HIGH
about drugs, we’ve found that most don’t have to be convinced that drugs like cocaine and heroin are dangerous. And while sometimes they’re uninformed about alcohol—they usually don’t know it has a different impact on their brain than on an adult’s—they understand that binge drinking is dangerous.
Many, however, roll their eyes when anyone says that marijuana is dangerous too. “It’s natural,” they say. “It’s an herb.” They say, “No one’s ever died because of pot,” and “Weed isn’t addictive.” It’s legal in some states, and more states are considering legalizing it.
Pot smoking has become an accepted part of mainstream culture. It’s everywhere. There’s even an unofficial but widely celebrated National Pot Smoking Day, 4/20, when people post lists of the best movies to watch stoned and comedians joke about it on late-night TV.
Of course, even in states where marijuana is legal for adults, those under twenty-one are prohibited from using it. We’re not going to argue the issue of legalization in this book. You may have strong views on the subject—many in America do.
It doesn’t really matter whether pot is legal in the United States when it comes to its impact on health and safety. Prescription medications are legal, but they kill more people than any other drug except, of course, cigarettes, and alcohol, which is also legal for those over twenty-one. For that matter, driving is legal and accessible to teens as young as sixteen, but fatalities abound. So something’s legality has little bearing on its safety.
One difference a drug’s legality makes to a potential user, other than removing the risk of incarceration, has to do with its “perception of risk.” In other words, because a drug is legal, or because the penalties for possessing it feel comparatively minimal, some people consider it less risky to use.
Some teenagers have told us that almost everyone they know smokes. Some get high on “edibles,” which these days include marijuana brownies, ice cream, gummy bears, barbecue sauce, and food made from any of many popular pot cookbook recipes, such as Ganja Granny’s Smoked Mac ’N’ Cheese.
Some teens use synthetic marijuana, which despite its name isn’t marijuana and has completely different effects and risks. (We’ll get back to Spice and other drugs billed as synthetic pot.) Some use hash and similar drugs derived from the cannabis plant.
Clearly many people smoke (or consume) pot without any obvious negative impact on their lives. Again, though, “obvious” is the operative term here. Negative effects may be subtle or may not become apparent for years. And while those who preach that marijuana will kill you, make you crazy, or make you shoot heroin are wrong, usually so are people who claim it’s harmless.
Here are the facts.
Though marijuana use doesn’t appear to harm lives like alcohol or opioids, research has shown that many long-term pot smokers have reported poor outcomes on a variety of life satisfaction and achievement measures. Fewer smokers than nonsmokers complete college, and here’s a fact that may surprise some kids: smokers are far more likely than nonsmokers to earn yearly incomes of less than thirty thousand dollars.
Says Dr. Richard N. Rosenthal, chair of psychiatry at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan and professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University: “The people who become chronic users don’t have the same lives and the same achievements as people who don’t use chronically.”
In some users, marijuana has been shown to cause something called amotivational syndrome, a pattern of behavior characterized by, yes, a lack of motivation. Even though it’s tough to quantify motivation, many long-term pot smokers describe a lack of drive that affects and in some cases defines their lives.
In the movie Jackie Brown, Samuel L. Jackson’s character tells his girlfriend, “That sh— gonna rob you of your own ambition, girl.” She answers, “Not if your ambition is to get stoned and watch TV.”
An adult we met told us that he began smoking when he was a teenager, which either caused or contributed to what he described as a “life of disappointments.” “I’ve never been able to hold down a job and never had a relationship that lasted,” he said. “I’ve lived in a cloud of smoke and television since I was thirteen, so maybe it’s not surprising that things haven’t turned out better for me.”
A 2014 study showed that teenagers who smoked pot daily were both 60 percent less likely to finish high school and 60 percent less likely to finish college than teens who didn’t smoke. Also, they were seven times more likely to attempt suicide.
Plenty of research exists that shows that pot may even affect brain structure, cognitive functioning, and memory in adolescents. Dr. Susan Tapert, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, scanned the brains of kids who had smoked weed throughout their childhoods and those who had never smoked. She found startling differences.
Group Reckoning
It’s a clear spring morning in Plymouth, Michigan, and David is visiting a rehab center called Hazelden Betty Ford. It’s a program for kids—well, it’s called an adolescent treatment center, and it’s for fourteen- to twenty-five-year-olds, but the kids in this group are on the younger side of that range—mostly between fourteen and seventeen. Most are in treatment because of addiction exclusively to pot. Anyone who says marijuana isn’t addictive should talk to these kids. Indeed, they have all suffered devastating consequences from their pot smoking, and most have tried to stop but can’t.
The boys tell about experimentation turning to consistent use turning to addiction. Some were arrested for using or selling. One was arrested because he struck his mother. (“It just happened. I lost it. I felt real bad.”)
Some haven’t experienced the same kinds of calamities as the others. One kid says, “I just couldn’t stop. No sh—. You think, I’m not an addict. I can quit. I just like it. I’ll stop when I feel like it. But you don’t quit. Then you’re smoking every day.”
A boy says, “For me, there was one thing that happened that bothers me. I have no short-term memory. It’s really a drag.” It’s a classic symptom of pot smoking—the impact of marijuana on memory retrieval.
“I know what you mean,” another boy says.
Another boy says, “Yeah, then there’s the breathing thing—I had bronchitis all the time. I know it was related because it’s gone now that I’m not smoking.”
A boy with long auburn hair parted in the middle says that another effect of smoking was burning through money. “I thought, Aw, it’s cheap, but when you’re smoking every day it’s not cheap unless you’re getting schwag [low-grade pot]. So you run out of money and you have to figure out how to get more, and there was always more in my mom’s purse. She never suspected. She doesn’t even now.”
“I never had a problem with money,” says a boy in torn jeans and a white T-shirt. “My main thing was just that I stopped caring.”
The counselor asks how that made him feel, and he says, “Pretty bad. I mean . . .”
Another boy says, “Depressed.”
“Yeah.”
“Weed’s a depressant,” says a boy on the opposite side of the circle. “I’m on like forty antidepressants and I’m smoking a depressant.”
That brings the conversation around to another kid, who admits he’s there because he tried to kill himself.
One of the other kids says, “Who hasn’t tried to kill themselves? I mean, we’re here, aren’t we? Welcome to the club.”
Another says, “I was trying to kill myself too. Just the slow way. By using.”
In brain scans, Dr. Tapert found alterations of marijuana users’ white matter—the network of fibers that link brain regions and allow signals to be sent between them. In heavy marijuana smokers’ brains, the white matter had “poorer integrity,” she says. That means that brain regions may not be able to communicate as efficiently and as quickly as in nonsmokers’ brains. The faulty memory and slow reaction time of teens when they’re high may become permanent problems in adulthood.
