Teens have access to vastly more potent cannabis than their parents had at their age. Parents need to understand the risks, including psychosis
For me it’s real simple: I talk to my kids about drug use and its negative impact on their growing minds and bodies. Like any growing organism, they need good food, fresh air, plenty of water, and exercise. Smoking, drinking, and drugs do not provide any of that, and all I ask of them is to wait until they are older.
Brennan Mulligan doesn’t do drugs (or alcohol I think) and he has told his mother’s insanely good talk about it on Gianmarco’s Soresi’s podcast. https://youtu.be/8t12OsPeCFY?t=49m59s
Still true for adults tho
What you’re describing is basically plants. Humans need much more than air, food and exercise. Thats an extremely limited point of view from your side.
Humans need social and spiritual experiences and substances in the right hands are tools for achieving this. A tool is only as good as the person using it so obviously kids shouldn’t be dropping acid but a responsible adult who had years of human experiences can gain a lot through altered states of mind.
Wow they fail basic science. Correlation does not equal causation. More gateway drug scare in its modern form.
No, they don’t “fail basic science”. They point out that there is a correlation and we need better studies, but the mere existence of the correlation is worrying, especially considering a lot of recent studies are confirming the link between cannabis and teen psychosis. A lot of the early studies on the harm of cigarettes started similarly. Correlation between lung cancer and smoking tobacco doesn’t imply causation, but it’s one hell of an alarm bell.
The author of the article themselves doesn’t say cannabis is a gateway drug and even recognizes that asking people to just not use it isn’t realistic.
They fail to explore systemic correlations and hyperfocus on cannabis. I am claiming they are repeating reactionary history instead of systemic analysis. Focusing on what is wrong with the individual rather than the system that bore them.
The article is an opinion as stated at the bottom.
Maybe the issue isn’t individual, but societal. Brave New World had vacation pills, interestingly named Soma. The current people don’t even want you to have a mind vaycay.
Anecdotal stories aren’t evidence, take your first year science class over.
Hey thank you! I thought Lemmy could never have the full Reddit experience, but there’s completely lazy and misinformed comments here too.
Try reading the article next time.
asking people to just not use it isn’t realistic.
Why though?
The same reason abstinence only sex ed doesn’t work.
And alcohol prohibition
I mean (most) humans are naturally driven to have sex, but no such instinct exists for weed.
There’s no such instinct for weed in particular, but almost everyone seeks out psychoactive substances in one form or another.
Uh… What?
Instinct for pleasure does.
no such instinct exists for weed.
I’d argue an instinct for getting high does exist.
Which may have scientific or medical reasons that the user isn’t even aware of. Which can be just fine, too. Enjoy! Not everyone has to become a scientist. Just if it’s important enough to you, or because you have to defend from the army of “Just Say No” types. They aren’t speaking about any of the benefits of marijuana. Pure ignorance or worse.
I’m more thinking socialism evolution over hundreds of thousands of years, than a personal preference.
I mean, I believe that where my personal preference came from, to be accurate.
I contend that Neanderthals were smarter, but didn’t get high, and due to hominids at that time (and still) being rather easily aggravated into (even mortal) fights, I dare say getting high while meeting up with new people would definitely be an advantage to a species. Which the Neanderthals didn’t have, and thus dies out while the h sapienses were out getting high and fucking
Alcohol, then. Prohibition didn’t work and a lot of people died making and selling their own moonshine.
I mean part of that was because of how idiotic the application of prohibition was, because on the other hand I can think of one very successful prohibition campaign.
Humans have found creative ways to get fucked up for millennia.
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but no such instinct exists for weed.
Based on what exactly?
From a Medical Marijuana Educational Guide (full disclosure, it’s connected to a dispensary):
*Also note: it uses “Medical Marijuana” language because it’s from a state where only medical is legal, not recreational.
Medical Marijuana works by impacting the Endocannabinoid System we all have in our bodies.
“Your body already makes Medical Marijuana-like chemicals that affect pain, inflammation, sleep and many other processes. It mimics those naturally occurring compounds in the body, and can produce therapeutic effects.” -Laura Borgelt, PharmD, University of Colorado
History proves this correct. It’s never worked. They’ve even gone so far as to jail people. Maybe others should learn something from this instead of constantly beating the marijuana bad drum.
Jailing people is the whole point
Okay let’s be clear that no matter where you ultimately stand on abstinence the war on drugs was a massively idiotic affair. Also given global downward trends in smoking I’d say there’s merit to the idea of anti-drug education/propaganda, with hopefully fewer bullets than the war on drugs.
I’m having trouble following some of the last parts of your comment. Are you saying that it’s worth it for the anti-smoking angle, like for health benefits? There are other methods for taking marijuana that have nothing to do with inhalation. Additionally, children can be prescribed CBD, to be taken through digestion or sublingually. This is a proven treatment for controlling seizures.
