Pharmaceutical companies, tobacco companies, private for-profit companies are helping market high potency, psychosis inducing THC products as ‘medical marijuana’ or as a harmless recreational food supplement. While this perception of weed in the past may have been even partially true, it is no longer the truth today. Today’s weed is a severe danger to people’s mental health, regardless of age.
Be a better-informed consumer, for your health and for that of your children and family members. In my practice, I talk to individuals who range from occasional weed users to being addicted to daily and sometimes twice daily use of marijuana products. Some, while not using themselves, report that their children are in the throes of this addiction. Things are not as they appear, when it comes to the perception of weed as a harmful recreational drug. Please read the following articles. This is happening NOW!
The following is a recent article, in a long series, that outlines the risks associated with Cannabis Use Disorder (CUD)–in simple terms, marijuana addiction–and a major psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia, especially in boys and men.
Download the article Association between cannabis use disorder and schizophrenia stronger in young males than in females
More Teens Who Use Marijuana Are Suffering From Psychosis
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/marijuana-depression-psychosis-869490d1
More Teens Who Use Marijuana Are Suffering From Psychosis
More potent cannabis and more frequent use are contributing to higher rates of psychosis, especially in young people
By Julie Wernau
Jan. 10, 2024 9:00 pm ET
When Braxton Clark was in high school, he used marijuana to control his emotions. At 17, he used it every day.
When he was 18, he had a psychotic episode after using cannabis and was admitted to a hospital. He spent the next three years sober. Then one day he tried cannabis again. Before long, he was back in the hospital.
“I had lost my faculties. I wasn’t making sense,” said Clark, now 24.
He has been sober a year and is thriving in college with the help of medication. Doctors have diagnosed him with a psychotic disorder, brought on by using cannabis.
Braxton is among thousands of teenagers and young adults who have developed delusions and paranoia after using cannabis. Legalization efforts have made cannabis more readily available in much of the country. More frequent use of marijuana that is many times as potent as strains common three decades ago is leading to more psychotic episodes, according to doctors and recent research.
“This isn’t the cannabis of 20, 30 years ago,” said Dr. Deepali Gershan, an addiction psychiatrist at Compass Health Center in Northbrook, Ill. Up to 20% of her caseload is patients for whom she suspects cannabis use triggered a psychotic episode.
Rates of diagnoses for cannabis-induced disorders were more than 50% higher at the end of November than in 2019, healthcare-analytics company Truveta said this week. The trend is contributing to the broader burden of caring for people who developed mental health and addiction problems during the pandemic.
Symptoms of serious mental disorders including schizophrenia often emerge in adolescence. Cannabis can’t be isolated as the culprit in any particular case, but large studies show a clear link between frequent and more potent cannabis use and higher rates of psychosis, particularly in young users, said Dr. Deepak D’Souza, professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine.
Even one psychotic episode following cannabis use was associated with a 47% chance of a person developing schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, a 2017 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry showed. The risk was highest for people 16-to-25-years-old and higher than for substances including amphetamines, hallucinogens, opioids and alcohol.
At Boston Children’s Hospital, doctors are treating more children developing psychotic disorders from cannabis use. Nearly a third of adolescents they see for checkups say they are using cannabis. About a third of children using cannabis report experiencing hallucinations or paranoia.
Doctors and other health workers from the hospital’s Adolescent Substance Use and Addiction Program hold weekly rounds to review cases. Recently, they discussed one young cannabis user who thought she was being followed. One young man had nearly crashed his car because he thought demons were chasing him. A teenager with cannabis-use disorder had threatened to kill his mother.
“This is a lot of my life, figuring out what to do with these kids,” said Dr. Sharon Levy, the hospital’s head of addiction medicine.
Until recently, marijuana referred to plant material. These days it can mean plant extract containing highly concentrated THC, the substance responsible for marijuana’s intoxicating effects, or lab-created derivatives that were rare a couple of years ago.
The average THC content of cannabis seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration was 15% in 2021, up from 4% in 1995. Many products advertise THC concentrations of up to 90%.
“This is attacking young brains,” said Dr. Roneet Lev, an emergency room physician at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego.
Jahan Marcu, scientific adviser for the Coalition for Cannabis Scheduling Reform, which represents cannabis companies, said research on connections between psychosis and cannabis doesn’t sufficiently distinguish between different kinds of products.
“Any time we talk about any substance, it’s just a factor. It can be a good factor, and it can be a bad factor,” he said.
Dr. Karen Randall moved to Pueblo, Colo., for a job in an emergency room more than a decade ago after working in Detroit for 18 years. She thought it would be like retiring early. She bought a ranch where she could ride horses in an area locals now call the Napa Valley of cannabis.
