The Kids Are Losing Their Minds Over Weed
A warning to parents
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The first recreational cannabis dispensary in Ulster County, New York popped up about 10 miles from my house. I saw it a back in August as I was driving home along Route 32. A sign out front read “Big Gas Dispensary” in the place where an old gas station used to be.
The logo, a bright green cannabis leaf surrounded by a circle of black, featured a hose with a gas nozzle on the end. I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach as I drove past the place.
I looked it up when I got home. It had opened in April 2024 — the 100th dispensary in the state since adult-use recreational cannabis became legal in NY in 2021. Their tagline is “Fueling your journey into wellness.” That’s a laugh.
Once upon a time, I would’ve celebrated the opening of a dispensary so close to my house. Cannabis helped me get through the darkest period of my life — the year my daughter was dying and the initial months afterward when I was navigating early grief.
I was grateful for cannabis for helping me sleep and numbing my intense sorrow. But my cannabis use stretched well beyond the initial crisis of Ana’s death, turning into years of near-daily use. All told, I used weed regularly from about 2016 through 2021. I’m still grateful it was available to me. I’m also grateful that medical cannabis, which became legal in New York in 2016, was available to Ana in the final year of her life.
Ana was on powerful pain meds that came with side effects that made it difficult for her to function. I’d pushed her to try medical cannabis, hoping it would give her some relief and help her avoid the potent narcotics. It had been easy enough to get the medical cannabis card for Ana. She was incredibly sick. I ended up spending about $300 on various products for her — a vape pen, a tincture that could be placed under her tongue, and THC-laced mouth spray.
Ana never wanted to talk about weed with me. I don’t know if it helped her. I gave her the items and we never spoke about them again. After she died, I tossed the tincture and the spray but kept the vape pen for a couple of years. My younger daughter Emily would eventually discover it, figure out how to use it, and empty it before I ever realized she had a problem.
After Ana died, I consumed homemade edibles a few nights a week to help me sleep. Several years of getting high 2–3 nights a week combined with weekends that involved 2–3 glasses of wine suggested I might have a problem. But I didn’t see it then. I thought I was entirely in control. I became comfortable with weed. I looked forward to its legalization so that the stigma about weed would finally be gone and I could access it more easily.
Like so many addictions, mine started as a coping mechanism. I was self-medicating and trying to survive an incredibly stressful time.
I didn’t realize that I’d grown to rely on weed to obliterate my crushing grief. I didn’t think the weed was a big deal and I developed a complacency about using it that I deeply regret. When, at age 15, Emily confessed that she’d been experimenting with weed, I wasn’t worried. Like so many Gen X’ers, I felt that weed was no big deal, plus it was being legalized in many states including my own.
I talked to Emily about never getting into a car with a driver who was high. I told her to never use weed from an unknown source. I schooled her on not becoming a stoner. And, to my never-ending regret, I confessed I sometimes used it to help me sleep. That’s how she learned it was in the house.
InAugust of 2020, Emily was 16 and spiraling into depression thanks to pandemic-induced isolation.
She was also grappling with the overwhelming grief of losing her sister. She’d suppressed her feelings for a few years after Ana died, but being alone day after day — bored, isolated, and riddled with anxiety — sent her over the edge.
For about a year, Emily had been dipping into my not-so-secret stash of edibles, sneaking them to the extent that I started running out. At this point, I still felt that weed was relatively harmless and didn’t feel the need to hide my stash. I also didn’t expressly forbid her to use it. I felt it was safer than her getting it from someone at school or online where it could be laced with something truly dangerous like LSD or Fentanyl. It was not my best parenting moment.
But as Emily grew increasingly bold about using weed, I became alarmed. When it was clear she had a real problem, I dumped the entire stash and quit using weed completely. By then it was too late. She’d figured out how to get it on her own. That month, she ended up in the ER thanks to an episode of cannabis-induced psychosis that scared the absolute shit out of me.
My level of terror the day Emily went to the psychiatric ER was akin to how I had felt eight years earlier, when I’d taken her sister to that same hospital for a bad stomach ache that turned out to be a malignant tumor on her liver.
But this time I was totally on my own. I couldn’t tell anyone or post an urgent status update to Facebook because this was about mental health. It was about addiction. It was about shame.
