thc induced psychosis

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What Happened to Our Daughter

The Tragedy of THC-Induced Psychosis and Suicide

Suicide is multifactorial—a vile symphony of parts that come together in a mighty clash of a finale. I will share with you the story of our daughter, Mila, who, in a matter of less than six months, tried smoking marijuana for the first time, became addicted, developed marijuana-induced psychosis and, in May 2021, took her own life.

“Took her own life.” Really? In the anguished months since that time, that part still seems like a lie. Our grounded, happy, common-sense daugh­ter did that? Mila? It’s a misalignment of facts, but not because I’m in denial—there is no denial in the world I live in. It’s a misalignment of facts because I wonder who was in control of the gears in her brain when she died. When someone ends the life of another, we have degrees for it. We use different words depending on whether they were in their right mind. If the murder was planned, we wonder for how long and how intri­cately. Or were they responsible for a murder but not in their right mind? Circumstances dictate whether we label it manslaughter or murder in the first or second or third degree. But when someone ends their own life, they did it and that’s that. Only with our daughter, it wasn’t her. It was a rav­aged brain, hijacked by a product that masquerades as the innocuous pot some parents knew growing up.

ANYTHING BUT INNOCUOUS

Many parents, especially those who may have smoked a little marijuana in their youth, have a hard time believing that pot could be any­thing but a good time. That’s certainly what the mammoth cannabis industry wants us all to be­lieve as they expand into ever-growing markets. However, that innocent joint of several decades ago—ridiculously ridiculed, passed around at a Van Halen concert, a puff or two each—had somewhere between 2 and 4 percent THC (tetrahydrocannabinol). That is not what many kids are smoking today. They’re smoking highly potent distillates and vaping pens and resins and waxes and “dabs” and things called “shatter.”¹ They’re smoking laboratory creations meant to drive addiction and set off dopamine avalanches in their still-developing brains.² Manufacturers want our kids coming back for more. However, these products—some in the 99-percent-THC content range³—are meant for obliteration, not a gentle groove to some mellow beats.

I didn’t know any of this before. We have two older daughters who didn’t have access to these highly concentrated products when they were teens. Pot wasn’t legal then. They smoked pot a few times and could take it or leave it. I was never a fan but didn’t think much else of it. I didn’t even really care if they legalized it. I figured it was the same stuff I had smoked back in the day, only now it would be regulated and safe. That’s not at all the story.

Calling these highly refined and concentrat­ed resins and edibles “marijuana” is like calling opium “a poppy” or crack “a coca plant.” It is nothing of the sort. In fact, there’s no marijuana flower even in the final product of these pens and edibles and dabs and whatever else they sell. Instead, the genetically engineered plant has been highly processed, the THC extracted with solvents and chemically manipulated into a super concentrated offering meant for maximum effect. The marijuana industry is a mammoth behemoth, a multibillion-dollar industry.⁴ No­tice how we’re hearing of these products more and more? There has been a huge shift. Why? Who stands to profit in the normalization of lives lived in an altered reality?

Many of the teenagers in our rural area in Ontario, Canada purchase black-market, high- THC vaping pens—their drug of choice—from the First Nations reservation, a place they call “the rez.” There, pot shops openly run without governmental oversight. These stores look like Apple stores, glossy and white and legitimate. In a regulated cannabis store in Canada, there are limits on quantities that can be purchased and the amount of THC a product can contain; the la­beling and testing of the product must fall within government parameters. In the “rez” pot shops, none of those regulatory requirements exist. The kids—and, in fact, many adults who frequent these stores—have no idea that the products on the shelves are not tested or regulated.

Many of the kids here have figured out which stores don’t require an ID and will make “runs” to make bulk pot purchases. Kids without an ID can purchase as much as they want of whatever product they want. I asked the police how this could continue and was told, “politics.” In the next breath, the same policeman told me that it is known in the policing community that these shops are connected to organized crime involving human trafficking, gun running and other unspeakable activities.

OUR “BALLERINA WARRIOR”

There are many adjectives I could use to describe our daughter Mila: illuminated, irides­cent, mysterious, soft-hearted and funny are just a handful. Mila was a girl with a mind capable of feats beyond a mere mortal—a creature beyond this time. She was a champion of the underdog, a girl who never understood cruelty for gain. She played hockey and rugby, wrote stories and novels, and played the ukulele and jazzy saxophone. During her homeschooling years, we would wake up at six in the morning to notes from her telling us she was in the forest with her bow, looking for adventures. She was the milker of devoted cows and the shepherdess of barn cats, who would sit outside our door, waiting for her to leave the house so they could follow her wherever she went, moving in great calico tumbleweeds behind her. She loved board games (winning, mostly) and raw cream, and she loved her two sisters and her family.