“I see more psychotic people here than I did in Detroit,” she said. “We’re just making this huge population of people who we can no longer fix.”
She is considering quitting medicine.
Randy Bacchus started smoking marijuana as a freshman in high school in Mahtomedi, Minn. By the time he was old enough to move out, his life had spun out of control.
In one of hundreds of videos his parents found on his phone after he died, Randy Bacchus told would-be fans that he was going to be a rap star. The 21-year-old held a vape pen in his hand, stopping to take hits at intervals.
He regularly talked about smoking cannabis in his videos. His interactions with his parents had been increasingly angry and erratic. He claimed he had spoken to God and the devil.
One night after using cannabis he had been so afraid people were after him that he ran out into a snowstorm in Denver and was lost for 24 hours. He survived with frostbite and infected toes.
“I was in full-blown psychosis,” he said in another video.
Heather Bacchus and Randy Bacchus Jr., with their son Randy, who started smoking marijuana as a freshman in high school.
His parents called the police for a wellness check but said that because he was an adult and not a danger to himself or others, they couldn’t force him into treatment.
“I think I’m going to take a break from smoking for a sec because I’m enjoying it too much,” he said in a March 2021 video.
In July 2021, he texted his mom to say he wanted to stop using cannabis and give up on music.
“I love you and am sorry for everything. I love dad and the same to him. I wish I would have been a better person,” he wrote at 2:09 a.m.
His mother wrote back that life isn’t easy and it is never too late. Today is a fresh start, she said. Police found him dead 48 hours later from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Doctors who treated Randy said his cannabis use was triggering psychotic episodes. In the videos on his phone, he said he believed cannabis had caused his delusions.
“I didn’t know that marijuana could cause paranoia,” said Heather Bacchus, Randy’s mom. “They don’t even know what they’re smoking.”
Write to Julie Wernau at julie.wernau@wsj.com
Appeared in the January 11, 2024, print edition as ‘Potent Pot Hurts Kids; ‘I Was in Full-Blown Psychosis’’.
San Diego ER seeing up to 37 marijuana cases a day — mostly psychosis
Meg and Scott knew something was going on with their son Kyle when, during the pandemic, he began refusing to get out of bed to attend class online.
Up until then, Kyle had been like a dream son: tall, good-looking, strong, athletic, with a great sense of humor. He was such a good baseball player that talent scouts were checking him out, and had a decent chance of someday playing in the Major League.
“He had the world by the balls,” his dad said. (At the family’s request, The Post has used pseudonyms.)
Now, Kyle was constantly irritable and depressed and wanted to drop out of his New Jersey high school. Then, one night, he lost it completely, fantasizing that his parents wanted to kill him.
“Zero touch with reality,” Scott recalled. The family checked Kyle into a psychiatric facility, where his delusions got worse. He thought his dad ran the mafia and had put Joe Biden in office. He demanded that his parents give him $10 million.
Meg and Scott were sure their son was messed up on some hardcore drug. But when the institution ran a drug test, Kyle came up positive only for his prescribed Attention Deficit Disorder medication and for THC — that is, marijuana.
Kyle’s now in recovery, but his is a story that is becoming familiar to more and more American families. Someone begins showing classic signs of hardcore drug addiction. Eventually, they suffer a full psychotic break. But the only drug history is for cannabis.
“We’re now counting 37 cannabis-related diagnoses a day,” Dr. Roneet Lev, an addiction medicine doctor at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, said about her emergency department. “It’s been steadily increasing over the years. When I started in the 1990s, there was no such thing. Now I see 1 to 2 cases per shift. The most common symptom is psychosis.”
“We probably see 20 THC-induced psychoses for every amphetamine-induced psychosis,” said Ben Cort, who runs a drug and alcohol treatment center in Colorado. One study showed an increase of 24% in cases of psychoses in emergency departments in Colorado in the five years following marijuana’s legalization in that state in 2012.
Since then, legal marijuana has been transformed into a potent and unrecognizable product.
“When I speak at parent nights at schools, most adults still think it’s like the weed we smoked when we were teens in the ’80s, [which had] between 3 to 5% THC per gram of flower,” said Laura Stack, an advocate against cannabis abuse in Colorado. “We never had today’s high-potency concentrates, vapes or edibles.”
Laura’s son Johnny was driven into acute psychosis by years of high concentrate THC usage. He believed his dorm room was bugged and that the mob was after him.
Johnny killed himself in 2019 at the age of 19 by jumping off a six-story building. “There are no caps on potency,” said Stack. “They’re cultivating higher and higher concentrates of THC. You literally can’t buy what you could get in the ’80s and ’90s; marijuana that mild isn’t around anymore.”
THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol) is the psychoactive chemical, or cannabinoid, that causes both the euphoria and the paranoia that tends to accompany marijuana highs. The strongest marijuana flower you can buy is in the range of 25% THC.
The edibles that are sold in dispensaries are created by chemically stripping the THC from the marijuana plant and creating a concentrated THC “wax” that’s typically three times that level. These products also lack CBD, a chemical in natural marijuana that partially counteracts the THC. Even more potent than edibles are “dabs,” a form of THC that users smoke out of vape pens, which can be over 90% THC. At this level of potency, THC can trigger severe symptoms of psychosis in regular users, studies and addiction experts say.
“Now that THC is a more readily available drug and the perception of harm is at the lowest point in recorded history, we treat more people for THC disorder than for opiate disorder right now,” said Cort. “I’d say about half of our census is THC. And the vast majority of them have THC-induced psychosis.”
“One clinical study showed that a moderate dose of pure THC causes psychotic symptoms in about 40% of people who lack a family history of psychosis. If you’re a casual user and your dosage is mild, that likely just means a touch of paranoia,” said neuroscientist Christine Miller, an expert on psychotic disorders.
Thirty-five percent of people who have experienced such symptoms, however, will go on to experience a full psychotic break, according to another study, if they continue their high risk environmental exposure by continuing to use cannabis.
According to multiple studies, for those who have ever suffered a full cannabis-induced psychotic break, the chance that, if you still keep using, you’ll eventually develop permanent schizophrenia is almost 50 percent. That’s a higher conversion rate than amphetamines, opioids or LSD.
But what really makes THC more dangerous than those other drugs, experts say, is that so few people consider it dangerous at all. “We know fentanyl is bad. We know meth is bad,” said Dr. Libby Stuyt, a recently retired addiction psychiatrist in Colorado. “We don’t know that marijuana is bad.”
THC concentrates are highly physically addictive, experts add. “It is almost impossible for people to quit,” said Stuyt.
But because they’re produced from marijuana, many users assume that they’re as non-addictive as an old-fashioned marijuana joint is. According to a Rasmussen Reports poll, 57% of Americans do not believe that marijuana is dangerous.
Often cannabis users believe the THC products they consume are cures for the very symptoms that are generated by their withdrawal from the drug, such as anxiety and insomnia. “People think, ‘Oh, it’s my symptoms. That’s why I need it. I’m anxious and it’s treating my anxiety,’” said Stuyt. “No: It’s the withdrawal that’s causing your anxiety.”
“Because it’s allowed to be heavily marketed and advertised as ‘medicine,’ people believe it’s safe,” Stuyt continued “It’s the industry, they keep saying it’s not addicting, it doesn’t cause psychosis. This is no different from the tobacco companies when they were saying it doesn’t cause cancer, it’s non-addicting.”
Since marijuana has been legalized in 19 states and counting, a $13 billion industry has emerged around it that has marketed the drug as a remedy for everything from chronic pain to anxiety. The corporations that have invested most heavily in cannabis are the ones that know best how to market addictive products and manipulate public opinion into underestimating their risks: the tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical industries.
There are in fact only four cannabis-derived drugs that are FDA-approved: Epidiolex for seizures, Marinol and Syndros for nausea and anorexia, and Cesamet, also for nausea. They are available only by prescription, and none are sold over-the-counter at dispensaries. (Since marijuana is still a Schedule I drug, American scientists cannot legally research it. President Biden has announced plans to review that status; if the administration re-schedules it, researchers will be able to legally experiment with it and more medical applications could in time be revealed.)
Beyond those four prescription drugs, evidence for claims to the medicinal properties of marijuana are scientifically lacking.
“This is not medicine,” Stuyt said. “This high-potency THC has not been studied as medicine.”
According to Cort, Americans underestimate the risks of THC because they conflate it with the much less harmful marijuana of the pre-legalization years. “They’re not smoking weed,” said Cort. “What’s being consumed in these concentrates is devastating for their mental health.”
“The whole world is telling them it’s safe,” said Dr. Lev of cannabis users. “People are in unbelievable denial.”
How Weed Became the New OxyContin
From Tablet Magazine
How Weed Became the New OxyContin
Big Pharma and Big Tobacco are helping market high-potency, psychosis inducing THC products as your mother’s ‘medical marijuana’
BY LEIGHTON WOODHOUSE
AUGUST 30, 2022
FOR 30 YEARS, DR. LIBBY STUYT, A RECENTLY RETIRED ADDICTION psychiatrist in Pueblo, Colorado, treated patients with severe drug dependency. Typically, that meant alcohol, heroin, and methamphetamines. But about five years ago, she began to see something new.
