Legalising marijuana creates big problems in preventing teen access
CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta. Photo: AP
For someone so opposed to the legalising of cannabis, it must have come as a surprise to neurosurgeon and chief CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta to find himself not only embracing the drug’s medical possibilities, but urging the government to change its hard-line position on the plant.
But the about-face, following the 2013 release of his documentary, Weed, came with a significant caveat. ”Much in the same way I wouldn’t let my own children drink alcohol, I wouldn’t permit marijuana until they are adults,” the father of three wrote. ”If they are adamant about trying marijuana, I will urge them to wait until they’re in their mid-20s when their brains are fully developed.”
What Dr Gupta had come face-to-face with was mounting evidence showing that the earlier one starts using marijuana, the more devastating the effects. Last year, a review of more than 120 Canadian and US studies looking into the effects of cannabis on young minds showed a distinct pattern: early marijuana use altered, or slowed down, the mind’s development.
The link between chronic cannabis use during adolescence and significant mental health issues, such as schizophrenia, remains contentious. And yet there are plenty of signposts. Last month, a study published in the Schizophrenia Bulletin found that ”heavy use of the drug in adolescence could lead to poor memory and abnormal changes in brain function that resemble changes found in schizophrenic individuals”.
This may not pose a problem for the ”three-quarters of consumers” who ”take cannabis with no ill effect”, as UK foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn wrote in 2011, ”but the remaining quarter, the genetically vulnerable, play Russian roulette”.
Cockburn should know. When he and his wife learnt in 1997 that their son Henry was using cannabis, when he was just 14, they thought it was fairly harmless. They couldn’t have been more wrong. ”It wasn’t until Henry was in hospital that we learnt of its possibly devastating impact on somebody genetically predisposed to schizophrenia,” he writes. Henry’s downward spiral – beginning with his first psychotic episode in 2002 – is searingly chronicled in their book Henry’s Demons: Living with Schizophrenia, a Father and Son’s Story.
And if we needed our own cautionary tale then perhaps we woke up to it on an unusually crisp January morning when Wayne ”Mousey” Perry was found stabbed at his makeshift camp near the Yarra River. His alleged attacker was Melbourne teenager and former Melbourne Grammar student Easton Woodhead. Friends of Woodhead later said ”that his behaviour had altered a few months ago when he began using cannabis”.
Woodhead is hardly alone in his drug of choice. Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in Australia, according to the 2010 National Drug Strategy Household Survey, and used at least once by one-third of people aged 14 or older. The survey also noted teenagers ”initiating cannabis use at younger ages and using cannabis on a daily basis”, as well as a growing cavalier attitude among teenagers towards ”regular” cannabis use.
That’s why Colorado’s foray into the legal selling of ”recreational marijuana” should make us uneasy. And marijuana law reforms are burning a hole through America’s conservative heart. This shift is thanks in no small part to a series of grassroots movements, as Fairfax journalist Nick O’Malley wrote recently, with the number of people supporting legalisation steadily rising since 1987. Australia, too, is not immune to this kind of citizen-driven initiative, as was evidenced last May when the NSW parliamentary committee voted unanimously in favour of trialling medicinal marijuana.
The issue here isn’t whether marijuana should be legalised for those of us old enough to judge for ourselves or sick enough to try anything; but a legal age requirement will not stop our kids from getting their hands on it.
Dr Sanjay Gupta is right. There is much light and shade to the marijuana debate, but first and foremost, we owe it to those in our care to not just wave away the dangers. Taking even the smallest risk with the dynamic, elastic adolescent brain is, and will always be, a risk too great.
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