Encouraging Mary Jane
Has the legalization of marijuana provoked more teenage pot-heads? Or, interestingly enough, has it lowered the rates? Is marijuana really that bad?
First things first- marijuana does not make you hallucinate the way the urban myth says it does. Jeff Craven, owner of a marihuana and bong shop in Downtown Fort Collins, makes that statement clear. His store is filled with bongs of all sizes, colors, and shapes, along with any possible Cannabis-related product you can imagine. Being under 18, it was sort of an audacious move to just waltz in and ask him for an interview, but I was on a mission. I wanted to know about marijuana. As a teenager living in Colorado, the marijuana leaf has become an iconic representation of the state, and that’s because it’s legal. Legal, of course, to everyone over 18 years of age. But has the legalization of this drug increased teenage consumption? I mean, perhaps making it more available has encouraged teens to try it, just like they may try cigarettes and alcohol.
I asked Jeff Craven if most of his customers were young people seeking to try out marijuana. Surprisingly enough, he said most, if not all of his customers, tend to be people who are in their 40s or older, that use marijuana to relieve pain due to arthritis, muscle cramps, seizures, or for just plain recreation. “Making marihuana legal hasn’t really attracted younger customers. The customers I have tend to be people who have always used marijuana, even before it was legal, and do it moderately. But I never get college kids, much less high schoolers.” He says that “kids may feel more liberty to smoke it publicly, but this doesn’t incite more of them to try it. The kids that are going to try it were the ones who were already going to do it anyways, but perhaps now it’s easier for them to get it.” Christopher Ingraham from the Washington Post says pretty much the same thing as Jeff in a news article from last June, “adolescents already report that marijuana is widely available. Nationally, roughly 80 percent of 12th-graders say that pot is easy to get. The kids who want to smoke weed are probably already doing so — and legalization would do little to change that.”
Marijuana itself is not an easily accepted drug anyways, as there is a stigma to marijuana having a larger impact on the body than other drugs such as alcohol and cigarettes. But is it really worse than alcohol or tobacco? Jeff says that “this is a misconception of uninformed people. Marijuana is even used medically. Alcohol, on the other hand, has a worse effect on a person’s personality and health, since it may cause them to become very aggressive. I’ve talked to police officers before, and they’ve told me they ‘definitely prefer to have to arrest a pot smoker than an alcohol intoxicated person just because of the pacific response. People doped out on marijuana generally seem to just be extremely relaxed.’” Upon further research, I discovered that Jeff might be right- an investigation made by The National Center for Biotechnology showed that cannabis is 114 times less deadly than alcohol. Even when compared to ten other drugs such as tobacco, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, methamphetamine, diazepam, amphetamine and methadone, marijuana still remained the safest drug to consume in the range of “typical recreational dosages.” Crazy, right?
Jeff also revealed that he, himself was once an alcoholic, and had moments in which he acted irrationally or violently to a situation that he shouldn’t have. On the other hand, he says, he’s never had that experience with marijuana- at the most he’d only felt really relaxed or hungry (the so-called munchies we’ve also heard about). Cigarettes, too, he explained, cause much more lung and heart damage than marihuana does, because “they add all those other components to cigarettes such as ammonia and arsenic, with a whole bunch of other toxins to keep the cigarette and the paper burning. With marijuana it’s not like that. It’s natural, there’s no need for fuel to keep it burning, and it doesn’t damage your health in the same ways.” There are 600 ingredients in a cigarette, and 7,000 more chemicals are created when burnt, out of which 69 are cancerous, according to the American Lung Association. If that doesn’t say anything about marijuana stigma, I don’t know what else will.
But just because marijuana is now legal, safer and ‘healthier’, by no means does that give teenagers the permission or suggestion to consume it. Jeff, along with any other rational adult, will tell you that any drug consumed at a young age isn’t healthy. Why? “Well, first of all, teenagers haven’t fully developed their prefrontal cortex until their mid-twenties, and still then, marijuana can have damaging effects to the brain. After all, it’s still a drug”, says Jeff, “if the prefrontal cortex controls decision making and how you act, taking any sort of altering drug will screw you up. Nobody wants that.” And indeed, although marijuana may seem like the healthiest drug, it still remains one for a reason, and that is because it contains tetrahydrocannabinol, or, as normal people call it, THC. This chemical impairs attention, memory, and decision-making- clearly the brain activity that goes on in the prefrontal cortex.
I’ve asked high school students (whose names will obviously remain anonymous), what they think about trying marihuana. One said “I’d try it, just to know what it was like, but maybe when I’m older. I wouldn’t pursue it as a habit, I’m not interested in that. But I’d definitely try it with friends or around people I’m comfortable with that I know will be able to take care of me.” Some kids are desperate to try it, others are just really curious. Someone else responded that they’d try it just to forget about reality. Another person who said would never try it approved of it because it gives “taxes that can be used to fund schools and such.” I asked Jeff what the main recreational reasons his customers consume marijuana are, and he said that it tends to be because they like the effect on the body, or because they want to temporarily forget about their problems, use it to think, simply relax, and sometimes even as a coping method. Either way, “people shouldn’t consume it if they aren’t old enough or willing to accept the responsibility and potential consequences”, Jeff says. Personally, as someone with a mother that uses marijuana recreationally and somewhat medically, I have no interest whatsoever in trying it. I don’t like the idea of any substance that affects the way you think, and I’m not curious to try it, either (it smells nasty).
Consuming marijuana can affect your personal life. Consuming Marijuana and other substances can form part of your identity, because they alter you personality as well as affect your environment, and most likely, the way others perceive you- taking for granted the stigma around it. Families whose members use marijuana can also impact your growing up and your own opinions on marijuana.
So generally speaking, marijuana is still the best drug you could consume, but that doesn’t mean you should do it unless you need to for medical reasons. Otherwise, you can simply walk down the street and catch the non-popular whiff of Cannabis lingering in the air, if you really needed it.