“I started seeing people with the worst psychosis symptoms that I have ever seen,” she told me. “And the worst delusions I have ever seen.”
These cases were even more acute than what she’d seen from psychotic patients on meth. Some of the delusions were accompanied by “severe violence.” But these patients were coming up positive only for cannabis.
Stuyt wasn’t alone: Health care professionals throughout Colorado and all over the country were seeing similar episodes.
Ben Cort, who runs an addiction recovery center in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, watched a young man jump up on the table in the emergency department and strip naked, claiming he was the God of thunder and threatening to kill everyone in the room, including two police officers. A collegiate athlete Cort worked with also had a psychotic episode and was shot five times by the police with a beanbag gun before he was subdued. In Los Angeles County, Blue Stohr, a psychiatric social worker, had a patient who climbed a 700-foot crane and considered jumping off of it, not because he was suicidal but because he thought he was in a computer simulation, like The Matrix.
Those patients, too, were high only on cannabis.
In 2012, Colorado legalized marijuana. In the decade since, 18 other states have followed suit. As billions of dollars have flowed into the new above-ground industry of smokable, edible, and drinkable cannabis-based products, the drug has been transformed into something unrecognizable to anyone who grew up around marijuana pre-legalization. Addiction medicine doctors and relatives of addicts say it has become a hardcore drug, like cocaine or methamphetamines. Chronic use leads to the same outcomes commonly associated with those harder substances: overdose, psychosis, suicidality. And yet it’s been marketed as a kind of elixir and sold like candy for grown-ups.
“I got into addiction medicine because of the opioid crisis,” said Dr. Roneet Lev, an addiction medicine doctor in San Diego who hosts a podcast about drug abuse. Years ago, she advocated against the over prescription of opioid painkillers like OxyContin. Now, she believes she’s seeing the same thing all over again: the specious claims of medical benefits, the denial of adverse effects. “From Big Tobacco to Big Pharma to Big Marijuana-it’s the same people, and the same pattern.”
Prior to legalization, marijuana plants were bred to produce higher and higher concentrations of THC, a naturally occurring chemical compound in the plant that induces euphoria and alters users’ perceptions of reality. In the 1960s, the stuff the hippies were smoking was less than 2% THC. By the ’90s, it was closer to 5%. By 2015, it was over 20%. “It’s a freak plant that resembles nothing of what has existed in nature,” said Laura Stack, a public speaker who has advocated against the industry since her son, Johnny, killed himself three years ago at 19 years old after years of cannabis abuse drove him into psychosis.
In the era of legalized weed, the drug you think of as “cannabis” can hardly be called marijuana at all. The kinds of cannabis products that are sold online and at dispensaries contain no actual plant matter. They’re made by putting pulverized marijuana into a tube and running butane, propane, ethanol, or carbon dioxide through it, which separates the THC from the rest of the plant. The end product is a wax that can be 70% to 80% THC. That wax can then be put in a vacuum oven and further concentrated into oils that are as much as 95% or even 99% THC. Known as “dabs,” this is what people put in their vape pens, and in states like California and Colorado it’s totally legal and easily available to children. “There are no caps on potency,” said Stack.
If you’re over 30 years old and you used to smoke weed when you were a teenager, the strongest you were smoking was probably 20% THC. Today, teenagers are “dabbing” a product that’s three, four, or five times stronger, and are often doing so multiple times a day. At that level of potency, the impact of the drug on a user’s brain belongs to an entirely different category of risk than smoking a joint or taking a bong rip of even an intensively bred marijuana flower. It’s highly addictive, and over time, there’s a significant chance it can drive you insane.
If you’ve ever smoked a bowl and become irrationally anxious that everyone is staring at you and knows you’re high, what you experienced was a mild symptom of cannabis-induced psychosis. According to one study, about 40% of people react this way. If you experience that paranoia and keep smoking on a regular basis nonetheless-especially with today’s high-potency THC products, and especially if you’re young-there’s a good chance you’ll eventually suffer a full psychotic break; 35% of young people who experience psychotic symptoms, according to another study, eventually have such an episode. If you keep using after that, you run a decent risk of ending up permanently schizophrenic or bipolar. Cannabis has by far the highest conversion rate to schizophrenia of any substance-higher than meth, higher than opioids, higher than LSD. Two Danish studies, as well as a massive study from Finland, put your chances at close to 50%.”One out of every 20 daily users can expect to develop schizophrenia if they don’t quit,” Dr. Christine Miller, an expert on psychotic disorders, told me.
But quitting THC products of that potency is “almost impossible,” Stuyt said, comparing its addictive power to tobacco. The days of marijuana addiction being merely “psychological” are over. “There is a definite withdrawal syndrome that includes irritability, anger, anxiety, massive cravings, can’t sleep, can’t eat,” said Stuyt.
