As weed gets more potent, teens are getting sick

Despite the name, it also works for Firefox.

“Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn't gonna make you kill people, and ...it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorists, but... Well son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored and... It's when you're bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or... being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything.” [0]

To be clear, I don’t wholly agree, I know too many talented and hard-working stoners, but it does sum up the passive danger of cannabis rather nicely I think.

[0] https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/My_Future_Self_n%27_Me/Scr...

I was never the type of smoker which was "active". I would smoke socially and began to hate that I could never remember people's names or conversations. It made me fairly quiet and anti-social compared to without.

Now I really can't enjoy marijuana, even when buying low THC high CBD bud and vaping it, it's still very easy for me to overshoot and get into a state I hate. Marijuana turns me into a complete idiot and creates a sort of cerebral haze I can't stand.

I really dislike the lack of education surrounding marijuana. People, especially young people, seem to disregard the impact of excessive consumption. You can argue with me all day it's safer than alcohol or tobacco, and I agree if we're talking equivalent amounts, but I'm not saying you should drink daily or multiple times a day for years.

Everybody is different, my experience isn't necessarily everyone else's. For those that do fall into the trap of spending too much money, time, and failing to understand how weed might be holding them back, better education, regulation, and support should net society a bunch of happy well informed people living their best lives.

Crucially, I used relatively small amounts of pure sativa. I wasn’t stuck on the couch while I used it. Still, this to me suggests self control is more important than abstinence.

I still struggle with motivational problems (ADHDish issues), but I think I've been lucky. I have friends that will probably never achieve anything meaningful in life and that is despite having had access to the best education available (private schools), parents that were MORE than okay, welp being privileged you know... Now some of them cannot stand normalcy (i.e.: working).

There is a world of difference between starting weed when you're 25 and smoking a little bit VS getting HIGH almost everyday from 13-15 onwards.

When we were young we convinced ourselves that weed was not dangerous at all...fools.

I'm about to be a dad, I'll make sure my kids know what's up.

That may be true for the majority of users, but the increase in people having significant negative reactions to high-dose THC is a real phenomenon.

This new era of extremely potent THC concentrates and other high-dose products has opened the door to some people using far more THC than previous generations could easily consume. Many of these high-dose users are discovering that the old narrative that weed isn’t “physically addictive” isn’t actually true and prolonged high-dose usage can produce significant physical and mental withdrawal effects. It won’t kill you like extreme alcohol withdrawal can, but the deep impulse to redose and inability to quit easily catches a lot of these high-dose users unprepared after they’ve been told that weed is harmless for so long.

Psychosis among high-dose users is also on the rise, though harder to pinpoint because the connection is very hard to make and quantify in studies. Again, this isn’t something people were taught to watch out for so you see some of these users believing that marijuana is a treatment for their psychosis rather than a cause and they spiral further and further until quitting.

The old street knowledge about marijuana’s biggest downside being laziness doesn’t really apply to people engaging in the more extreme doses and uses heavily processed and concentrated products.

The real issue I'm having with it is that I'm using pretty much every night. I come from the gym, take a shower, and grab the vape pen and sit on the couch. It just makes me so lazy.

I stopped cooking and just eat pizza and ice cream nearly every night. Thankfully my weight hasn't taken a hit. But it creates this cycle of not cooking, so I don't buy groceries, so I can't cook, so I just order in.

I don't feel "dopey and less intelligent" when I smoke weed at all times of the day. It actually has very little impact on me. But it does help me deal with my chronic anxiety issues.

I take breaks regularly. Sometimes I get into a place where I can't operate in my day to day life because of intrusive thoughts. When I smoke I'm able to break out of cycles of repetitive thought and make real progress in my life. I achieve so much more and get so much more out of life. I'm able to engage with the people in my life better and improve my relationships.

You speak with false authority on a matter you cannot possibly understand, because you do not share the life experience of myself or people like me. It's irresponsible and you should desist. If you have relevant experiences, share them and explain that this is your conclusion. If you don't have relevant experiences, don't include yourself in the conversation. Don't speak in generalizations about other people's lives.

if weed makes someone feel fulfilled, then they can farm a lot more feelings of fulfillment by using it than the old fashioned way of actually accomplishing things. I think trying to shame people away from it is silly. People who use it will very quickly realize it isnt bad, and then they dismiss everything they heard about it.

