Teens have access to vastly more potent cannabis than their parents had at their age. Parents need to understand the risks, including psychosis

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  • blargle@sh.itjust.works
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    17 hours ago

    Teens have access to vastly more potent cannabis than their parents had at their age

    Oh FFS. I’ve been hearing this same bullshit for the last 25 years and it’s still irrational Reefer Madness conservative fearmongering.

    So what? If anything, more potent weed is less harmful because you are putting a smaller amount of burned plant material into your lungs to get the same effect.

    It’s not like people just… consume one marijuana and however high that gets you, that’s what you’re going with today. No, you’re going to continue smoking until you get sufficiently stoned and then stop and put it out.

    It doesn’t take long for anyone to figure out how high is too high and how much it takes to get there, and plan accordingly.

    It might be a vape pen with 92% THC hash oil in it so you take a couple of sippy little puffs and get mildly buzzed and you’re fine with that. Or conversely you can pack up a handful of that leafy brown prohibition-era crap and do gravity bongs until you cough your lungs out, and get a lot higher, because that was your goal.

    They sell those oil-soaked kif-encrusted joints here. You do not want to finish one in one sitting. The point of these isn’t to get insanely baked, it’s that one good hit will do it and you can put it out and save it in the glass jar it came in.

    As others have explained already- if you have the kind of brain prone to psychosis, weed is likely to push you over the edge- and that’s likely to happen when you’re a teenager, because lots of people try it at that age- but something else would have triggered it a few years later. And yes it’s just universally worse for adolescent brains. It is already illegal, everywhere it’s legal, for people under 21, which is reasonable. But parents need to parent.

    The idea that we can and should protect the kids who are predisposed to go schizo by keeping the available cannabis weak enough that no one can smoke enough of it to ever get really high is just absurd when you phrase it that way but that’s exactly what anyone pushing this “It’s so much more potent now!” pearl-cluching FUD is trying to sell you.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      9 hours ago

      If anything, more potent weed is less harmful because you are putting a smaller amount of burned plant material into your lungs to get the same effect.

      Yes. The actual issue is the THC/CBD ratio, CBD being antipsychotic as well as blocking the metabolisation of THC into more psychoactive variants.

      Add to that criminalisation and the desire of dealers to impress clueless customers with head highs and you get selective breeding for high-THC strains. I’d say the main reason I stopped back in the days was because there was essentially nothing but white willow on the market, ~20% THC ~1% CBD. And that’s not even the worst of the strains.

      Hopefully legalisation cuts back on that BS, with every satchel coming with test results showing people how off-kilter or balanced the weed is. There’s certainly no shortage of CBD-heavy seeds available, the market is obviously there.