U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory: Marijuana Use and the Developing Brain

Soon, I wasn't happy until I picked up an eighth and rolled up a blunt or packed my bowl. When I would stop, I would feel so numb. I soon got depressed, but luckily found a counselor and worked through that dark time with exercise and meditation. People really downplay how damaging getting high all the time can be.

It's strange though, because this doesn't happen to everyone. Some people can get stoned all day everyday and live a very happy, productive life. I wish I was in this category, but nothing good lasts forever.

That said, seeking to be routinely intoxicated could itself a symptom of something else wrong in their work or personal life. This would be a non-controversial statement to make about "hard drugs", alcohol, video games, risky relationships, etc...

Broadly speaking, I am pro-legalization of Pretty Much Everything, on the basis that proper education and appropriate treatment programs for heroin users are better for society than jail time.

But that comes with the need to implement pragmatic, evidence-based policies for how we approach drug use as a society.

A lot of neural development happens before your mid-20s, with a very large chunk happening during your adolescent years. Recreational drug use before your mid-20s, which includes alcohol and nicotine, really has a massive impact on your entire life.

I would argue that "soft" drugs, like low-percentage alcohol (beer and wine), maybe cocoa tea (not purified cocaine), and possibly low-percentage CBD should be relatively safe for adolescents from sixteen onwards.

Medical professionals, feel free to chime in if I'm wrong here. :)

Hard alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, and such, on the other hand, should have some access barrier for those under the age of twenty-five (90th percentile for complete neural development).

I wouldn't advocate an outright ban or criminalization -- if a teenager wants some weed and vodka, they're going to get it -- but putting some barriers in place to discourage consumption for the under-aged would be wise.

All of this, of course, needs to be coupled with comprehensive education.

The abstinence-only approach of "Just Say No" doesn't equip kids to really understand the full impact of the drugs they choose to use, and because of that, there's a lot of misinformation out there, ranging from "weed will make you crazy" to "it's completely safe for kids".

Neither of those things is true, and if we want to empower people to make good decisions, we must first be honest with them about the impact and trade-offs of the options on the table.

I mean, heavy use either way may be bad and boundaries are important with anything (weed, beer, chocolate, etc), but smoking the strongest stuff may be extra bad.

Note that I’m not saying you are wrong, nor am I saying he is wrong - but I am pointing out that your conclusion that neither of you can claim any truth is an unsound argument.

Furthermore, you also cannot conclude that a huge population of people who took marijuana with high THC content do not have a significant percentage of people who experienced adverse health effects from their drug-taking. To know that you would also need to have done an extensive study to conclude anything.

Now it may be you have done such a thing (or have read such a study) but without presenting such a study (or group of studies) then it’s also speculation.

Both likely covered by insurance. And stop smoking weed.

If you’d like to argue that the federal government - through the supremacy clause - has the power to override States that legalize marijuana, perhaps you’re right in theory.

But I think it’s a fantasy that the federal government will want to die on that hill. There are politically valuable reasons to avoid addressing the tension between state’s rights and the federal government’s power.

Federal LEOs shall not compel state LEOs to enforce federal law. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act and the 10th Amendment for why, but this fact has very long precedent.

So if nice Mr DEA man goes to the state police and say "help me bust these grow operations", the head of the state police says "go piss up a rope, those are tax-paying law abiding citizens who are breaking no law I have the responsibility to enforce."

And this is called state's rights.

Rhetorically I am well within the realm of sanity to describe purchasing weed at the dispensary down the street as legal. Feel free to insert the implicit footnoted "persuant to the laws of the state of oregon" in your head, if you like, for completeness.

Problems occur when the brain is too preoccupied in La La Land to develop optimally for the real world. There's a huge difference between the "thinker" and the "space cadet" when it comes to how one's brain handles thc in their youth.

Space cadets tend to stay space cadets. Thinkers tend to stay thinkers. The space cadet is who the Surgeon General is concerned about, because thc pretty much obliterates their chances of getting out of La La Land mentality.

Nobody says pot stops the brain from developing. You're going to get a notable Bell Curve. Some potheads go total 70's/80's movie revival mode. Others become Carl Sagan. Almost everyone around these people can identify which one is the Carl Sagan and which is the Tommy Chong (character) pretty early on. That's half of the pot humour in those movies, so it's not like only non-users notice this.

Recognizing that you are a deadbeat, and deciding that you don’t want to be is the only way to even begin recovery. I’ve seen this up close. Anyone who has any experience helping addicts will tell you the same thing. That’s why forced treatment doesn’t work and will never work.

Trust me, you’ll look at this differently after you have pulled family members out of crack houses that you thought only existed like that in the movies, had them steal your motorcycle and sell it for drugs, had them give your address to their crackhead friends where your wife and kids sleep, etc. Some of us are way past worrying about hurt feelings.

And this isn’t something that happens with weed users at all, which is why I don’t think people really understand what it means to be a drug addict when they mention weed. There is just no comparison.