Growing up on our Canadian farm, Mila lived a rather idyllic life. She raised goats and meat rabbits and helped in the garden. When she wanted cream for the bucket of blackberries she picked, she wandered into the field, got her favorite cow, Ursula, and milked her. “Spare a little cream, Ursula?” And of course, Ursula, who had seemingly great affec­tion for Mila, just as every animal on our farm did, was happy to oblige.

We harvest our own animals. With livestock, as they say, comes dead stock. There were so many lessons Mila learned in her condensed years on the farm. When her beloved goat broke her back, she asked her papa to carry it onto her lap and there she sat, on the grass, under the sun, petting her goat and talking to her privately for over an hour. What she said, I do not know. I watched from the kitchen window. All I could see was a little girl, still round and soft in her nine years of age, weeping, and the calm goat, accepting her touch. When she was done, she called her dad over and said, “Okay, she can go. She knows I love her.”

Mila began playing on the boy’s hockey team when she was four years old. At first, she was the little tyke on the ice, turning to help her opponents up every time they fell. Later, she grew into the nickname “Bulldozer” as she took on every six-foot, two-inch powerhouse who dared to slam into her. She was a fan favorite in the stands, the parents yelling, “Yeah that’s right, make her mad! See what happens!” We called our ballerina the “Warrior on the Ice.”

Throughout high school, Mila maintained a 98 percent average and offered peer tutoring to those who struggled. In her twelfth-grade year, Mila was given an assignment to write her biography. “Who was she? Who did she want to be?” Her essay was unlike any that one would expect. Instead of writing about her accomplishments, of which there were many, she told the story of a little doe that she and her father came upon while driving back to our farm from the city late one evening. It’s not unusual to see dead deer here, but what made this creature different from most is that she was still alive, her back legs severed at the knee. She tried to get up, repeatedly, using her exposed bone where a delicate hoof should have been to propel her, but she just collapsed over and over.

Why would our daughter tell this story as her biography? Because, while other cars drove past, swerving around the suffering animal, she and my husband pulled over, brought the animal to the side of the road and soothed it before swiftly slitting its neck. “Swiftly”—that word is important. Her teacher, moved to tears by the story, suggested the word “gently” to smooth out the edges, but Mila wouldn’t have it. “Kindness isn’t always gentle,” she explained. “Swiftly and assuredly,” that was right. She wrote this story as her biography because, as she stated, “That is the person I want to be.” The person who did the hard thing because it was right. And that is the person she truly was. Morally driven. Deeply connected to the natural world. A young woman who had a profound sense of meeting what was hard and painful, over the ease offered up by our culture. She wanted to be a midwife, and she would have been a glorious one.

COVID IN CANADA: A PERFECT STORM

My inclination is to spend all of my time sharing stories of our beloved Mila. As much as I want to remain in those memories, I need to crawl out and do this part now—the part where I tell you the story of Mila’s death and the events that precipitated it. The part where, in the rubble of my life, I muster what I can to share with you our pain in hopes that there is something here that might make a crumb of difference.

When Covid hit our part of the world, On­tario imposed some of the most draconian and aggressive measures of anywhere on Earth. A couple of weeks to flatten the curve, right? Ini­tially, like almost everywhere and everyone, we obliged. Schools closed. It was near the end of Mila’s grade eleven year. There were no classes online at that time. A mad scramble ensued to get these kids some sort of education. Eventu­ally, schools tentatively opened for some. We had the option of keeping Mila home or sending her in. She insisted on going.

For the next few months, and into the fall of Mila’s senior year, schools opened. Then schools closed. Then schools opened. Mila’s friend group shrunk considerably. According to the mandates in our province, she wasn’t supposed to be socializing at all, and most parents abided by the “no socializing” rule. There was really nowhere for the kids to go anyway. Theaters, live music, restaurants and even places like bowling alleys and the roller rink were closed. Sports were another victim of the mandates. Hockey, the sport Mila had played since she was four, ended, as did rugby. Instead, the friend group that Mila was a part of arranged random, clandestine meet-ups—in a friend’s frigid barn or someone’s basement.

The school board opted for “mono classes” to keep everyone safe. This meant that cohorts of kids went to school and entered one and only one classroom, with six-foot spacing between them and masks on all day long. They sat there until the end of the day. They ate their lunches there, too (masks off and on quickly, if you please). They were not allowed to use their lockers or gather for any sort of social interaction. Their book bags had to stay with them. When we learned that the school bus driver was mandated to keep all of the windows open on Mila’s hour-long bus drive into school every day, despite the temperatures hovering around minus twenty degrees Celsius, we handed Mila the keys to the old farm truck. She started driving herself.

