Pot Pitfalls

Citizens of Santa
Barbara County, beware. Every day there are articles
and advertisements about marijuana in our local papers. The
drug, being promoted for medical, recreational, and economic reasons, is now legal in California.

However, has anyone
considered the devastating effect marijuana has on
teens and young adults? According to Joseph Garbely,
chief medical officer for the Caron Foundation, we now see “on a regular basis young people with marijuana-induced psychosis.
Ages 18-26. We see a significant misperception about the safety and efficacy of marijuana among our teens
and young-adult patient population.” At Caron, the number of patients who
were admitted with a primary diagnosis of
cannabis use disorder increased more than 22 percent from 2014 to 2019. In
those five years, people admitted to treatment for marijuana addiction rose
from more than 27 percent of Caron’s total admissions to
nearly 40 percent. Secondly, Independent Blue Cross, has seen claims for cannabis use disorder rise between 2012 and
2018 by 180 percent. That included a 100
percent claim rise for patients 19 to 25.

Why is marijuana
today more dangerous? For starters, “the nature of what’s
being consumed has changed dramatically, said Ital Danovitch, an American Society of Addiction Medicine fellow and
psychiatry chairman at Cedars-Sinai Medical
Center in Los Angeles. The concentration is stronger
and cannabis is being used in vaping. Simply put, the marijuana of today is not the “reefer” of the Woodstock
generation.