Weed: I've Seen It Affect Young Minds
Posted August 11, 2017 09:50 am | Op-Ed
By
Winslow Myers
Fifty years ago I was speculating with a college friend about what we might do with our lives. He asserted that he wanted to spend his life bringing about the legalization of marijuana. I kidded him at the time because such an ambition seemed an absurd waste of his talent and brains. He spent a number of years working for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and as we know the goal of comprehensive legalization may be coming within reach. More and more states have legalized marijuana, some states for recreational use, 23 others and counting for medical use. The medical benefits are remarkable.
Meanwhile, the “war on drugs” has been an abysmal failure. We desperately need creative thinking, especially to respond to the opioid crisis in the U.S. Some enlightened police departments are leaning away from the criminalization of drug use and toward helping people obtain treatment. For adolescents, legalizing drugs may diminish their glamour as something forbidden.
As a high school teacher in the U.S. for 30 years, I witnessed an almost total correlation in my students between chronic marijuana use and a falling off of the ability to come to class prepared to engage, ask questions, and grow intellectually. For the teens I worked with, marijuana was an insidious and consistent killer of ambition. After I retired, clinical studies emerged that seemed to confirm my observations—heavy marijuana use has the potential to permanently damage the young adolescent brain.
When I was teaching high school, one of the most effective anti-cigarette propaganda tools was to remind students that nicotine narrows veins and therefore could hypothetically accelerate genital insensitivity in both sexes. Fear mongering or not, that was an argument they listened to! Further research may yield more clarity about the deleterious effects of marijuana upon young minds, or minds of all ages that will be as effective in convincing teens not to overindulge.
My personal experience with weed was consistent with my experience of my students, though at 76, I rarely smoke anymore.
When I smoked it in my twenties, marijuana did act as advertised, as a radical relaxant. It was amusing to get high in a group and find every offhand remark unaccountably hilarious. It was fun to play music with friends and experience the illusion that everyone was a far better guitarist and singer than we judged ourselves to be when sober. But I always felt logy and out of sorts for a few days after, not like an acute hangover from too much alcohol but still, a price paid in “lowness” for having gotten high that was more than just my puritan heritage at work.
Nowadays a few puffs just put me to sleep. Who needs it?
When I began a family, the issue became more personal. My son Chase learned to play a mean electric guitar at a young age. I assume marijuana was a constant in his life not long after he bought his first instrument and spent more and more hours with his bandmates in various neighborhood garages.
He was arrested once for possession, though it did nothing to make him more prudent. His academic record remained dismal all the way through high school and he graduated by the skin of his teeth.
In his early twenties, he pulled himself together and began to study sound engineering at the Berklee College of Music, even making the dean’s list.
The shadow temptation of drugs still loomed over him though, and he departed this life at the age of 23 from an overdose of methadone, imbibed at the house of an addict acquaintance. His mother, my wife of 30 years, died more or less of grief a year later.
No doubt, tragedy conditions my skepticism about blanket legalization. Those who are working for it would view me as an unnecessarily alarmist.
I’ve known adults and adolescents whose chronic marijuana use has clearly done something to diminish their engagement with the challenges of life and work. When people argue that marijuana use has no consequences at all for mind or body, it makes me want to reconnect with my college friend from so long ago. I’d like to ask him if marijuana still stands up as his best answer to facing life’s “ordinary unhappiness.”
Bottom line for me: legalize it, fine, but let’s also figure out how to educate kids 10 and up to forego marijuana for at least the decade when their brains are still developing resilience — and wouldn’t we all prefer it if it were outright prohibited for surgeons, train engineers, passenger jet pilots, air traffic controllers, and other professionals who need every brain cell to deal with the unexpected?
---------
Winslow Myers is the author of "Living Beyond War: A Citizen's Guide," and serves on the boards of Beyond War and the War Prevention Initative, and is syndicated by PeaceVoice.
Graphics and layout added by the Observer
This piece was reprinted by the Columbia County Observer with permission or license.