Mila was a girl who was raised on the land—a girl who knew and found her touchstone of truth in the authentic and the wild. And now our leaders, our authorities, were saying “No more. This is what you have now”—masks, isolation, distance, a war with our own bodies and ourselves. All of it was unrecognizable. Worried about the effects that the bizarre school environment would have on her psyche, we begged Mila to just do online courses, but she refused. She would take what she could get of seeing and being around other people. With the closure of hockey and rugby, school band, peer tutoring and entertainment venues, the few meager moments she had to see her friends—or their eyes, at least—were better than nothing.

It was at this time that Mila started coming home from her part-time job pumping gas at our little country, full-serve gas station (yes, they still exist!) and writing about the interactions she had with customers. She wrote stories about the Jehovah’s Witness that people were openly making fun of. She felt bad for him, so she asked him for one of his pamphlets. She liked how it seemed to make him happy. She wrote another story about complimenting a middle-aged woman on her beautiful hair. The woman broke down into tears and asked Mila if she was teasing her. “No!” Mila assured her, “Your hair is truly beautiful!” The woman replied, “I have cancer, this is a wig. I thought everyone could tell. Thank you, thank you for your kindness.”

In October 2020, Mila wrote in her diary about her frustration with Canada’s lockdowns and her dwindling friend group. Their get-togethers often involved smoking and consum­ing drugs. She wrote of her boyfriend and other friends always being high on vaping pens. She wrote, “Everyone is always crossed [high], and it’s pissing me off.” She was “pissed off” because their limited interactions were wasteful for her—other kids high and laughing while she sat there “bored.”

Just over a month later, in November 2020, Mila wrote in her diary of trying a vaping pen for the first time and “loving it.” After another month, she wrote that she couldn’t sleep any­more. Within two months, she was using the pens every day, and then often taking a “rip” throughout the night to fall back to sleep. Mila wrote that she was in trouble. Her unique bio­chemistry, always exquisitely sensitive, had met its match—the great Russian roulette in life. All of her normal brainwave patterns and hormones were askew. The artificial surge in dopamine would crash her dopamine levels below baseline, and she would feel unbelievably despondent and need to raise those levels again. Soon enough, the deadly combination of her unique biochemistry and these diabolical lab concoctions melded into insomnia, irrational thinking and hallucinations. But her friends all seemed fine, so it couldn’t be the drugs, right?

THE “MODERATION” MODEL

Meanwhile, Mila’s school was dealing with an explosion of kids using the vaping pens at school. The principal, in desperation, ordered the doors be taken off the school washrooms. Our children were living like zoo humans in the synthetic construct of a life.

The school board contracts out to a private company that employs roving counselors who make their way through dozens of schools, sometimes appearing for a few hours every week or two at any given school. When the school drug counselor came around, Mila went to see him. The counselor, not knowing Mila and not talking to any of her teachers—teachers who would certainly have been shocked at the swiftness of her self-identified problem—did what he was trained to do for everyone walk­ing in his door; he told Mila to “moderate” her usage, “maybe just smoking in the evenings or once her homework was done.” He added that it was “probably a good way to cope during Covid.” Mila told her friends that the counselor had given her permission to carry on.

At home, we could see that Mila was strug­gling. We talked to her, sat on her bed with her. We offered to arrange counseling if she would rather speak to someone else. We could see her sadness, her disconnection, a smile that faded too fast from her face. She assured us she was okay. “Just stressed about all this stuff, trying to figure out what to do” she would say, or that she was PMSing, or that she was just overwhelmed with school and Covid and not knowing what to do after graduation. When we tried to speak to her about her weight loss and her moodiness, she insisted it was because of all of the above. It was an incredibly difficult time to be in her grade twelve year with so many unknowns.

We could understand her level of stress, and her explanations seemed reasonable. She had always been incredibly mature, honest, responsible and surefooted, so we had no reason to believe anything else was going on other than what we discussed. We did what we could to reach her. We played board games every night after our family dinners as we always had. We talked to her about options. We spoke as a fam­ily about how twisted the narrative is, but there was hope in it still. We had covert gatherings and interactions with family and friends. We tried to inject healthy socialization.

