cannabisnews.com: No Pot Luck for Kids





No Pot Luck for Kids
Posted by FoM on February 08, 2000 at 10:14:40 PT
By Krista Foss, Health Reporter 
Source: Globe & Mail
Charlotte is no stranger to smoking marijuana. But for the past six years, her 18-year-old son has become a regular user, and Charlotte now finds herself with less of a taste for the weed.The Toronto mother suspects the differences between her pot smoking and her son's is simple: She did it less frequently and the kind of marijuana she smoked was weaker. 
She can tell the pot her son smokes is stronger -- that it has higher levels of the buzz-producing chemical tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) -- by the way it smells and the way it makes him behave."When I smoked, it was nice, giggly dope," she said. "I stopped smoking when I got into a stupor. They [her son and his friends] don't seem to be having a good time. They're just heavy all the time."Extra-strong pot is quickly becoming a made-in-Canada problem. British Columbia has gained notoriety as the source of some of the "strongest" marijuana in the world. THC levels can be as low as 2 or 3 per cent of the dried weight in marijuana illegally brought in from Mexico. But "grow" operations in lotus land use cross-breeding techniques to create high-THC strains of marijuana and then maximize the weed's strength further by raising the plants hydroponically and nurturing them with high-quality fertilizers and optimal conditions. As a result, "B.C. gold" can have THC levels as high 15 to 20 per cent.Combine that stronger marijuana with a recent upsurge in the number of young people turning to the drug, and you have a serious public-health problem, according to the experts. But those same experts can't get through to parents and the public, most of whom still consider marijuana a soft drug that creates a mild buzz and has no addictive potential.Take Charlotte, for example. She admits that when her son started smoking at the age of 12, she wasn't unsettled. She is now. That's because her eldest child's future is going up in smoke -- an acrid-smelling kind with a stuporific effect. It leaves her highly intelligent son lying around, hanging out with the wrong crowd, scraping by in school and influencing his highly impressionable 14-year-old brother.Worse, Charlotte realizes her son has submitted to the "you deal or you steal" rule of users. In an attempt to get her son's life on track, she enrolled him in a boarding school. Later, she found out the only reason he agreed to go was because he had "done a bad deal" and was afraid of being "kneecapped." After a year, the boarding-school experiment was a bust and he was back in his old crowd.Current research suggests that the health implications for this young smoker may also be dire: He may be damaging his intellectual ability, wrecking his lungs and increasing his risk of cancer, in addition to developing a serious dependency."Like most drugs, the effects of marijuana are dose-dependent. If the proportion of THC in marijuana is increased, then essentially you are increasing the dose," said Peter Fried, a professor of psychology at Ottawa's Carleton University who has studied marijuana for 20 years. "In all likelihood, the risk of becoming dependent goes up, too."There are no statistics to clarify how many young pot smokers are inhaling the premium-priced marijuana that provides extra kicks. But the numbers have been clear about one thing: More young people are smoking pot than a decade ago.A report on adolescent health prepared by The McCreary Centre Society in Burnaby, B.C., a non-profit agency that is funded by several provincial ministries, found the number of Grade 7 to 13 students who have used marijuana once rose from 25 per cent in 1992 to 40 per cent in 1998. (The number of frequent users -- those who've smoked pot more than 40 times -- doubled from 6 per cent to 13 per cent in that same time period.)British Columbia's problem mirrors the rest of the country. A recent survey of Ontario students in the same age group conducted by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health found that 29.2 per cent had used marijuana in the last year."There's a social climate that is sending some interesting messages to teenagers," says Dr. Roger Tonkin, executive director of The McCreary Centre Society and an adolescent-health specialist. "In B.C., we have snowboarding and the fact that we grow 'good stuff.' The federal ministry of health is looking into marijuana as medicine. Which all says to kids, this product may be okay."Certainly, the way marijuana plays with the mind may not be so okay. It's widely understood that smoking the drug has some hazardous possibilities: It can lead to reduced focus and less ability to perform tasks that require concentration, difficulty absorbing new information and retaining knowledge, trouble speaking and listening effectively, and reduced ability to solve problems. And motivation nose-dives."There's this complete lack of initiative and interest in doing things," says Charlotte of her son. "And then there's this easy rationale: He will say he is trying to change the world and make it less workaholic. He reads about how everybody is so stressed out so he has an excuse."The neurological