If you want to address smoking, I think there’s much to be said. But making it all about smoking is a distortion. And until others prove otherwise, to me it’s deliberate. Vaping isn’t seen today as harmful like combustion is. I’m sure there’s more to learn there, but all of these things are positive developments, that should be spoken about along with the negatives folks simply want to focus on.
Are you saying that it’s worth it for the anti-smoking angle, like for health benefits?
I’m trying to say that if there turn out to be significant health issues caused by cannabis (which seems likely given the data in the article), then an anti-cannabis campaign should be viable and at least partially successful, in the same way anti-tobacco campaigns have been successful in reducing tobacco use. Drug use isn’t some force of nature that can’t be stopped if we have a good reason to stop it; the war on drugs failed to stop it because the war on drugs was stupid.
Right, only if you are speaking about children. The proof I use is the massive demand for it, along with the no massive damage to people or society over all these years. And, this is in the face of illegality and jail time. So other than some focused study on the effects of youth that result in an appropriate response, you can get out of here with your junk science and reefer madness. Alcohol is much more damaging on the brain. Look it up!
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Hell yeah. Correlation studies are useless guys! I know very much science.
My concern is another Reefer Madness type of propaganda campaign. We need legit, replicable and replicated studies. I don’t indulge anymore, for several reasons. Most were practical but also unrelated to health/employment.
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You’re gonna get tired of repeating this in about, oh, 20 years.
I’m speaking from experience.
You’re entirely correct, just to be clear. You’re just gonna get tired of repeating it.
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Just don’t do drugs. It’s pretty simple.
Idk, I’m a full grown adult, and I very much enjoy doing some drugs. Always been glad I got started, even with the various consequences of that decision.
Kids should have time to develop their brains, but adults should get to use or misuse theirs as they please.
Ok, don’t take any pain killers or sedatives when you go in for your next surgery and tell me after “just don’t do drugs”.
You got it!
Not even caffeine?
He “dabbled” with other substances as well (Xanax, Ecstasy)
Yeah sure it’s cannabis… I have no words.
The link between diabetics and insulin is real
These Zelda games are getting out of hand
Good. It should remain illegal.
Why do you hate fun and personal freedom?
Canada legalized it years ago and literally nothing changed. Well, good vibes maybe, but nothing negative.
A plant, should be illegal? A plant? A thing that will grow out of the ground if you scatter a few seeds? Why would you want to make a plant illegal?
It’s totally not the potency of natural cannabis. It is the user’s lifestyle and world around him/her. Like how shrooms are banned because not everybody reads the recommended dosage and somebody on reddit already posted about taking a kilogram of dried shrooms, your eyes will look like cherries.
A kilogram? I struggle to get a few grams down! And I think anyone who managed to eat that much would end up puking it all out in short order. It sounds like a very expensive way to waste a lot of perfectly good drugs.
I don’t think a kilo of shrooms would fit in my stomach.
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I’m wondering about dosage here, really. As a kid, I smoked weed like maybe once a week but I knew kids who were constantly high all day, every day. We called them “permafried” and some even self-identified that way as a matter of pride.
Hopefully, with further study and research, we can get more information about the actual risk to teens with a variety of usage patterns. Then it’s a matter of education so that they’re aware of the risk before they’re presented with the choice to smoke.
The problem is, a bunch of people with very limited drug experience sharing their anecdotal stories isn’t evidence. It’s just a story.
what would you consider extensive drug experience with cannabis, particularly in the context of minors as to be relevant to the study?
I think that a scientific study would be a better place to start than anecdotes. Preferably one run by actual research professionals.
Yeah, I’m aware of that. We need more study and research, like I said. I’m very pro-weed (I’m smoking right now lol), but we can’t make reasonable conclusions about the level of risk involved in teen smoking yet. We just don’t know the full extent of any negative effects on developing brains.
I think assessing risk based on consumption makes sense in terms of teens (and young adults too because their brains are still developing) being informed of the level of risk involved in how much they smoke, so that’s why I advocated for that.
Lol
My hot take is that teens should be allowed to smoke weed but only if they grow it themselves. Wand some kid? (Hands grow light and tent) get to work. It takes patience since you won’t get your first crop for 3-4 months and the quantity they consume is limited to what they can grow, and it’s a skill they’d learn
Everybody should use a flower vaporizer like G Pen. Clean hits, low dose, and none of the crap that’s in concentrates.
Compared to what I even had when I was a kid as a millennial, these vape pens are wild. Dabbing all the time. It’s like casually taking shots of alcohol. There is such thing as marijuana abuse and even addiction.
