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Getting Higher
By Hempology | November 7, 2003
As more teens turn to pot the debate simmers on: is smoking up harmful?
From the Times Colonist, November 7th, 2003
By Katherine Dedyna
A group of mid-teens huddle in the bushes near a middle-class Greater Victoria high school.
Classes are over on this cold autumn day and it’s time to really chill – by rolling and sharing
a joint. These kids do it all the time, not that they look or sound like druggies. They appear
healthy and sound articulate as they talk up pot as an everyday pastime that they’ve been
using for years to relax, relieve depression, help them sleep or – implausibly – focus their
concentration.
They’re part of the biggest upswing in dope smoking in the last 25 years, with statistics showing
that marijuana use is now a mainstream teen activity. And the age of users is going down as the
frequency of use goes up.
B.C.’s McCreary CEntre Society found that 40 per cent of nearly 26,000 B.C. students in Grades
7-12 had smoked pot at least once by 1998-99, up from 25 per cent in 1992. Most try it at age
14 or younger.
Teens are now more likely to try pot than to touch cigarettes.
Clean-cut Ryan is 17 and started smoking dope at 13. “It started out with depression,” he says.
“Hey, it made me feel better.” So good, in fact, that he smokes up to four times a day, often
with friends. “It’s just a regular pastime,” he says. And to adults who wag their fingers
at how bad it is, he responds: “You don’t hear about people who are stoned getting in huge
car crashes and beating their wives.”
| Non-user | Current user | |
|---|---|---|
| Sexual Health | ||
| Ever Had Sex | 7% | 57% |
| Had sex before age 14 | 2% | 19% |
| Violence | ||
| Involved in 1+ physical fights | 22% | 47% |
| Carried weapon to school in past month | 5% | 19% |
| Driving | ||
| Ever driven after using alcohol / drugs (of licensed drivers) | 9% | 71% |
| Rode with drinking driver in past month | 12% | 50% |
Kris, also 17, likes to get high, claiming it helps him concentrate or unwind.
“Adults have a beer; kids want to smoke a joint,” he says.
He objects indignantly to the anti-weed commercials he’s seen on TV as “completely false.
You’re not that slow; you’re not that stpud,” he protests. “I can go to school and ace
the test.”
Ken, 16, has been smoking up since Grade 8. His parents know he smokes dope a lot:
“They’re totally OK about it but they’d like to keep it quiet around my little sister.”
He doesn’t think it does him any harm to smoke up every day or two, especially before
he goes to bed. “It actually helps you get to sleep,” he says. “I pretty much know
the health effects involved and it’s my choice to do it,” he says. “I’ve read a lot about
pot and it’s not bad from a health perspective.”
And on one level, this high school kid is right. Even Dr. Perry Kendall, B.C.’s provincial
health officer agrees – to a certain extent.
Most of the medical evidence for marijuana shows it can be used in a way that is “relatively
harm-free” even for teens, Kendall says.
That would mean smoking up at home, and not behind the wheel or at school, nor all the time.
“The evidence is that that’s not particularly harmful. It’s illegal; it’ll get them into
trouble but it’s not and of itself particularly harmful. Which is why the Senate committee felt
that it should be regulated and legalized.”
But the current bill before Parliament proposing decriminalization of pot appears poised to die
should Parliament dissolve today – and he wishes it wouldn’t.
“I am not in any way promoting (marijuana) use but I do not think it’s appropriate to
criminalize recreational young users,” says Kendall.
Not only is there little evidence that criminalization of pot deters adolescents, he’s concerned
that “reefer madness” messages cause kids to discount other messages about more dangerous substances
like crystal meth or designer drugs.
Kendall, formerly head of Ontario’s Addiction Research Foundation, is a realist when it comes to
adolescents and pot. That they’re smoking up is a given. So it’s the context that becomes
crucial to the safety of users.
“(If) you’re going to smoke cannabis, it’s much better to do it socially, intermittently and on
weekends. There’s harmful use and there’s not harmful use.”
Still, he issues some heavy-duty warnings to kids about weed: “If they’re smoking it before they
go to school, it’s certainly going to mess up their education and their learning ability.”
“If they’re smoking and driving or operating heavy equipment, it’s going to impair their abilities
to do that. And if they’re smoking it frequently, there are problems with chronic use – cognitive,
behavioural and issues of memory, information processing, some intellectual impairment. It’s probably
reversible but it’s as bad an idea to go to school or be regularly intoxicated with marijuana as it is
to be intoxicated with alcohol.”
Even a couple of puffs can get kids stoned, given the potency of some of today’s B.C. bud.
