MORE YOUTHS TURNING TO POT

Drug’s Potency Makes Habit Tough To Kick, Councilors Say

Bored with small-town life and craving to be like the older boys, Christopher Bolton took his first tentative tokes of marijuana at age 12.

(Marijuananews note: The numbers below on the cost of marijuana do not make any sense to me, but that is the least of it.)

Three years later, he says, that early dalliance turned into a $100-a-day habit that kept the Auburn teenager shrouded in a hazy stupor from morning until night.

He found the drug’s allure so powerful, he didn’t feel any shame when his struggling single mother confronted him about stealing $700 she had painstakingly squirreled away to buy a used car. She had stashed the money inside a wall for safekeeping.

"She had tears running down her face," recalls Bolton, who used the savings on a week’s supply of marijuana. "That meant nothing to me."

Bolton, who was caught with marijuana in his high school locker, is on probation for four years and undergoing substance abuse counseling. Now 17, he has been drug-free for eight months.

In growing numbers, youngsters like Bolton have become ensnared in the lingering perception of marijuana as a relatively benign drug, even though many of the plants grown today are especially potent and researchers have begun documenting damaging effects from the drug.

"That means if Johnny or Mary is smoking one joint a day now," says Jerry Manny, a substance abuse psychotherapist at the Worcester Youth Guidance Center, "that would be the equivalent of smoking eight or 10 joints a day when the teens’ parents were that age."
See
Marijuana Prohibition And Potency, Price, And Safety -- 
"Is Marijuana Stronger Than It Was Back In the '60s, When Everyone Thought It Was Harmless?"
Analysis By Richard Cowan
and
The Prohibitionists In Stockholm Reveal The Shocking Truth
About The Potency Of Dutch Marijuana

The result is thousands of children and adolescents in the United States are smoking marijuana so compulsively that they are being forced by the courts, schools, and their families into drug treatment programs.

In 1996, the latest year for which data are available, more youngsters received treatment for abusing marijuana than any other substance, including alcohol, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
(Marijuananews note: This is not journalism; it is just a rehash of Joe Califano’s press release.)
See
Califano Says, "Teens who smoke marijuana are playing a dangerous game of Russian roulette."
And Other Brilliant Insights.

Of the 182,000 people under age 20 admitted to substance abuse programs, 48 percent were treated primarily for marijuana use and dependence. It’s a phenomenon that crosses racial, ethnic, and gender lines.
See
The Real Data On Teen Marijuana "Abuse Treatment" – What The Media Don’t Tell Us:
"Half of marijuana treatment admissions were referred through the criminal justice system."
-- Analysis By Richard Cowan

"There is sort of an implicit acceptance, that it is no big deal," says Jerry Duberstein, a psychologist and director at Team Coordinating Agency in Haverhill.

"But the consequences are serious in terms of kids. It gets them off track. They struggle in school. They are not able to hold onto jobs. They get into trouble in their relationships with their families and friends."

Over the years, enhanced cultivation methods have yielded marijuana plants with higher levels of the mind-altering ingredient THC, tetrahydrocannabinol, say public health and law enforcement officials, although they concede that hard data are hard to come by.

In fact, it is a matter of public record – hard data -- that the average potency has not changed in decades.)

In addition, while their parents’ generation typically smoked marijuana rolled into cigarette-sized "joints," some youngsters today favor smoking the much larger "blunts," which are hollowed-out cigars filled with marijuana.

(Marijuananews note: Blunts are found primarily in the inner city, but people have always been able to roll larger – or smaller joints. This is really absurd.)

Children and adolescents today, as a result, are taking in bigger doses of THC, which recent research has found lingers in body fat cells for days. That means even after the initial effects have worn off, the drug continues to impair judgment.

(Marijuananews note: It has been known for years, outside of the Boston Globe, that the metabolites of THC, not the psychoactive ingredients, remain in fatty tissue for up to a month. This does not mean that the effects remain.)

As the potency of marijuana has been rising, youngsters’ perceptions of the drug’s harmfulness have been eroding, resulting in a tripling of marijuana use among adolescents between 1992 and 1995, according to state and federal reports.

See
Legalize Marijuana and Reduce Use?
New Survey Puts Estimate of Dutch Marijuana Use Even More Below DEAland

Teens and substance abuse specialists say society’s vacillating views - reflected in cycles of expanding and relaxing penalties and decriminalization and recriminalization of marijuana in some states - have led to misconceptions and complacency.
(Marijuananews note: Yeah, sure, the kids sit around and discuss the success of the Alaska recrim measure and the failure of the Oregon recrim laws, and then decide to roll a blunt! Thanks to our public education fiasco, they probably couldn't find Alaska on a map.)

Amy Harris, director of the Chelsea Alcohol and Substance Abuse Program, says her difficulty finding quality educational materials about marijuana brought home the scant attention society has been paying to the problem.

(Marijuananews note: The absence of "quality educational materials about marijuana" is hardly an indication that we have not been paying attention, but rather that the literature was as unbelievable as this article.)
See
Page On The Drug Czar’s Web Site—Projectknow.Com—Is Called "True Lies" And It Truly Is

In Massachusetts, the state Public Health Department spends $7 million a year on substance abuse prevention. It has had public service campaigns to discourage the use of tobacco, alcohol, and inhalants, but no similar campaign targeting marijuana use.

In 1995, the federal government launched an anti-marijuana campaign, which included funding for research on the effects of the drug and development of materials parents can use to educate their children about its dangers.

(Marijuananews note: The federal government has been sponsoring research trying to prove that marijuana is dangerous for decades. There was a new prohibitionist propaganda campaign launched in 1995, but it wasn’t really anything that the Partnership for a Marijuana-Free America hadn’t been doing for years.)
See
When The Partnership For A Marijuana-Free America Speaks,
The Media For A Marijuana-Free America Parrots.
Widely Reported Press Release About Kids and "Drugs" Mentions Marijuana 29 Times, Alcohol 0!

H. Westley Clark, director of the US Center of Substance Abuse and Treatment, acknowledges that despite the federal effort, "clearly the message is not sinking in in the manner we would like it to sink in."

But Clark also sees another factor behind the large numbers of youngsters being treated for marijuana use. Parents might be quick to send their children into treatment, Clark says, because they envision them traveling to dangerous neighborhoods to get drugs.

Often, however, youngsters have to venture no farther than their own neighborhoods and schools to get the drug.

Peter Ducharme, 18, of the South End recalls how casual his introduction to marijuana was at a party with teenagers seven years ago.

"It was just there," he says. "It wasn’t planned. It was just something people did and didn’t have a problem with."

Ducharme began dealing drugs to classmates to support his marijuana habit, and he says that at its worst, it amounted to $200 a day. He is now in court-ordered substance abuse counseling program and has been off drugs for eight months.

Ducharme and Bolton, who have been in trouble with the law more than once because of substance abuse, say their drug use might have been averted had there been more to keep them occupied after school.

But Clark says many youngsters find plenty of activities to do to keep away from drugs, and those who abuse them might be self-medicating because of underlying emotional problems.

"I thought I was helping myself," Bolton says of his marijuana use.

"All it did was put everything on pause.

"It was ridiculous," adds Bolton, who credits his fiancee with inspiring him to turn around his life. "I wasted time. I wasted money. Trust is the biggest thing I lost, the trust of my family and teachers. You can throw it away in a millisecond. But it can take years to get back."