There is a monkey paw warning in that it wears off. It wears off in short and long terms; it is less effective the more you use it over time. So be aware that the spectrum for its effects is along the lines of "kind of cool for a little bit" to "everything you love slowly being ripped from your hands". the latter extreme probably being pretty rare and more applicable to heroin.

Otherwise you could make the same 'danger' argument about video games, porn, social media, reading books, painting, co-dependent relationships, etc. Anything that people use to dump their attention / time into rather than deal with anything uncomfortable in their life. The vessels people use are a matter of preference, and tangential to the underlying problem.

There is always an issue with trying to use 1 tool to fix every problem. obsession. Weed usage requires nuance and an understanding of what it is you are trying to accomplish with it. same as any other drug, same as any other tool.

Honestly, if someone wants to do nothing with their life than smoke weed.. who cares? I certainly dont. They might be one of the last people I offer any sort of charity to, but that's about me not them.

Other ubiquitous drugs like caffeine or alcohol are easier for me to balance because their drawbacks (dependence, hangovers, weight gain) are more obvious.

But cannabis doesn't have those to nearly the same extent, so it's easy to rationalize frequent use: on an average night without anything planned, it always sounds enjoyable without any downsides. But then frequent use eventually adds up and starts to cause small issues, like being a little lazier and having a slightly worse memory.

>And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional success, or personal fulfillment.

This applies to being 100 pounds overweight too.

Hell, it can be argued if you cut out beer and switch to cannabis your health will improve.

However, I've gotten stoned almost every night for the past ~15 years and I think it's been pretty positive. I actually get a low-level pleasant and productive anxiety to create shit. Like don't get me wrong I can get stoned and play a game or watch TV, but usually it just makes me want to go harder on something I'm working on and makes the work more fun. For certain types of work (writing product stuff, making music, css polish) I find it correlates with small creative bursts or insights. My current rule of thumb... only vape [0] in situations where I don't have to deal with strangers or kids (only at night these days). Like food, alcohol, coffee, being alone, or being social, moderation is key.

My point is just that it depends on the person and setting. It's not necessarily good or bad, more like a power tool for your mind. No panacea.

[0]: https://www.puffco.com

If you want to be a daily user, or already are, do try to still feel the need to do something when there's nothing to do and consume it responsibly. You probably will be fine health-wise but remember that doing-nothing-is-ok is not ok especially when it's become routine.

You can form a bad relationship with literally anything. Social media, television, video games.

The smartest and most passionate developer I have ever known smoked weed literally every day.

There are many musicians who use marijuana regularly. They perform, practice, and achieve at a level I can only IMAGINE.

What you are really talking about here is something nefarious: Self medication. Personally, I self medicate because I have a very busy mind and I need something to slow my brain down at the end of the day.

Other people self medicate due to depression. This IS bad. It is a way to escape reality because you are unhappy.

Anecdote: I smoked weed in high school pretty frequently. Then, I left for college, was super busy, didn't have any money, so I didn't smoke weed for almost a decade.

Eventually I moved to a state that has legal weed, and I bought a joint, and I smoked it. And I found something: It wasn't just youthful rebellion, I enjoy being a little stoned! So now I do it occasionally.

THC users like to downplay them.

There is something to be said for turning off the part of the brain that worries about being productive all the time.

Claiming a few 4 hour blocks over the course of a week as your own time to "zone out" and do whatever activity you like is not a bad thing. For some people cannabis helps them get in that zone.

Only when her finance had a psychotic breakdown and tried to kill everyone from it did she finally get off of it. Was 2 months before he didn't sound like an anime villain who was going to take over the world.

She keeps commenting at much more energy and less depressed she is, how she isn't always irritated at everything. She had no idea it was affecting her like that. For us we have our sweet loving and caring daughter back.

You can give someone a hamburger and some people will abuse it til they are obese. It's a personality thing.

To me, the most alarming trend I see among people nowadays is cell phones - people are checking notifications all day like its crack.

As a general rule, I don't disagree, although there could be other important variables in place here as well.

An alternative outcome is that one spends their time thinking about intelligent and important things (that few other people think about), except they may not have an easy route to monetization (professional success) for various reasons that are not the fault of drugs, and in some cases arguably due to a lack of more widespread drug usage, or simple diversity in thinking and discussion.