That day, they almost sent my kid to an inpatient psych facility 60 miles away. But they didn’t. She came home and got treatment at a partial inpatient program for teens, a 5-minute drive from my house.
It got her back on track and provided much-needed support during a brutal three-week withdrawal period. It was month six of lockdown and it was not going well for any teen. Emily really needed to be with her peers, even in a setting as hard as rehab.
This was the beginning of her struggle with weed addiction, also known as cannabis use disorder. That struggle is her story to tell. I’m sharing this small part of it with her permission because when I say that kids are losing their minds over weed, I’m speaking from a place of having witnessed it firsthand.
This was also the start of my own sobriety. The emergency room is where I kicked off my education about the reality of weed and learned that it’s not as harmless as I’d once thought.
To wrap your head around the larger picture of the realities of weed addiction, you need only drop into a subreddit for people trying to stop using weed. There were nearly 340,000 members in this group the last time I checked. A search for “psychosis” returns hundreds of posts and comments from people, many of them under 25, who’ve had episodes of disassociation, extreme paranoia, intrusive thoughts, hallucinations, or worse.
And believe me, it can get worse. A Washington Post article from May 2023 tells the story of a teen who lost his life from cannabis-induced psychosis and others who experienced severe psychotic symptoms like visual and auditory hallucinations, delusions, and acute paranoia. Heavy cannabis use has been linked to schizophrenia, particularly in young men, but all kids (and their developing minds) are at risk.
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), weed is sending people under 25 to emergency departments in record numbers. The CDC reported a spike in ED visits during the pandemic in 2020, though cannabis-related ED visits for young people were increasing even before then. There are a few reasons for this, but two of the main ones are potency and accessibility. Weed is much more potent now than it once was — and it’s everywhere.
Eleven U.S. states had legalized recreational cannabis in 2019, but that number will more than double by the end of this year. New York is riding a weed train that’s making stops across the entire U.S. And it’s not about to slow down anytime soon.
When I say that today’s weed is potent, I mean this stuff will send you into a new dimension if you’re not careful. My cohort of Gen X parents is largely clueless about the risks of today’s very high-potency cannabis. We remember the weed from our teen years — the stuff that seemed to have no lasting consequences beyond making us high and giving us the munchies.
Our collective ignorance is painfully evident in the comments on articles like the Washington Post piece where the prevailing belief is that cannabis is completely harmless, it enhances thinking, and “no one’s ever died from smoking weed”. It’s true that death by weed is rare, but that doesn’t mean it’s not harmless. It’s also not completely true that no one has ever died as a result of using cannabis.
The ways that weed has changed over the years are complex and I’m not an expert. This article from Yale School of Medicine is a good starting point if you want to learn more.
The clear takeaway from the Yale piece, and similar articles about today’s cannabis versus the weed of yesteryear, is that the tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content in modern weed is much higher. THC is the main psychoactive compound in cannabis that gets us high.
The stuff we smoked in the 80s and 90s had a THC concentration of about 4%. Prior to the 80s, it was even lower at about 2%. In 2022, the average concentration of THC had risen to around 16%, per NIH Cannabis Potency Data.
Keep in mind that 16% is an average. Potency can be much higher than this. Products like oils, edibles, and “dabs” — a process that heats up the cannabis oil to make it even more potent, can contain as much as 95% THC. Weed with a 16 or 20 or 95 percent concentration of THC is powerful stuff. It will get you very high. It’s also been linked to psychiatric disorders like depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, particularly when used heavily by people who may already be at risk for these disorders (like teenagers and young adults).
The potency and your brain’s reaction to it are what make today’s weed so much more addictive than the skunky joints we rolled behind the handball court in junior high school back in 1986. Add to this that teenage brains are at a peak point in development. They’re vulnerable to addiction because of, well, science.
The potency of weed is not the only thing that worries me for young people like Emily. There’s a combination of worrisome trends lining up to blindside parents about the potential dangers of recreational cannabis that I find alarming. Weed is way more accessible thanks to legalization. A recent Pew study found that nearly 80% of Americans live in a county with at least one legal cannabis dispensary.