In some cases, people are using medical marijuana. It’s strange to point out someone else’s frequency of medication usage throughout the day, don’t ya think? Having the ease of a vape cart is no reason to be worried. Know your dosage and stick to it.
I’m not talking about medicinal users. The overwhelming majority of people smoking weed are using it recreationally. Weird comment.
Yes. It’s strange how you and others left out large parts of the marijuana story, but want to be taken seriously. Your argument only works when you don’t consider everything. Huh, imagine that.
I sense that you were personally offended by my comment. Apologies if you are using it for medicinal purposes. I am in no way condemning your behavior. You do what you need to do. Others abuse it. Hope you are healing or as comfortable as you can be with whatever you are treating with marijuana.
G pens are okay, pax are okay. Honestly they are all very mid in comparison to the Airizer products. The air max I have or whatever its called is the closest flower vape Ive ever had to smoking, easiest to use and clean, and I beat the shit out of it smoking multiple times a day and it still works great after almost two years
Have a look at dynavap as well. I like arizer for session vapes, but dynavap is awesome for on-demand hits and feels closer to smoking than any other method I’ve tried (other than smoking)
Thanks I’ll check it out!
EDIT: woah that shits expensive
The war on drugs has made research into cannabis difficult and compared to alcohol and tobacco, we are practically blind. Legalization has changed this and we should pay attention.
The only thing to match the propaganda of the drug war is the CBD cure-all craze. I think that it’s wise to do some basic research so that one day we can have an informed opinion rather than a knee jerk reaction.
Research into tobacco and alcohol, use used to be practically impossible, but there were several congressional acts which pushed for independent analysis to get to the truth of these matters. But this happened after possibly centuries of their youth. Cannabis is only entered, mainstream consciousness, recently, and so it’s going to take a while before the taboo around it’s use fades enough forthere to be reasonably and rationally funded research into the effects of its use.
there were several congressional acts which pushed for independent analysis to get to the truth of these matters.
It’s wild to imagine the U.S. congress actually promoting independent scientific research. I wish I lived in a world like that.
Teens have access to vastly more potent cannabis than their parents had at their age
Oh FFS. I’ve been hearing this same bullshit for the last 25 years and it’s still irrational Reefer Madness conservative fearmongering.
So what? If anything, more potent weed is less harmful because you are putting a smaller amount of burned plant material into your lungs to get the same effect.
It’s not like people just… consume one marijuana and however high that gets you, that’s what you’re going with today. No, you’re going to continue smoking until you get sufficiently stoned and then stop and put it out.
It doesn’t take long for anyone to figure out how high is too high and how much it takes to get there, and plan accordingly.
It might be a vape pen with 92% THC hash oil in it so you take a couple of sippy little puffs and get mildly buzzed and you’re fine with that. Or conversely you can pack up a handful of that leafy brown prohibition-era crap and do gravity bongs until you cough your lungs out, and get a lot higher, because that was your goal.
They sell those oil-soaked kif-encrusted joints here. You do not want to finish one in one sitting. The point of these isn’t to get insanely baked, it’s that one good hit will do it and you can put it out and save it in the glass jar it came in.
As others have explained already- if you have the kind of brain prone to psychosis, weed is likely to push you over the edge- and that’s likely to happen when you’re a teenager, because lots of people try it at that age- but something else would have triggered it a few years later. And yes it’s just universally worse for adolescent brains. It is already illegal, everywhere it’s legal, for people under 21, which is reasonable. But parents need to parent.
The idea that we can and should protect the kids who are predisposed to go schizo by keeping the available cannabis weak enough that no one can smoke enough of it to ever get really high is just absurd when you phrase it that way but that’s exactly what anyone pushing this “It’s so much more potent now!” pearl-cluching FUD is trying to sell you.
If anything, more potent weed is less harmful because you are putting a smaller amount of burned plant material into your lungs to get the same effect.
Yes. The actual issue is the THC/CBD ratio, CBD being antipsychotic as well as blocking the metabolisation of THC into more psychoactive variants.
Add to that criminalisation and the desire of dealers to impress clueless customers with head highs and you get selective breeding for high-THC strains. I’d say the main reason I stopped back in the days was because there was essentially nothing but white willow on the market, ~20% THC ~1% CBD. And that’s not even the worst of the strains.
Hopefully legalisation cuts back on that BS, with every satchel coming with test results showing people how off-kilter or balanced the weed is. There’s certainly no shortage of CBD-heavy seeds available, the market is obviously there.
This shouldn’t be controversial. It’s been known for about a decade now if not longer.
he had had persistent delusions for more than six months. Sam was fully convinced that the government was following him and constantly surveilling him
That’s not a delusion tho.
The government probably is surveilling them.
Also, anecdotes are not evidence unless you’ve got a brain worm.
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Lmfao, what if we started smoking the green because of low grade psychosis? Chicken or egg that.
