NO POT LUCK FOR KIDS

Today's Much Stronger Marijuana Has Grim Implications Both Mentally And
Physically For The Future Of Young Users

Charlotte is no stranger to smoking marijuana. But for the past six years,
her 18-year-old son has become a regular user, and Charlotte now finds
herself with less of a taste for the weed.

The Toronto mother suspects the differences between her pot smoking and her
son's is simple: She did it less frequently and the kind of marijuana she
smoked was weaker. She can tell the pot her son smokes is stronger -- that
it has higher levels of the buzz-producing chemical tetrahydrocannabinol
(THC) -- by the way it smells and the way it makes him behave.

"When I smoked, it was nice, giggly dope," she said. "I stopped smoking
when I got into a stupor. They [her son and his friends] don't seem to be
having a good time. They're just heavy all the time."

Extra-strong pot is quickly becoming a made-in-Canada problem. British
Columbia has gained notoriety as the source of some of the "strongest"
marijuana in the world. THC levels can be as low as 2 or 3 per cent of the
dried weight in marijuana illegally brought in from Mexico. But "grow"
operations in lotus land use cross-breeding techniques to create high-THC
strains of marijuana and then maximize the weed's strength further by
raising the plants hydroponically and nurturing them with high-quality
fertilizers and optimal conditions. As a result, "B.C. gold" can have THC
levels as high 15 to 20 per cent.

Combine that stronger marijuana with a recent upsurge in the number of
young people turning to the drug, and you have a serious public-health
problem, according to the experts. But those same experts can't get through
to parents and the public, most of whom still consider marijuana a soft
drug that creates a mild buzz and has no addictive potential.

Take Charlotte, for example. She admits that when her son started smoking
at the age of 12, she wasn't unsettled. She is now. That's because her
eldest child's future is going up in smoke -- an acrid-smelling kind with a
stuporific effect. It leaves her highly intelligent son lying around,
hanging out with the wrong crowd, scraping by in school and influencing his
highly impressionable 14-year-old brother.

Worse, Charlotte realizes her son has submitted to the "you deal or you
steal" rule of users. In an attempt to get her son's life on track, she
enrolled him in a boarding school. Later, she found out the only reason he
agreed to go was because he had "done a bad deal" and was afraid of being
"kneecapped." After a year, the boarding-school experiment was a bust and
he was back in his old crowd.

Current research suggests that the health implications for this young
smoker may also be dire: He may be damaging his intellectual ability,
wrecking his lungs and increasing his risk of cancer, in addition to
developing a serious dependency.

"Like most drugs, the effects of marijuana are dose-dependent. If the
proportion of THC in marijuana is increased, then essentially you are
increasing the dose," said Peter Fried, a professor of psychology at
Ottawa's Carleton University who has studied marijuana for 20 years. "In
all likelihood, the risk of becoming dependent goes up, too."

There are no statistics to clarify how many young pot smokers are inhaling
the premium-priced marijuana that provides extra kicks. But the numbers
have been clear about one thing: More young people are smoking pot than a
decade ago.

A report on adolescent health prepared by The McCreary Centre Society in
Burnaby, B.C., a non-profit agency that is funded by several provincial
ministries, found the number of Grade 7 to 13 students who have used
marijuana once rose from 25 per cent in 1992 to 40 per cent in 1998. (The
number of frequent users -- those who've smoked pot more than 40 times --
doubled from 6 per cent to 13 per cent in that same time period.)

British Columbia's problem mirrors the rest of the country. A recent survey
of Ontario students in the same age group conducted by the Centre for
Addiction and Mental Health found that 29.2 per cent had used marijuana in
the last year.

"There's a social climate that is sending some interesting messages to
teenagers," says Dr. Roger Tonkin, executive director of The McCreary
Centre Society and an adolescent-health specialist. "In B.C., we have
snowboarding and the fact that we grow 'good stuff.' The federal ministry
of health is looking into marijuana as medicine. Which all says to kids,
this product may be okay."

Certainly, the way marijuana plays with the mind may not be so okay. It's
widely understood that smoking the drug has some hazardous possibilities:
It can lead to reduced focus and less ability to perform tasks that require
concentration, difficulty absorbing new information and retaining
knowledge, trouble speaking and listening effectively, and reduced ability
to solve problems. And motivation nose-dives.

"There's this complete lack of initiative and interest in doing things,"
says Charlotte of her son. "And then there's this easy rationale: He will
say he is trying to change the world and make it less workaholic. He reads
about how everybody is so stressed out so he has an excuse."

The neurological effects of pot smoking aren't confined to one generation
either. For the past 20 years, Dr. Fried has been following 170 families
and documented the substance-use habits of parents and their children. His
findings reveal that the children of mothers who smoked pot during
pregnancy start to exhibit deficits by the ages of 4 to 6 in what's called
"executive function," which includes problem-solving, decision-making and
impulse control.

The changes to the brain of a child of a pot-smoker are "definitely
subtle," concludes Dr. Fried. But if that child goes on to become a pot
smoker, then the neurological impairment may get amplified (a question that
Dr. Fried is currently studying).

"The pothead description fits: Those kids who use it are a lot slower," Dr.
Tonkins says bluntly.

But if marijuana mellows the mind, over time it stresses out the body. Two
decades of research by Donald Tashkin, a lung expert at the University of
California in Los Angeles, shows there is no pot luck for the lungs. His
work indicates that, gram-for-gram, a joint has more carcinogens and, on
average, three times the tar of a cigarette. The way potheads inhale,
deeply and holding the smoke in for a long time, increases that damage. As
a result, regular pot smokers are as frequently beset with the symptoms of
chronic bronchitis as cigarette smokers, despite the fact that tobacco
smokers inhaled more than 20 cigarettes a day compared with the three to
five joints for the pot smokers.

Dr. Tashkin's research also shows that the immune cells in the lungs of
marijuana smokers are much less able to fend off bacteria compared with
those of cigarette smokers. What's more, a recent study performed at New
York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center showed pot smokers have 2.6
times the risk of contracting head and neck cancers than those who have
never used the drug.

Marijuana smoking won't result in the blocked airways, emphysema or even
reduced lung capacity that cigarette-smoking causes. And you can't fatally
overdose on pot like you can with other illicit drugs. Still, the company
some young pot smokers keep can get them into trouble. And research shows
pot smoking usually goes hand-in-hand with other substance abuse.

"I don't want to sound moralistic," said Dr. Tonkin. "But when we ask the
kids in our survey who drink alcohol, smoke tobacco or marijuana, what else
they do, there appears to be a higher degree of multiple drug use."

The experts agree pot simply isn't as bad as other illicit drugs, and in
terms of overall health effects, may be less damaging than long-term
cigarette use. But higher THC concentrations in today's weed may have a
destructive effect on young people's futures.

"If you haul down seven figures and you smoke a little dope and it makes
you cranky and wrecks your relationship with your girlfriend, well, hell .
. . we're not too concerned about you," said Doug Colman, a Vancouver-based
consultant in addiction medicine. "There's a big difference when you're a
disadvantaged kid, who cannot afford any further compromises. Even small
compromises of intellectual function may have consequences in this group.
And unfortunately, we're ignoring this problem."

Charlotte is well aware that there are reasons her son may have reached for
pot -- she divorced when he was 5 and entered into another relationship
afterward. She's not ready to give up on him, though. And in the meantime,
she is keeping a closer watch on her 14-year-old.