It’s like anything else; confusing and obtuse then you learn to live with it

No one learns to code before writing bad code. Some of my best and simplest ideas came to me while high af simply because other routine daily thoughts were out of the way

Kindly stop peddling tropes from a place of ignorance and actually figure it out subjectively for yourself. Other peoples tolerances are not the same as yours. Like everything else it’s gradients, ranges, and distributions

Edit: my only non-typical stoner trope is I did not smoke until I was 27. I had life experience behind me. A non-trivial detail. I am 43 now

So, like being addicted to an Internet connected, social media infested smartphone?

I have given up smoking for long periods at several points in my life. Sometimes I filled the time productively, sometimes I filled it with TV, video games, the internet, etc. The modern world afford people many ways to be happy doing nothing, weed just happens to be one of several that are very good at the job.

But having said that, I know a lot of people who have lives I consider dull but never use cannabis. So it might be nothing to do with the drug at all. After all, I was still able to quit easily. It wasn't like a heroin addiction or something.

Anecdotally, I've known people who were prescribed pharmaceutical anti-anxiety meds and done far worse with that feeling of weightlessness and removal of stakes, like you're just wandering around in the Matrix until something bad happens like a car accident. I mean yes that happens on weed (again, anecdotally) but we have no controlled studies about it, and it absolutely should be studied.

So yes, valid point, but it's the tip of a much deeper iceberg.

Thanks for sharing your wisdom.

I could not have relationships or work at all without medicinal cannabis, and there is really no difference between it and recreational cannabis in terms of efficacy, as long as the strain matches somewhat closely.

Chicken vs. the Egg.

Perhaps many are drawn to cannabis due to the inability to achieve such goals due to whatever individual or societal issues/reasons one may have.

Yeah there's the general state of the world, economic precarity among families, the effects of social media, the education system and society in general deprioritizing developing resilience and coping skills as part of children's upbringings, etc. I'm sure they all contribute, but I have a hard time believing the weed is helping.

In most cultural practices that revolve around psychoactive substances it's typical to embed them in sort of a ritual context. Alcohol is pretty obvious, but even things like tea ceremonies or ritual practices around use of hallucinogens match. The modern "clinical" approach of just focusing on consuming the substance without any social or cultural thing around it is probably the wrong way to go about things. We do this with alcohol, for example, where we have some socially understood norms about healthy and unhealthy ways of using it, in particular not drinking alone as a habit.

I like bourbon and gin, but I don't drink both everyday.

As they say, "everything in moderation."

Like, why deal with life (which involves risk and rejection, and ick, work) when you can just blast trippy movies through your head all day? (Fun though these movies can be, for a while).

1) That line has been trotted out continuously because weed potency has been going up continuously. In the late 90s, good weed was anything above 4-5% THC; the store near my house currently has nothing below 23%. For your beer/liquor analogy to work, you'd have to live somewhere where the bottle shop only sells triple IPAs and fortified wine, and Coors is in the soft drink section.

2) I don't believe there was anywhere in the US where hash products were "widely available" before legalization. And believe me, I was looking! Back then, using hash every day was an expensive and exotic thing to do, like owning an albino tiger. Today it's commonplace and costs less than a dollar a day.

3) You're ignoring the entire point of the article, which is people getting sick. I don't think cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome existed a generation ago. If you'd told me in 1999 that you knew a daily pot smoker who accidentally smoked too much and had to go to the ER, I would've said no way, physically not possible. Today, totally plausible. If everyone just "adjusted their consumption" this would not be true.

CBD is a very effective antipsychotic that occurs naturally alongside the THC: https://academic.oup.com/schizbullopen/article/3/1/sgab053/6...

What percent of products sold for recreational use in dispensaries have a 1:1 or greater ratio of CBD?

So no, there actually is a confirmable mechanism by which the legal product being sold today is significantly less safe in terms of psychosis related side effects than the illegal products from years ago.

And everyone is still so sensitive to regulatory overreach from those years ago that they are stubbornly turning a blind eye to the underlying pharmacological evidence for that danger.

10mg of THC alone and 10mg of THC with 10-20mg of CBD will have very similar euphoric effects. But the latter will be much less likely to result in delusional side effects, for which constant daily use can build up into a full-blown psychotic episode as in the case mentioned in the article.

