When Sion Kim Harris, a Harvard Medical School substance abuse researcher, visits high school classes to talk about marijuana and other drugs, she does not hang up a “Just Say No” banner or talk about how a drug charge can stain a student’s criminal record.
Harris instead talks about cannabinoid receptors and brain development, about how regular marijuana use may affect performance on a test now, or 10 years from now. As states loosen their laws around limited marijuana use, raising concerns that it could cause an increase in use by teenagers, recent studies have found that marijuana dependency among teens can change their brains for the long term.
Comments
Yes, I think it doea change the perception, but not just for teens.
I speak to teens about marijuana and they do use the fact that is medically prescribed as rationale that it is not harmful. They also say marijuana is not like crack or alcohol to justify using it.
As long as society proscribes something that some find enjoyable, there will be many rationalizations as to why it's okay. Certainly they're right when comparing it to harder drugs and alcohol. Rationalizatons don't make it okay, of course, but negative exaggerations seriously weaken the other side of the discussion.
I'm not sure we have the tools to prevent teens from smoking marijuana or drinking alcohol. Scare tactics will not work on teens because they consider themselve invulnerable. Some marijuana smokers losing a few IQ points isn't likely to be an effective argument.
Maybe instead of speculation, we should study how approval of medical marijuana influences the USE of marijuana by teens. This article is about attitudes, which makes it next to useless in the real world.
We've already decriminalized the use of marijuana and it seems to me that fact would influence attitudes more than allowing medicinal use, but decriminalization is ignored by this article.
It could be that actual USE of marijuana by teens is not effected at all by allowing medicinal use. This article is terribly one-sided and not very informative. Chelsea Conaboy either has an agenda or is a poor reporter.