effects of pot smoking aren't confined to one generation either. For the past 20 years, Dr. Fried has been following 170 families and documented the substance-use habits of parents and their children. His findings reveal that the children of mothers who smoked pot during pregnancy start to exhibit deficits by the ages of 4 to 6 in what's called "executive function," which includes problem-solving, decision-making and impulse control.The changes to the brain of a child of a pot-smoker are "definitely subtle," concludes Dr. Fried. But if that child goes on to become a pot smoker, then the neurological impairment may get amplified (a question that Dr. Fried is currently studying)."The pothead description fits: Those kids who use it are a lot slower," Dr. Tonkins says bluntly.But if marijuana mellows the mind, over time it stresses out the body. Two decades of research by Donald Tashkin, a lung expert at the University of California in Los Angeles, shows there is no pot luck for the lungs. His work indicates that, gram-for-gram, a joint has more carcinogens and, on average, three times the tar of a cigarette. The way potheads inhale, deeply and holding the smoke in for a long time, increases that damage. As a result, regular pot smokers are as frequently beset with the symptoms of chronic bronchitis as cigarette smokers, despite the fact that tobacco smokers inhaled more than 20 cigarettes a day compared with the three to five joints for the pot smokers.Dr. Tashkin's research also shows that the immune cells in the lungs of marijuana smokers are much less able to fend off bacteria compared with those of cigarette smokers. What's more, a recent study performed at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center showed pot smokers have 2.6 times the risk of contracting head and neck cancers than those who have never used the drug.Marijuana smoking won't result in the blocked airways, emphysema or even reduced lung capacity that cigarette-smoking causes. And you can't fatally overdose on pot like you can with other illicit drugs. Still, the company some young pot smokers keep can get them into trouble. And research shows pot smoking usually goes hand-in-hand with other substance abuse."I don't want to sound moralistic," said Dr. Tonkin. "But when we ask the kids in our survey who drink alcohol, smoke tobacco or marijuana, what else they do, there appears to be a higher degree of multiple drug use."The experts agree pot simply isn't as bad as other illicit drugs, and in terms of overall health effects, may be less damaging than long-term cigarette use. But higher THC concentrations in today's weed may have a destructive effect on young people's futures."If you haul down seven figures and you smoke a little dope and it makes you cranky and wrecks your relationship with your girlfriend, well, hell . . . we're not too concerned about you," said Doug Colman, a Vancouver-based consultant in addiction medicine. "There's a big difference when you're a disadvantaged kid, who cannot afford any further compromises. Even small compromises of intellectual function may have consequences in this group. And unfortunately, we're ignoring this problem."Charlotte is well aware that there are reasons her son may have reached for pot -- she divorced when he was 5 and entered into another relationship afterward. She's not ready to give up on him, though. And in the meantime, she is keeping a closer watch on her 14-year-old.Published: Tuesday, February 8, 2000Copyright © 2000 Globe Information Services CannabisNews Search Of Canadian Articles:http://www.alltheweb.com/cgi-bin/asearch?type=all&query=CannabisNews+Canada
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Comment #2 posted by steve1 on February 09, 2000 at 16:31:01 PT
more potent equals good!
Really, you smoke less when it is potent. Anyone experienced and educated about marijuana can tell you that, perhaps the mother should be reading more about marijuana with her kid.
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Comment #1 posted by Alexandre Oeming on February 08, 2000 at 11:43:20 PT:
Simple math is lost on these idiots
>Extra-strong pot is quickly becoming a made-in-Canada problem. British Columbia has gained notoriety as the source of some of the "strongest" marijuana in theworld. THC levels can be as low as 2 or 3 per cent of the dried weight in marijuana illegally brought in from Mexico. But "grow" operations in lotus land usecross-breeding techniques to create high-THC strains of marijuana and then maximize the weed's strength further by raising the plants hydroponically and nurturingthem with high-quality fertilizers and optimal conditions. As a result, "B.C. gold" can have THC levels as high 15 to 20 per cent.This is classic. First off, where can i hook up with some of that gear? 15-20% THC?!? Now, THAT is the KIND! Secondly, why do the sheep ALWAYS think this is so evil? Think about this: greater active ingredient equals less needed to achieve the same effect, *right*? Therefore, there is less of a chance of all the nasty side-effects from the inhalation of burning plant matter having any effect! Isn't that GOOD, people? Is connecting the dots really so hard for modern society?
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