And if you’re thinking, “Hey, my kid’s just 12. They won’t be visiting a legal dispensary anytime soon.” Don’t fool yourself. Kids have been finding ways to get weed for decades before it was legal for any of us. Now it’s everywhere. There’s an absolutely booming illegal market for cannabis products and many of these places have no problem selling weed to minors.
It’s also way more acceptable to consume cannabis than it’s ever been before (I smell it everywhere I go these days). So when you add up the availability of weed from legal and illegal sources, the larger cultural adoption of it, and our collective lack of understanding that this drug is not what we think it is, we have a problem.
Whenever I read an article about the dangers of today’s high-potency weed, there’s usually a few people who comment some version of the sentiment, “Relax. No one’s ever died from weed.” But that’s simply not true.
In the addiction support group I belong to — a group specifically for loved ones of people with cannabis addiction — more than one person has lost a loved one because of weed. I don’t mean “loss” in the metaphorical sense. I mean that their son or daughter or husband or sibling has died from things like Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome, a side effect of excessive cannabis consumption that causes nausea, lack of appetite, and in extreme cases, excesive vomiting. It can cause dehydration which leads to kidney failure and death.
Cannabis can also cause death from psychosis. This was the case with Johnny Stack, who died by suicide at age 19 after using high-potency weed since the age of 14. Johnny’s parents started a foundation in his memory and on the foundation website, they point to weed as the direct cause of Johnny’s death, writing:
“Continued use of dabs and vapes made him so paranoid, he wrote in his journal the mob was after him, the university was an FBI base, and the whole world knew everything about him. He wasn’t depressed, neglected, drugged, or unloved. He was psychotic, paranoid, and delusional, and he jumped from a 6-story building in his pain.”
Johnny’s family is from Colorado, which was among the first states to legalize recreational cannabis in 2012 and their first retail dispensary opened in 2014. Ten years later, many states are following in Colorado’s footsteps. But Colorado is a cautionary tale.
Hospital visits for cannabis intoxication, once rare, are now the norm in Colorado. For example, the University of Colorado ED sees 1–2 patients a week for cannabis intoxication and as many as 15 per week for weed-related illnesses.
There are some other related consequences of weed availability in Colorado too — like an increase in serious burn cases caused by flash burns from THC extraction which uses butane as a solvent. Unintentional ingestion of cannabis by children under 5 is on the rise, thanks to products like cookies, chips, and gummies that have high THC content.
I don’t mean to rain on your weed parade. I really don’t. Weed significantly hurt my kid and my ignorance made that possible. I thought it was fine to have a little weed in the house. I thought it was safe. After all, I’d smoked it a bit when I was in high school and in my early twenties and I turned out okay. It helped me when I was at the very lowest point in my life. I thought it might help Emily too. It ended up making her mental health issues worse.
Turns out that, just like me, she was using weed to self-medicate. Now she’s on a proper regimen of drugs to help with ADHD and anxiety and that’s been nothing short of transformative.
I was ill-informed, incorrect, and foolish with my approach to allowing weed anywhere near my kid. My ignorance combined with my complacency, even enthusiasm, around weed created an environment of easy access for my teenage daughter. This is literally the worst parenting mistake I’ve ever made and it’s not easy to admit it, even now that Emily is an adult and she is sober and she is doing really well.
Emily will be 21 in about 7 months and I’m legitimately scared. By then, there will likely be several adult-use dispensaries within a short driving distance from our house. Weed is literally everywhere. I can’t imagine being 21, sober, and surrounded by legal weed dispensaries. The only thing I can do at this point is continue to model sobriety for Emily and hold my breath that she’ll continue to abstain.
This isn’t a manifesto against legalizing weed. I think that’s as futile as prohibition. But I do think it’s important to educate yourself about what weed looks like today and how kids gain access to it and why, if you’re older than 35, it probably isn’t the same drug you remember.
This is especially important if you have kids of any age. Keeping it away from adolescents for as long as possible is the best way to avoid the kind of psychotic episode that Emily experienced — an episode that thankfully never happened again.
Thank you for sharing this info, and don't beat yourself up. You were both hurting and didn't know what you were getting into. I hope Emily will be able to maintain sobriety. 💕
Wow and wow. I started using CBD for sleep and then with THC and man did I come unglued. I quit it all together. I still don't sleep great but it's my sleep and no one else's. Great article.
ps I'm 70 years old - don't do it!!!