POT USE ON THE RISE, DO WE DESERVE WHAT WE HAVE ACCEPTED?

Marijuana’s renewed popularity is not limited to any single group of young people. It encompasses wealthy, middle-class, and low-income families. It thrives in suburban, urban, and rural youth populations. It includes high achievers and average students. It involves every ethnicity and every kind of household. As one student reminded me, "A lot of people think it’s just low-life and troubled kids who drink and do weed. But it’s not. Everybody’s doing it…" Realizing that today’s kids of course overestimate on the norms side of predictions of use, they certainly know better than any adult what their friends and peers are doing. For adults to side with norms adjusters, who would have us believe that youth behaviors are greatly exaggerated is the basis for much of our problem in confronting the surge in marijuana use by our youth. Imagine an athlete who has been caught in a violation for using marijuana. They will receive the same consequences for use of marijuana as for drinking a beer. What is the difference? Well first, marijuana is classified as an illicit street drug. Alcohol is an illegal drug by age (21 years for anyone who forgot).  Through decades of desensitization, we have arrived at a time and place, where both are now side by side on the same shelf. What a colossal mistake. To think as many do, that alcohol is the dangerous one… that pot isn’t as bad, doesn’t make people violent,  doesn’t kill people etc. etc…rationalize away.

Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in America today, and this has been the case for some years. Nearly 70 million Americans have used marijuana in their lifetime. Marijuana is a potent, intoxicating drug with long-term, cumulative effects. Unlike alcohol or most other substances of abuse, it remains in the body for as long as thirty days. Heavy users can test positive for the drug even after weeks of abstinence.
The recent increase in marijuana use is very broad. Some of the reasons for this shift are young people’s attitudes about how dangerous marijuana is. Young people have to see the danger as it applies to them and to their behavior. They are not seeing it in our world. Media, music, television, movies, desensitize them more and more leading them toward use and abuse. A significant change in the perception of the risk of heavy marijuana use will be hard to sell.

Even with the advent of the UCLA brain maturation study, which chronicles late stage brain development well into the teen and early adulthood years, we lazily drift along failing to use this valuable information as educational ammunition for prevention and intervention programs that might help youth make their decisions based on alarmist consequence beliefs. To think that we can show someone structural damage in scans, and have them realize the mistake they have made or will make and to then offer hope to the same group that young brain plasticity can actually reclaim damaged areas. This much needed approach is missing in action. Failure by our leaders in this field to provide the most powerful message we have in lieu of pathetic prevention education programs, governmentally approved and rubber stamped, packaged and sold, nearly as insidious as a drug headed to market via our pharma venues.

What Marijuana can do for Athletics
Marijuana is a dangerous drug for anyone who uses it. It is a drug that if ever legalized would cripple the youth population in this or any country. In one small rural school district I recently visited, the marijuana use rate by 12th grade was 47.5%. Most small rural schools have a participation rate of 65-90% for students that compete in at least one sport season. That school had a participation rate of only 30%. Pot ruins motivation at that age. Pot ruins dreams. Athletics is the last place that should rationalize that marijuana is acceptable.