And it’s even harder because so many users believe it’s good for them.
As a teenager, Kevin Bright suffered from depression and anxiety. He started smoking pot at around 15 years old to self-medicate. As his tolerance built up, he started using THC concentrates-the stuff made from those high-potency waxes and oils-which was legal and easily available in the Bay Area suburb where he grew up. His personality began to unravel, his father, Bart, told me. He was constantly irate. He attempted suicide several times-once by ingesting pills, once by trying to hang himself, and another time by driving his car into the Bay. Then he began developing full-blown delusions, imagining that the FBI was after him. When he called his parents, he would scream at them in gibberish. Eventually, at 29 years old, he put a plastic bag over his head and breathed nitrous oxide through a tube until he suffocated to death.
Kevin had a hardcore drug addiction, but in his imagination, he was just taking medicine-and a $13 billion industry was telling him he was right.
“The line about it being medicine-he bought that;’ Bright said about his son. “I told people, what medicine do you get from a doctor that’s 100% always approved, that you can get within 10 to 15 minutes online, you can take as much as you want per year, you never have to come back to renew it?”
Since marijuana is still considered a Schedule I Controlled Substance by the federal government, there’s no such thing as a “prescription” for medical cannabis.
Instead, you can get a “recommendation” from a physician.
“This doctor’s recommendation typically has no expiration, has no dose, has no duration, and no change across state lines,” Ben Cort said. “It’s basically, ‘Take as much as you want as often as you want until you feel what you want.”‘ (Colorado has tightened rules around medical cards, but only for 18- to 20-year-olds, in an effort to mitigate drug dealing in high schools.)
To get a recommendation, you can go to websites with names like “NuggMD” and get approved in less than 10 minutes. With that recommendation, you can acquire a state-licensed medical marijuana card. In states where recreational use of cannabis is legal, you don’t need a medical marijuana card to buy cannabis products, but the card exempts you from certain taxes-it’s basically a discount card for high-frequency users.
At a dispensary, there’s no distinction between cannabis products made to be consumed for fun and ones created for their supposed healing properties. “You walk into a store, it’s the exact same product,” Cort said. “If you have a med card, you pay less tax.”
The array of products on offer is dazzling. On WeedMaps.com, you can buy your cannabis in the form of a joint, flower, vape, concentrate (budder, crumble, or crystalline), cookie, brownie, corn nut, caramel corn, jalapeno cheese cracker, rice krispie bar, macaron, pretzel bite, cereal, tincture, syrup, seltzer, iced tea, herbal tea, tonic, apple juice, punch, mocktail, root beer, cream soda, lemonade, agua fresca, powder, gummy, mint, chocolate, gum, balm, salve, bath bomb, salt, oil, shower gel, or soap, and have it delivered to your doorstep.
These products are all sold as “medicine,” even though none of them is FDA approved. (There are only four cannabis-based drugs that have received FDA authorization, all of which require prescriptions.) And although it’s illegal for anyone without a medical degree to offer medical advice, dispensary “budtenders” do it all the time. Their advice is completely evidence-free, because no evidence exists that the specific products they sell have any medicinal value.
“Drug companies are forever doing drug trials to see if this new drug helps or doesn’t help,” said Dr. Robin Murray, a psychiatric researcher at King’s College London who specializes in cannabis-induced schizophrenia. “Why would cannabis companies do this? They’re doing so well without the trials. The trial might show that it wasn’t helpful. So, they’ve got no incentive to do these trials.”
“There is research out there supporting the use of cannabis for some medical conditions,” said Stuyt, “But it’s all less than 10% THC. Nothing has been studied greater than 10%. But we have all this research showing that greater than 10% puts you at risk for psychosis, addiction, suicide, cannabis hyperemesis syndrome [constant, severe vomiting]-all these things that high-potency THC is doing:’
“High-potency” describes almost all of the cannabis products sold in the United States today, the vast majority of which are over 15% THC.
Dr. David Smith, an addiction medicine doctor who founded the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic in 1967, is highly optimistic about the prospects of cannabis research for medical purposes, as well as the medical potential of psilocybin and other psychedelics. “There’s a lot of promise in cannabis medicine,” he told me. “But you’re not going to get that by vaping in a classroom.” The pantomime version of drug prescription that characterizes the cannabis market today “is not the way medicine’s supposed to be practiced,” he told me.
“It’s insulting to the medical profession,” said Dr. Lev. “They’ve hijacked the word ‘medical.”‘
“This is not medicine,” said Stuyt. “This high-potency THC has not been studied as medicine. But because it’s allowed to be heavily marketed and advertised as medicine, people believe it’s safe. And so, they believe it’s medicine. And when you take medicine for a chronic problem, you take it every day. Sometimes you take it all day long. And that makes you addicted to it. And so, then you’re in constant withdrawal.”
