Feds: Teen use of pot can lead to dependency, mental illness
Experts who have worked with children say there's nothing harmless about marijuana.
"I've seen many, many kids' lives negatively impacted and taken off track because of marijuana," said Elizabeth Stanley-Salazar, director of adolescent services for Phoenix House treatment centers in California. "It's somewhat Russian roulette. There are so many factors, emotional, psychological, biological. You can't predict the experimentation and how it will impact a kid."
Bruce Mirken, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project, an organization that advocates the decriminalization of marijuana, called the study "an absolutely dishonest report, deliberately confusing correlation with causation."
"This very week the British government's official scientific advisers on illegal drugs issued a report saying they are 'unconvinced that there is a causal relationship between the use of cannabis and any affective disorder,' such as depression, he said.
The drug control policy office analyzed about a dozen studies looking at marijuana use, including research by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Overall, marijuana use among teens has decreased 25 percent since 2001, down to about 2.3 million kids who used pot at least once a month, the drug control office said.
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Member Comments
Posted By: ceanf9 @ 05/10/2008 12:08:36 AM
Comment: burbank, ihave to disagree with you when you say this study is 'on the mark'. This 'study is what they call a meta-study. Basically they do no new research and combine the results of previous studies, manipulating the results to support their conclusions. I wouldn't give this study a single bit of credibility because a) it is from the white house drug war propaganda machine and b) relies of dubious statistical methodologies. As for your other comments... they reek of the nanny state mentality. Who are you to say that smoking pot brings others to the 'brink of despair', as it seems to have done to you? There are tens of millions of productive, successful american citizens that have at one time, or currently smoke marijuana. please step down from your 'i know whats better for you than you' pedestal.
Posted By: dreamwrthy @ 05/09/2008 11:05:43 AM
Comment: Goffness, you stated that the AMA has already stated that cannabis isn't dangerous. That is an outright lie. I've looked up their policy on cannabis on their website and they state unequivocably that it IS dangerous. Pull the other leg, why don't you.
Posted By: Goffness @ 05/09/2008 10:58:44 AM
Comment: The sad part about this is that most young people wont take this seriously at all. I myself really doubt that this is true. The best way to predict future behavior is to look at past behavior. The government has lied time and time again about marijuana and its effects. Science proves this, period. The young people in this country are tired of the boy who cried wolf, a.k.a. the drug war. Even if any of this were true, we've been mislead so many times that I cant imagine most people taking it seriously. Britain's top health officials just did a re-classification of controlled substances. They took in over 1500 factors ranging from personal health to sociatal impact. The result? Both tobacco and alcohol were in the top 7 most dangerous drugs, with cannabis coming in at number 11. The american medical association has already come out and said that cannabis is not a dangerous drug. The fact that cigs and booze kill almost 1 million people a year in this country and marijuana is some evil drug is absurd