I hate it.
I drive my children to school and pass a billboard showing a lovely birthday cake and marijuana leaves and reminding everyone that they must be 21 years old in order to partake. Talk about setting up a "forbidden fruit" scenario. My husband saw another billboard that showed a pretty outdoor scene, but it wasn't clear what the ad was about; once he got closer, he could read that it was a reminder that only private, not public, use of marijuana is allowed.
Today in the thrift store aisle, an employee loudly complained to another co-worker about how a female in his life doesn't appreciate him smoking "the janga" and argued that pot is no worse than tobacco.
My children read billboards and go to the thrift store with me. They see all the green "plus" signs for the medical marijuana dispensaries, sometimes with sign wavers dancing in front to draw in customers (there can't possibly be enough people getting non-recreational health benefits from pot for so many dispensaries to stay in business). Children, including mine, are very impressionable, and this legalization experiment is bad for them. It normalizes the use of an herb that does terrible things to adolescents while making it extraordinarily easy to obtain.
A new book, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults, has a sobering (to those who aren't high, at least) chapter on marijuana, which discusses how THC concentrations in pot have more than doubled since the 1980s. Here are some quotes from that chapter:
THC disrupts the development of neural pathways. In an adolescent brain that is still laying down white matter and wiring itself together, such disruptions are far more harmful than if they were taking place in an adult brain....
In the past five years, several studies have shown that verbal IQ especially is decreased in people who have smoked daily starting before age seventeen, compared with people who smoked at a later age....
One of the largest studies followed tens of thousands of young Swedish soldiers for more than a decade. The heaviest users--that is, those who said they had used marijuana more than fifty times--were six times as likely to develop schizophrenia as those who had never smoked pot....
Another little-known fact is that levels of two abrasive compounds in marijuana smoke, tar and carbon monoxide, are three to five times greater in cannabis consumers than tobacco users. Smoking five marijuana cigarettes is equal to smoking a full pack of tobacco cigarettes, according to the American Lung Association. Marijuana smoke, which users inhale and try to hold in their lungs for as long as possible, also contains 50 to 70 percent more cancer-causing chemicals than cigarette smoke contains....
Teenagers are especially vulnerable to the drug because they are at a critical stage in the development of two of the most sophisticated parts of their brains--the frontal and prefrontal cortext--and these are precisely the parts most affected by marijuana.
Despite the research showing the harm done by marijuana, users of it refuse to accept that there could be anything wrong with their beloved plants. The fact that a few seizure-prone children are helped by marijuana oil doesn't make all the other documented problems go away. Perhaps they've never met someone with schizophrenia, but I have a close family member suffering from it (probably unconnected with drugs), which means all her family--especially her children--suffers, too; it's easy for me to despise a "recreational" substance that increases the number of schizophrenics in this world. There's nothing fun about a mother who is unable to care for herself or her family properly due to that particular mental illness.
Pot advocates remind me of the vociferous defenders of pit bulls that show up in website comment sections whenever a little old lady has been mauled to death yet again. (Interestingly, the only marijuana grower I know of has a pit bull. I wonder how large the overlap in the population of pit bull owners and marijuana fanatics is.)
It's discouraging to see how many adults are so enamored of their weed that they would flood communities with it despite the proven risks to young people. If your state has a movement to legalize pot, fight it now until the backers give up and move to a state that has already lost that fight. It's probably too late for Colorado, but you don't have to follow in our miss-steps.
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