This is true, and I believed it without caveat until I was in my 30s, and met a very productive programmer who smoked when they studied. Learning under the influence of cannabis is just something that has to be practiced, and since people rarely study stoned, they rarely get to that point. After you've realized this, cannabis just allows you to study longer and more imaginatively.

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't had the example, and the practice that I used was playing the game minesweeper under the influence. I do feel that I might have ruined some of the joy in being stoned, I never feel as out of control or confused as I could feel before, but I'm now of the belief that this was weird cultural baggage. When you're intoxicated, society gives you permission to be out of control, so you feel that.

I've always known people who drank for the impunity. The kind of people who start saying and doing unforgivable shit and slurring their speech after the first can of O'Doul's.

It's easy to tell by looking at it that vodka is not beer. In fact you can often tell how alcoholic a beverage is just by sniffing it. Is the same true for different intensities of cannabis? In any case, hard liquor is certainly far more dangerous than beer (when you hear about college kids who died of alcohol poisoning, it's always from liquor - the physical limits of the stomach generally prevent you from getting worse than a night of vomiting and a hangover from beer). So I'm not sure that the analogy to alcohol is helpful to cannabis.

That was definitely not true in my case. I used to consume pretty high-% THC hash throughout the day. At first it was strong and I did it once every day or two. But you get tolerant and can handle a lot more. Eventually I was smoking hash several times a day and I ended up with a lot of the symptoms described in this article (though I am in my 30s). I realized I needed to quit, and the off-ramp was terribly long and frightening; I was very hooked both physically and emotionally and I haven't touched any form of THC since, though it did take me close to a year to feel normal again.

Interesting to me that sharing my experience with THC addiction has deserved downvotes. Sigh.

I also think that the weed culture is hostile against suggestions of problems. Almost every time I have spoken about possible dangers of weed, even when presenting peer reviewed articles or meta analysis, I have been angrily shouted down. Unfortunately weed users have been prosecuted for so long that they take a dogmatic view about its benefits.

During the Gin Craze, sure:

> It is with the deepest concern your committee observe the strong Inclination of the inferior Sort of People to these destructive Liquors, and how surprisingly this Infection has spread within these few Years ... it is scarce possible for Persons in low Life to go anywhere or to be anywhere, without being drawn in to taste, and, by Degrees, to like and approve of this pernicious Liquor.

Eh, I don't believe that. Especially with weed there is not much to indicate dosage and the addiction is often to tobacco too which motivates people to smoke another joint. It is true that plants got more potent too. At least this is the case in Europe where weed is a bit different than in the US.

But I guess the most immediate danger is that drugs are increasingly being laced with other stuff.

Not to mention the vast difference between what it says on the label and what you may actually be consuming -- the testing and labeling processes are rather notorious for being inaccurate. Even for an avid smoker, it's virtually impossible to consume the exact appropriate dosage, if there even were such a thing. There's also social pressures which encourage people to consume larger amounts. The list goes on and on.

So, what you're suggesting as being the obvious negator of the expert opinions of medical professionals, simply has no foundation in reality.

When non-American parents allow their teenagers to drink usually its beer/wine only.

As someone who smokes a good amount of weed, my recommendation to people it to always stick to just flower. I've tried it all, vaping, vaporizers (different than vaping, you're superheating flower rather than using an extract), edibles, and regular pot.

From my personal experience, edibles last the longest but don't hit right away, takes about an hour for it to pass through to your liver and from there I noticed that it was a "low grade" high for a few hours.

Vaping is the polar opposite, the stuff hits you almost instantly. You also have to be careful and not puff to much, a monster hit will send you to another universe. I've also noticed that because of the high THC content (sometimes 90-100%) and virtually no CBD content, this is the easiest way to have a bad high. This also gives you the shortest high, seems to wear off quickest.

Finally you have good ol' flower. This is what I usually smoke because it slots somewhere between vaping and edibles in terms of how high you get. I almost always smoke flower because I get consistent results. If I vape I might have a panic attack, if I have an edible it might last too long, but with plain weed I know how long I'm going to be up, what the experience will be, etc.

Also this is complete pseudoscience but there's something that makes me feel better about smoking flower vs the other stuff. Vaping and all that other stuff is cool, but there's a certain safety in knowing the only modification a flower had was trimming the leaves away, no lab equipment, extractions, chemicals or any of that.