“Look at the industries that pioneered the addiction business: tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceuticals. Today, all three are heavily invested in cannabis.”
To imagine the market potential for a legal, highly addictive drug, all you have to do is look at the colossal success of the industries that pioneered the addiction business: tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceuticals. Today, all three are heavily invested in cannabis. In 2019, Altria, the parent company of Marlboro cigarettes, acquired 45% of Cronos, one of the world’s biggest cannabis companies.
Constellation Brands, a major alcohol conglomerate, has billions invested in Canopy, another cannabis company. Last year, Jazz Pharmaceuticals acquired GW Pharmaceuticals, the company that makes one of the four FDA-approved, cannabis-derived drugs. Even a former CEO of Purdue Pharma, the company that made OxyContin, co-founded a medical marijuana company called Emblem after helping to create the modern opioid epidemic.
“People think it’s a miracle drug, that it’s nonaddictive, that it helps with cancer and anxiety,” said Jordan Davidson, who recovered from cannabis addiction and now works for Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which advocates against the expansion of the cannabis industry. “It’s more like Big Tobacco 2.0.”
The future of the industry that these investors are now betting on is focused on families like Aubree Adams’ in Pueblo, Colorado.
Aubree’s older son started using legal cannabis products in the eighth grade. By his freshman year in high school, he was addicted. He became psychotic: “Self harming, violent behaviors, couldn’t even regulate any moods-crying obsessively, inconsolable, paranoid over things, thinking people were after us,” his mother recounted. He tried to kill his little brother several times. Once Aubree’s younger son had to run away from his brother barefoot in the snow. Aubree had to quit her job to stay home to protect him. Her older son attempted suicide. He started selling marijuana and ended up on the streets. He got beat up. Someone threatened to shoot up the family’s house.
On one occasion, Aubree found herself trying to calm down her son as he frantically searched the house for the key to the lock on the family’s gun, believing people were coming after him. “There were many moments when I had to tell my younger son, ‘Get out of the house,”‘ Aubree said. “There were moments when I said, ‘Get the dog. Lock yourself in my bedroom.”‘
When Aubree tried to get her son to stop, he would say, “It’s medicine, Mom. You’re the only one not using it, Mom. Maybe you need to start using it, Mom. You’ll feel better. What you’re saying is a lie, Mom. It’s all propaganda, Mom.”
Even while watching all of this unfold, Aubree’s husband began secretly using cannabis as well, believing it would calm his anxiety. He went to a dispensary and complained about panic attacks. The budtender readily offered him spurious medical advice, recommending marijuana flowers that were 24% THC. Aubree’s husband began regularly consuming cannabis as his family was falling apart and fell into a pattern of depression and suicidal ideation.
It’s a common pattern: People start consuming cannabis to fix their anxiety, but the withdrawal from the THC instigates anxiety instead of alleviating it. “People think, ‘Oh, it’s my symptoms. That’s why I need it. I’m anxious and it’s treating my anxiety,”‘ said Stuyt. “No: It’s the withdrawal that’s causing your anxiety.”
It’s a vicious cycle that’s great for business. At the root of the misconception is the myth that “cannabis” as it exists today is a safe, natural, medicinal substance. But if people thought of today’s high-potency THC products the way they think of hard drugs, far fewer people would fall under its influence-which is why it’s so important to the industry that they don’t.
“Everybody knows meth is bad,” Cort said. “There’s not a user who does not think meth is bad. You survey America, about 65% of them are going to tell you there’s nothing wrong with weed.”
And now those Americans are facing a tidal wave of corporate advertising telling them they’re right.
“This is a for-profit industry,” said Stuyt. “And they profit off of addiction.”
Psychosis, Addiction, Chronic Vomiting: As Weed Becomes More Potent, Teens Are Getting Sick.
Elysse was 14 when she first started vaping cannabis. It didn’t smell, which made it easy to hide from her parents. And it was convenient — just press a button and inhale. After the second or third try, she was hooked. “It was insane. Insane euphoria,” said Elysse, now 18, whose last name is being withheld to protect her privacy.
“Everything was moving slowly. I got super hungry. Everything was hilarious.”
But the euphoria eventually morphed into something more disturbing. Sometimes the marijuana would make Elysse feel more anxious, or sad. Another time she passed out in the shower, only to wake up half an hour later.
This was not your average weed. The oil and waxes she bought from dealers were typically about 90 percent THC, the psychoactive component in marijuana. But because these products were derived from cannabis, and nearly everyone she knew was using them, she assumed they were relatively safe. She began vaping multiple times per day. Her parents didn’t find out until about one year later, in 2019.