> After adjusting for various confounding factors, no association between marijuana use and mood and anxiety disorders was found. The only significant associations were increased risk of alcohol use disorders, nicotine dependence, marijuana use disorder, and other drug use disorders.

It's pretty well established even in hardcore drug communities that drugs aren't for everybody and it's rarely ever the drug itself that caused it. Even without scientific evidence.

A simple test to determine if a teenager who tries marijuana should be forced to stay away from it is whether they have an extreme reaction to it.

Then again, psychotropic drugs when you're already dealing with problematic brain chemistry probably isn't a great idea for anyone.

I suspect lots of people around you do so without you knowing it; as it remains a federal crime and not protected from employment and other discrimination, many people are discreet about it and the non-discreet are not a representative subset of the using population.

With tobacco use, there was a huge amount if money spent selling the public on the idea that it wasn't dangerous. In contrast, there has been a large amount of money spent selling the idea that marijuana is incredibly dangerous. More accurate conversations would be

"My mom died of lung cancer"

"I'm sorry to hear that, would you like one if my doctor recommended cigarettes? Marlboro published a study saying smoking helps grieving people with no side effects."

Compared to

"My mother has schizophrenia"

"It's her fault for smoking marijuana. At least they locked up your father for selling it."

For a meme war maybe, but for those of us who decide based on facts, their precise safety is unknown until proven otherwise.

> History has shown that there are very few "safe" recreational drugs.

What history is this, and for what specific definition of the word "safe"?

> This attitude is one of the reasons it was so hard for public opinion to change on tobacco usage.

Perhaps, but pardon me if that doesn't motivate me to hop on board the anti-science train.

This is correct. But we do have sufficient statistical evidence to rule out _large_ negative effects. We do know that cannabis is very unlikely to be as harmful to physcal and mental health as alcohol.

Not only that, I lack the confidence we as a society can make adequate decisions on restrictions to freedoms based on the sorts of numbers and correlations that are currently being published. Does the expected reduction in harm justify the restrictions of personal freedoms imposed in its name? Does it help more than, say, banning high school sports would?

Unless unless causation goes wholly or partially the opposite way (more likely to smoke cannabis if you are already predisposed to schizophrenia).

Organic solvents have practical uses, and can be inhaled from a rag to get high.

I don't see the difference, other than some fucking politics.

But yeah if you're unstable in the first place, one too many beer or one to many joint and you'll do stupid shit. Anyway, always research, buy from renown sources, test your drugs (kits are available on amazon, ebay, &c.), do it in a safe environment with people you trust, don't use drugs when depressed or suicidal.

What? The parent comment is asking: how do they know they wouldn't have done better for the past fifteen years if they hadn't started in high school.

One of the odd things about drugs is that if you do use them as a crutch (and I certainly do), then you are forfeiting recreational value.

I smoke to feel "normal" and to avoid nightmares (it turns off dreaming, which is quite useful). That means I can't get "high" like non-potheads can. When I haven't smoked in a while, I get giggly and have the munchies and every idea is mindblowing, and that's truthfully quite a lot of fun and is the reason most people start smoking weed.

Unfortunately, if I don't smoke after work, I can't really feel like my work day is over, and I'll keep thinking about work until I exhaust myself. If I don't smoke before bed, there's a good chance I'll have horrible nightmares and wake up in a cold sweat. These aren't symptoms of withdrawal that go away in time, that's just how I lived my life before discovering weed, and that's how I feel daily even if I take a months-long break from smoking.

I would love to not need weed as a crutch, both to be healthier and so I can occasionally get a giggly-munchies-omg-this-music-sounds-amazing type of high.

The problem is, if I quit smoking, I feel less mentally healthy, and all of the psychiatric drugs that could possibly help are worse in health and effect than weed.

However, the point is moot because legalizing marijuana increases it's overall availability, image, and appeal and thus you'll have more minors using it overall post legalization.

To illustrate my point, it would be like saying "legalizing marijuana makes it 50% harder for minors to buy it!" but leaving off the "(but also legalization would increase the number of minor users by 10000+%)" part.

All it would take is for Juul to make THC pods and suddenly you have a HUGE adolescent user base essentially using marijuana overnight that didn't exist before legalization.

Legality makes it so that now everyone knows where to buy it (at any store) and now minors just experiment a few times until they find a lax vendor just like they do with Juuls. After all, minors are not penalized for merely attempting to buy something.

And, like I put in my other comment, it doesn't really matter if the barrier for minors buying drugs is higher if the act of legalization increases the number of minors attempting to buy the drug by an astronomical factor.

I just don't buy this. When I was a kid it was trivial to ask somebody to buy us alcohol and cigarettes. Almost everybody I knew drank underage and at least a third of the kids smoke. Compared to this getting weed was always 'an event' and I did not get to try it until much later.

Marijuana might be down now, but I could see THC Juul pods or MJ pills or some other form of legal marijuana becoming a fad among minors in the future and usage skyrocketing. Legalization is the enabler in this case.