I think setting national standards around this would be just one benefit of legalizing recreational use at the federal level.

People who want a stronger buzz could always just take two..

Just give consumers choice

> lawnmower beers

> totally zooted

Oh I like you.

> sourced from god knows where

Well, that's the illegal part, isn't it? ;-)

It's always illegal until it lands in the coffeeshop! It's almost like a game of tag really. I wish Dutch politicians would properly legalize it, but the way I sometimes hear them talk about drugs is way too out of touch for that ever to happen.

Many places tax liquor more than beer, and restrict sales to approved liquor stores while beer and wine are sold broadly.

This is literally something my cat learned by himself as a kitten. He was a stray, raised without a momcat, and very food insecure when he arrived. When we started feeding him full meals, he'd promptly eat as much as he could and about 10 minutes later barf it all out. He learned to not do that and not eat everything he could find on all plates very quickly.

Any not-completely-stupid person could do the same. Sheesh

Also, exotic strains you the average user has never heard about is a function of a growing market. A proper cannasseur would know where the strains (cultivars) are from - who bred them, what their lineage is, how they were grown, how long they were cured (not fermented), etc.

Completely agree with your point though that out of hundreds of strains that I have tried, nil have a “making sick” property by default. It only arises when users incorrectly scope the risk.

If anyone reading this experiences cannabis hyperemesis syndrome, stuff like fresh air, chewing peppercorns, or a dose of CBD sublingually can help.

Very curious to hear more about the adulterated, unregulated, non coffee shop world over there! Thanks for your comment.

Source - Recently Certified Ganjier.

I speak from experience because I developed the cannabis hyperemesis syndrome. It happened when I switched to dry herb vaporization and the smoothness of the vapor made me unconsciously and insidiously increase the amount of cannabis I consumed per puff until I reach the ridiculous amount of .25g per puff. I know it was the syndrome and not some adulterated weed because applying capsaicin cream on my abdomen stopped the nausea.¹

When you are affected by that syndrome abstinence is the only permanent solution. So if someone like to indulge in cannabis, they should avoid to consume frequent concentrated doses.

1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5758720/

Teens are getting zooted because they are using concentrate pens, which are essentially e-cigarrette's but replace PG/VG with distillate.

From the math in the rest of your post, I think you meant to say that "Low-concentration cannabis is a significant health risk". (I don't think the term "huge" applies in any case to a substance whose intake, after all, is optional).

Interesting.

The market controlling genetics in plant propagation has consistently lead to favoring bigger, more uniform, more shelf-stable, and this has always lead to less nutrition, over-consumption, and more waste.

The same thing is happening with BOTH drug cannabis and industrial (CBD) hemp. The low threshold of .3% THC for hemp to be legal for any grower in the US is an arbitrary ass number, so by breeding to it who knows what’s getting lost in the genetic dustbin.

Growing your own is liberating, if not still legally dubious in the US. Repealing the prohibition against growing would likely get more people inquiring about their cannabis, just like when you go to a farmers market and enjoy substantially better quality vegetables. You can learn what went into it.

Of course the dispensary business is on the verge of becoming an entrenched lobby, and would likely rebuff any effort to legalize growing.

If the drug causes negative effects on a large subset of the people who use them, that is a problem with the drug.

I consider them fun! I think edibles have their own audience, and the "experienced users" think their tolerance is in one place because of the low quality crap they simply used a lot off the street, but its really in a totally different place. (With other drugs, people often overdose for the same reason like they use a scale that was relevant 5 years ago and then OD because their tolerance changed and the drug concentration changed.)

Edibles are also basically a different drug after it gets processed by the liver, I think some additional consumer protection should be done

I am also 100% in agreement that FDA-level studies should exist, and that it is pathetic we just have random experiences from random jurisdictions.

Maybe they should think to mention the millions of people on cannabis prescriptions who have had massive benefits.

Both can be (and almost certainly are) true at the same time.

Gone are the days of finding a smelly bong in the back of the closet, this could be in their pocket or purse at all times.

The side effects of weed could be found in every sober teen. Hungrier, more emotional, more distant from parents, etc. Are good parents supposed to treat their children like criminals until they no longer show signs of puberty?