“We got her in a program to help her with it. We tried tough love, we tried everything, to be honest with you,” Elysse’s father said of her addiction.
Starting in 2020 she began having mysterious bouts of illness where she would throw up over and over again. At first, she and her parents— and even her doctors — were baffled. During one episode, Elysse said, she threw up in a mall bathroom for an hour. “I felt like my body was levitating.”
Another time she estimated that she threw up at least 20 times in the span of two hours.
It wasn’t until 2021, after a half dozen trips to the emergency room for stomach illness, including some hospital stays, that a gastroenterologist diagnosed her with cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, a condition that causes recurrent vomiting in heavy marijuana users.
Although recreational cannabis is illegal in the United States for those under 21, it has become more accessible as many states have legalized it. But experts say today’s high-THC cannabis products — vastly different than the joints smoked decades ago — are poisoning some heavy users, including teenagers.
Marijuana is not as dangerous as a drug like fentanyl, but it can have potentially harmful effects — especially for young people, whose brains are still developing. In addition to uncontrollable vomiting and addiction, adolescents who frequently use high doses of cannabis may also experience psychosis that could possibly lead to a lifelong psychiatric disorder, an increased likelihood of developing depression and suicidal ideation, changes in brain anatomy and connectivity and poor memory.
But despite these dangers, the potency of the products currently on the market is largely unregulated.
In 1995, the average concentration of THC in cannabis samples seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration was about 4 percent. By2017, it was 17 percent. And now cannabis manufacturers are extracting THC to make oils; edibles; wax; sugar-size crystals; and glass-like products called shatter that advertise high THC levels in some cases exceeding 95 percent.
Meanwhile, the average level of CBD — the nonintoxicating compound from the cannabis plant tied to relief from seizures, pain, anxiety and inflammation — has been on the decline in cannabis plants. Studies suggest that lower levels of CBD can potentially make cannabis more addictive.
THC concentrates “are as close to the cannabis plant as strawberries are to frosted strawberry pop tarts,” Beatriz Carlini, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute, wrote in a report on the health risks of highly concentrated cannabis.
Although cannabis is legal for recreational use in 19 states and Washington, D.C., and for medical use in 37 states and D.C., only Vermont and Connecticut have imposed caps on THC concentration. Both states ban concentrates above 60 percent, with the exception of pre-filled cartridges, and do not permit cannabis plant material to exceed 30 percent THC. But there is little evidence to suggest these specific levels are somehow safer.
“In general, we do not support arbitrary limits on potency as long as products are properly tested and labeled,” Bethany Moore, a spokeswoman for the National Cannabis Industry Association, said in a statement. She added that the best way to keep marijuana away from teens is to implement laws that allow the cannabis industry to replace illegal markets, which do not adhere to age restrictions, state-mandated testing or labeling guidelines.
The Food and Drug Administration has sent warnings about various cannabis products, including edibles, but so far federal regulators haven’t taken action to curb potency levels because cannabis is federally illegal, said Gillian Schauer, the executive director of the Cannabis Regulators Association, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that convenes government officials involved in cannabis regulation across more than 40 states and territories.
California lawmakers are now considering adding a mental health warning label to cannabis products specifying that the drug may contribute to psychotic disorders.
National surveys suggest that marijuana use among 8th, 10th and 12th graders decreased in 2021, a change partly attributed to the pandemic. However, over the two-year interval from 2017 to 2019, the number of kids who reported vaping marijuana over the last 30 days rose among all grades, nearly tripling among high school seniors. In 2020, 35 percent of seniors, and as many as 44 percent of college students, reported using marijuana in the past year.
Elysse got sober before entering college but soon found that seemingly everyone on her dorm floor habitually used weed.
“Not only carts,” she said, referring to the cannabis cartridges used in vape pens, “but bongs, pipes, bowls — absolutely everything.” Each morning, she found students washing their bongs in the communal bathroom at 8 a.m. to prepare for their “morning smoke.”
After a few weeks, she began vaping concentrated THC again, she said, and also started having dark thoughts, occasionally sitting alone in her room and sobbing for hours.
“I felt so trapped,” said Elysse, who has now been clean for nearly two months. “This is not fun in any way anymore.”
Teens are particularly affected by cannabis.
Michael McDonell, an addiction treatment expert at the Washington State University college of medicine, said that more research is needed to better understand how much more prevalent psychosis and cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome have become among teenagers and others using high potency products.
Even so, he added, “we definitely know that there’s a dose-dependent relationship between THC and psychosis.”
One rigorous study found that the risk of having a psychotic disorder was five times higher among daily high potency cannabis users in Europe and Brazil than those who had never used it.
