseur indoor marijuana production, the 90s birth of medical marijuana, and all the way to today - 1.1% of the people get schizophrenia.

That said, it’s not for adolescents.  There is credible research to suggest that cannabis may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia if used heavily by teens who are predisposed to schizophrenia.  But we need to avoid overreacting to the relative odds when the actual odds are still quite low.

What’s the difference?  Well, think of it this way.  Relative odds say that if you buy ten lottery tickets, you’re ten times as likely to win the jackpot as the person who bought one ticket.  Actual odds say that both of you have a greater chance of being hit by lightning.

Other dangers: lung damage and social and behavioral problems. Marijuana used when driving can make it difficult to judge distances and react to signals and sounds on the road. Marijuana affects judgment, perception and memory, so it can mean poor performance in school, in sports or at a job. It can lead to risky sexual behavior.

Your lung damage consists of at worst, a hacking cough or mild bronchitis, and that’s if you’re bonghitting morning noon and night for decades.  Marijuana smoking does not lead to head, neck, or lung cancers (Tashkin et al).  Don’t smoke pot at school, in sports, or at work!  Practice safe sex.  None of those harms are caused by marijuana, they’re caused by irresponsibility and would be twice as devastating if we were talking about irresponsible drinking.

Cowser reports that withdrawal from marijuana can take longer than withdrawing from alcohol or cocaine. He said the THC in marijuana accumulates in the fat tissues, which are slow to release the chemical.

Bald-faced liar.  THC-COOH metabolites accumulate in the fat tissues.  These are non-psychoactive compounds that cause no withdrawal symptoms whatsoever.  THC itself is clear of your system within 2-4 hours.

Tags: Kentucky, schizophrenia, Woodstock Weed

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Reefer Madness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a trackback from your own site.