Meanwhile, the number of early teens in B.C. trying pot doubled to 20 per cent in 1999 from a decade
ago as social sanctions decrease due to high-profile advocates for medicinal use, a wide-spread
push for decriminalization, targeting a generation of parents who know what it’s like to be stoned.
Even the Prime Minister Jean Chréien makes jokes about smoking dope post-retirement.
“The rate of marijuana use has gone up dramatically in the past decade so that more kids are using
and using more often,” says Dr. Roger Tonkin, chairman of the McCreary Centre Society, a
non-profit agency that monitors adolescent health in B.C.
Tonkin challenges the idea that pot is a “safe recreational activity” for adolescents, citing
research that links it to everything from lack of motivation, chronic class cutting, and side
effects such as “depression, multiple substance abuse, dietary dysfunction and family conflict”
to later onset of serious disease or impairment.
Pot smokers are more likely than non-users to take mich higher risks in many areas, including
cigarette smoking, binge drinking, having unprotected sex, getting into fights, and carrying a
weapon to school. Few classify themselves as above average students – 13 per cent versus 72
per cent of non-users.
A recent Health Canada survey of 1,250 people aged 12-19 found 32 per cent had tried pot;
rising to 54 per cent of those 15-19. In 1994, only 33 per cent of those 15-24 had tried pot.
Almost one-quarter (23 per cent) of B.C. adolescents have smoked up more than 10 times compared
with 13 per cent of students in 1992. And one-fifth (21 per cent) used it at least once in the month
prior to the survey.
Marijuana use among the very young most concerns Tonkin, a retired pediatrician from Galiano
Island who spearheaded the Canadian Pediatric Society’s decision to take a position on the
issue, expected to be published later this month.
Research sought into effects on young
“Those that smoke up at an early age are more inclined to engage in other risky behaviours that
can be at least as harmful if not more harmful than the marijuana they start off with – alcohol,
hard drugs, risky driving, risky sex,” he says.
“More long-term studies on respiratory function and the prevalence of chronic lung disease, cancers
and cognitive capacity among chronic marijuana users are needed, but the available evidence shows
that these negative effects are present,” Tonkin wrote last year in Pediatrics and Child Health.
Tonkin says it’s crucial to know more about how marijuana affects young adolescent brains, which
may be more prone to addictive patterns.
“The only thing we know is during that phase of development the hardwiring goes in and there is some
suggestion that maybe that gets compromised.”
Cancers and chronic lung disease may await pot-smoking children down the road, he warns.
It took a long time for epidemiologists to connect cancer to tobacco, he says. “We’re obviously
going to have to wait for a fairly long time with respect to marijuana.”
According to the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, today’s marijuana, up to five times more
powerful than in the 1970s – can cause “adverse physical, mental, emotional and behavioural
changes, and – contrary to popular belief – it can be addictive.”
“The use of marijuana can impair short-term memory, verbal skills and judgement and possibly
increase a user’s likelihood of developing cancer.”
Given the potential for harm, not enough is being done to tune kids in, says Art Steinmann,
executive director of the non-profit Alcohol-Drug Education Service, which provides teaching
materials to about 1,500 B.C. classrooms.
“We are not in any systematic way educating kids about the possible downside of marijuana,”
he says. “Basically, we’ve tended to put our resources into enforcement and prevention.”
Richard Garlick, spokesman for the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, agrees that more of
a message about the risks of cannabis needs to get out, much the way campaigns against
smoking and drinking worked.
“There’s a certain amount of complacency by kids who say it’s safer than smoking or drinking,
and they’re right. Tobacco kills 40,000 Canadians a year. And when you look at alcohol, it
probably kills 5,000 to 7,000 people a year. As far as we know, nobody actually dies of cannabis
overdose, but we need to understand what role it may play in accidents and particularly
highway fatalities.”
Thus far, research shows that most of the harm from cannabis use relates to heavy and prolonged
smoking rather than short-term intermittent use, he says.
He adds that he has encountered some brilliant people who have become paranoid and incapacitated
in dealing with life after smoking too much marijuana.
“For the most part, we see reversible effects once use ends, whether it’s mood disorders or
delusions or hallucinations.”
Reviews of the scientific liteature shows very few pot smoking adolescents will carry usage
into adulthood or turn to hard drugs, he adds.
He would rather see limited research dollars spent on how to help kids deal with the social and
behaviour impacts of pot smoking rather than adolescent brain research per se.
“We don’t have a measure on the actual harm. We don’t know what role it plays in disrupting their
activities including school.”
“We don’t know to what extent it results in injuries because of impairment.”
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