Growing availability and acceptance has brought unintended consequences.

By Danielle M. Dick, Ph.D.

KEY POINTS

• Today’s marijuana is far more potent than the marijuana of years past: five to seven times stronger than in the ‘60’s, 70’s, ‘80s, and ’90’s.
• NIH’s Monitoring the Future 2021 study found that 11% of young adults said they used marijuana daily, nearly double the rate from a decade ago.
• Daily use is associated with problems in memory and motivation, which are critical for young people.

As the wave of legalization of medical marijuana and recreational cannabis sweeps the nation, many of us who work in the addiction field are worried. Legalization resulted in an increased availability of marijuana and a decreased stigma around using it, and those two conditions are strongly related to how much people use a given drug, especially young people.

If you’re a parent, you may be wondering why that’s problematic. Perhaps you used cannabis when you were younger, and you don’t see any harm in it.

The problem is that the marijuana of today is a far more potent drug than the marijuana of years past.

Until the 1990s, the amount of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, was about 3 to 4 percent in marijuana. As the first states began to legalize marijuana, breeders began to experiment and create stronger strains. By the mid-2000s, the average potency was up to 12 percent. Now, in states where marijuana is legal, it’s common to find THC levels of 20 percent or more. That means the marijuana of today is actually a drug that’s five to seven times stronger than the drug people remember from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and even ’90s. Edibles are even more potent, with concentrations of up to 80 percent. Guess who is attracted to gummies and other edibles? Kids.

New data from the annual survey of drug use conducted by the National Institutes of Health found that 11 percent of young adults said they used marijuana daily, nearly double the rate from a decade ago. That’s more than one in ten young people, the highest level of regular use ever reported since the study started in the ‘80s.

And here’s the problem:

We don’t know much about the long-term effects of this highly potent new drug on the developing brain—and what we do know is worrisome.

Marijuana adversely affects memory and motivation, critical skills for young people who are still learning, growing, and making important life decisions.

Young people need to get themselves to class or work, remember to do their homework, or meet up with their friends or partners. Regular marijuana use starts to impair all these critical components of daily life.

But then comes the other nefarious part of the drug’s impact on the developing brain: the more a person uses, the less they care about adverse consequences. The drug saps the motivation to do anything about the consequences of using the drug. We’ve seen these trends on college campuses for years.

Daily marijuana use is on the rise; it’s wreaking havoc on an increasing number of young people’s lives, and their brains are no longer motivated to care.

Oh, and did I mention that marijuana causes psychosis in a small but significant subgroup of kids?

To be clear, I’m not necessarily against legalization. The “war on drugs” caused great damage to many lives; it sent people who needed substance use treatment to prisons rather than hospitals, and it was disproportionately used to incarcerate people of color. Righting that wrong is a critical step that is long overdue.

However, the corollary of legalization—that marijuana use is increasingly perceived as “harmless”—just doesn’t match the data. Most young people and parents don’t realize how different today’s marijuana is from the marijuana of the past. Let’s all work to raise awareness so that young people can make choices that set them up for success.

Originally published at Psychology Today

References

National Institutes of Health (NIH). (2022, August 22). Marijuana and hallucinogen use among young adults reached all-time. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/marijuana-hallucinogen-us…

Danielle M. Dick, Ph.D. is a tenured Professor of Psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School