Cannabis Use in Kids: What Every Parent Needs to Know
Could marijuana be the next epidemic?
As the wave of legalization surrounding medical marijuana and recreational cannabis sweeps the nation, many of us who work in the addiction field are worried. Really worried. Legalization has brought increased availability and decreased stigma, and those two conditions — availability and acceptance — are strongly related to how much people use a given drug, especially youth.
If you’re a parent, you may be wondering why that’s problematic. Perhaps you used cannabis when you were younger, and you don’t see any harm in it.
The problem is that the marijuana of today is a far more potent drug than the marijuana of years past.
Up until the 1990s, the amount of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, was about 3–4%. As the first states began to legalize marijuana, breeders began to experiment and create stronger strains. By the mid-2000s, the average potency was up to 12%. Now, in states where marijuana is legal, it’s common to find THC levels of 20% or more. Think about that for a minute: that means that the marijuana of today is actually a drug that’s 5 to 7 times stronger than the drug most people think of as marijuana from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and even ’90s. Edibles are even more potent, with concentrations up to 80%. Guess who is attracted to gummies and other edibles? Kids.
New data from the annual survey of drug use conducted by the National Institutes of Health found that 11% of young adults said they used marijuana daily, nearly double the rate from a decade ago. That’s more than 1 in 10 young people. It’s the highest levels of regular use ever reported since the study started in the ‘80s.
And here’s the big problem:
We don’t know the long-term effects of this highly potent new drug on the developing brain — and what we do know is worrisome.
Marijuana adversely affects memory and motivation, which are critical skills for young people, who are still learning, growing, and making important life decisions.
Young people need to get themselves to class or work, remember to do their homework, meet up with their friends or partners. Regular marijuana use starts to impair all these critical components of daily life. But then comes the other nefarious part of the drug’s impact on the developing brain: the more a person uses, the less they care about adverse consequences. They’re not motivated to do anything about it. We’ve been seeing these trends on college campuses for years.
Daily marijuana use is on the rise; it’s wreaking havoc on an increasing number of young people’s lives, and their brains are no longer motivated to care.
Oh, and did I mention that marijuana causes psychosis in a small but significant subgroup of kids?
To be clear, I’m not necessarily against legalization. The “war on drugs” caused great damage to many lives; it sent people who needed substance use treatment to prisons rather than hospitals, and it was disproportionately used to incarcerate people of color. Righting that wrong is a critical step that is long overdue.
However, the corollary of legalization — that marijuana use is increasingly perceived as “harmless” — just doesn’t match the data. Most young people, and parents, don’t realize how different today’s marijuana is from the marijuana of the past. Let’s all work to raise awareness so that young people can make choices that set them up for success.
Danielle Dick, PhD is a professor of psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Director of the Rutgers Addiction Research Center. She is an internationally recognized expert on adolescent and emerging adult alcohol use and related mental health problems. She has written >350 scientific papers and been awarded >30 million dollars in research funding from the National Institutes of Health. She is the author of The Child Code: Understanding Your Child’s Unique Nature for Happier, More Effective Parenting, published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Visit my website at danielledick.com for free resources, or follow me on social media at Dr. Danielle Dick, for more information about how understanding genetics can help you in your parenting, relationships, health, and well-being.