Another study, published in 2021 in JAMA Psychiatry, reported that, in 1995, only 2 percent of schizophrenia diagnoses in Denmark were associated with marijuana use, but by 2010 that figure had risen to 6 to 8 percent, which researchers associated with increases in the use and potency of cannabis.
Cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, which can often be alleviated by hot baths and showers, is also linked to prolonged, high-dose cannabis use. As with psychosis, it’s unclear why some people develop it and others do not.
Dr. Sharon Levy, the director of the Adolescent Substance Use and Addiction Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, said there is “no doubt that higher concentration products are increasing the number of people who have bad experiences with cannabis.”
When her clinic opened in 2000, marijuana was illegal in Massachusetts. At the time, Dr. Levy said far fewer kids came in with psychotic symptoms “and we almost never saw cannabis hyperemesis syndrome.”
Now, she said, those numbers are shooting up. Psychotic symptoms while high can include hallucinations, trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality, strange behaviors (one young man would spend his days tying plastic bags into knots) or voices talking to them in their head, she added.
If a teenager displays these symptoms, getting that person off cannabis “becomes an emergency,” she said. “Because maybe, just maybe they’ll clear up, and we’re preventing someone from developing a lifelong psychiatric disorder.”
‘Oh well, it’s just weed.’
Laura Stack, who lives in Highlands Ranch, Colo., said that when her son Johnny first confessed to using marijuana at the age of 14, she said to herself, “Oh well, it’s just weed. Thank God it wasn’t cocaine.”
She had used marijuana a couple of times in high school and cautioned him that marijuana would “eat your brain cells.” But at the time she wasn’t overly concerned: “I used it, I’m fine, what’s the big deal?”
“But I had no idea,” she added, referring to how marijuana has changed in recent years. “So many parents like me are completely ignorant.”
Initially, her son did not have any mental health problems and excelled in school. But he eventually started using high potency marijuana products multiple times a day, and this, Ms. Stack said, “made him completely delusional.”
By the time he reached college, he had been through various addiction treatment programs. He had become so paranoid that he thought the mob was after him and his college was a base for the F.B.I., Ms. Stack said. At one point, after he moved out of his childhood home, he threatened to kill the family dog unless his parents gave him money. His mother later discovered that Johnny had obtained his own medical marijuana card when he turned 18 and had begun dealing to younger kids.
After several stays at mental hospitals, the doctors determined that Johnny had a severe case of THC abuse, Ms. Stack said. He was prescribed an anti-psychotic medication, which helped — but then he stopped taking it. In 2019, Johnny died after jumping from a six-story building. He was 19. A few days before his death, Ms. Stack said, Johnny had apologized to her, saying that weed had ruined his mind and his life, adding, “I’m sorry, and I love you.”
A recent study found that people who used marijuana had a greater likelihood of suicidal ideation, plan and attempt than those who did not use the drug at all. Ms. Stack now runs a nonprofit called Johnny’s Ambassadors that educates communities about high-THC cannabis and its effect on the adolescent brain.
There’s ‘no known safe limit.’
It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how much THC enters someone’s brain when they’re using cannabis. That’s because it’s not just the frequency of use and THC concentration that affect dosage, it’s also how fast the chemicals are delivered to the brain. In vaporizers, the speed of delivery can change depending on the base the THC is dissolved in, the strength of the device’s battery and how warm the product becomes when it’s heated up.
Higher doses of THC are more likely to produce anxiety, agitation, paranoia and psychosis.
“The younger you are, the more vulnerable your brain is to develop these problems,” Dr. Levy said.
Youths are also more likely to become addicted when they start using marijuana before the age of 18, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Furthermore, there is growing evidence that cannabis can alter the brain during adolescence, a period when it is already undergoing structural changes. Until more is known, researchers and clinicians recommend postponing cannabis use until later in life.
“I have kids asking me all the time, ‘What if I do this just once a month, is that OK?’” Dr. Levy said. “All I can tell them is that there’s no known safe limit.”
Dr. McDonell agreed that avoiding drug use entirely is always the safest option but said that some kids might require a more nuanced conversation. He advised having open discussions about drugs with middle-schoolers and teenagers, while also educating them about the dangers of high potency cannabis products compared to those that are mostly made of CBD.
“I think that’s something we’re all struggling with as a community,” he added. “How do we get this information to parents and kids fast enough?”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/well/mind/teens-thc-cannabis.html. Psychosis, Addiction, Chronic Vomiting: As Weed Becomes More Potent, Teens Are Getting Sick. With THC levels close to 100 percent, today’s cannabis products are making some teenagers highly dependent and dangerously ill. By Christina Caron. Published June 23, 2022. (c) The New York Times.