NOWHERE TO GO

Word came back from the universities: “You’ve been accepted, but you must be vac­cinated.” She was worried, but she was also Mila—pragmatic and a gifted, critical thinker. “I’m not convinced, convince me” is how she rolled. She would wait for the convincing, but until then, she would not accept the vaccine. She spent weeks agonizing over ways to get around the mandates to be vaccinated to attend the university program she wanted. She wrote emails. She spoke to admissions. She brain­stormed. When it became evident that it wasn’t going to happen, she considered using some of her savings to travel around the world for a year, volunteering on farms as her older sisters had done when they had graduated. No, it turned out, that was not going to happen either. Canadians were not allowed to leave their country unless they were vaccinated. “I’m in prison,” she said. As 2021 arrived, so, too, did the pressure to decide what to do next. She was itching to test her mettle, to head into the world and take on what it had to offer, but all roads pointed to. . . nowhere. The road had one big stop sign on it.

Mila’s use of the marijuana pens increased. In the new year, she was caught skipping school and had privileges taken away. It was the first time she had ever been in any real trouble. A week later, she told us she was moving out. We were flabbergasted. Her older sisters were flab­bergasted. All of us spoke with her, trying to figure out what was happening. She broke up with her long-term boyfriend and then was devastated that she had. We spent hours and hours trying to understand what was going on. We spoke. We listened. We struggled to find sense in a voice that didn’t even seem familiar. To all of us, she insisted that she wanted to spend the last few months of grade twelve closer to the city, living with a friend, so she could have a more robust social life. She had always loved living in the country, loved the animals and nature, but now it was “limiting.” She wanted out. It was so unusual and out of character for her. Of course, in hindsight, knowing that she was chronically using pens and edibles and that her brain was no longer clear and concise, it makes sense. But at the time, none of us understood what was happening. We had no idea that she was using those pens to escape or that she was in the throes of “marijuana-induced psychosis.” Mila moved into her friend’s house and the drug use increased exponentially.

Out of desperation, Mila had applied to a university that some of her friends would be attending that had a business and accounting program that didn’t require vaccination. She was unenthusiastic about her future but didn’t know what else to do. In February, word came that she was accepted, but the plan to stay in residency for the first year, as her friends were going to do, wasn’t going to happen. She needed to be vaccinated for that. While her friends began excitedly planning where they would live in the residence buildings, she looked at rental places where she could live off-campus. Who would she share an apartment with? She didn’t know anyone but would find someone. She started looking through advertisements and saw that the need for vaccines pervaded even there.

We encouraged her to take a year off, letting things settle down with Covid restrictions and saving up some cash. By March, though, the seams of her life were unraveling. She wrote:

“I just miss being able to see faces, to be able to stand next to some­one and not have to worry about being yelled at or told off, or being able to just walk down the streets of downtown Kingston with my friends, and just see everyone doing normal things. I miss being able to just ‘go out’ and do whatever you want, without having to worry about restrictions or masks or gathering sizes or anything like that. Everyone is saying how we’ll never have the ‘old normal’ again—that we’ll have a ‘new normal.’ But to be frank, I don’t want any part of what is going on in our world to be normal, because this isn’t normal. Humans are social animals and we need that social aspect in our lives to be happy. I hope that our world will be back to the ‘old normal’ as soon as possible, because no matter how long things are like this, whether it be two years or eight, I will never view this as normal. I’m also very upset that this had to happen in my senior year. All of my friends and everyone I know will soon be moving away, and I didn’t even get to have that last year with them, or a prom or a graduation. It’s really disappointing and I’m very upset at how distant everyone is with each other now.”

Mila told her friends about terrifying hallucinations she started to have. After her death, her friends told us that she called them, terrified and shut in a closet, because she believed there were people outside of it trying to hurt her. They also told me that our house was haunted and shared stories of what she told them. When I asked them why they didn’t say anything or recognize that she needed help, they said, “We thought she could see ghosts.” They had never heard that around 30 percent of marijuana us­ers develop a “marijuana use disorder”⁵ or that at least 15 percent of adolescents using marijuana—especially the high-THC marijuana found in the pens—experience some sort of psychosis or serious mental health issue. These are only estimations garnered from poorly kept records. Experts believe the numbers are likely much higher.

In April, now floundering, Mila started making bizarre decisions that were completely foreign to her make-up. She would not go to university at all. She would go work. No, she would go out west and plant trees. No, she would go out east and work and kayak the Atlantic. We were dazed and confused. What was happening? We sat with her for hours and tried to untangle her thinking. We all cried together. We offered help. We offered everything we could think of. She was desperate, and we could see it, but there was no reaching her reason. In retrospect, we know that she could not reach her reason either. She was trapped in a hijacked mind.

In the last few weeks of Mila’s life, she couldn’t sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. She went to see the drug counselor again. She told him that sirens and ambulances were following her everywhere she went. She told him that there were voices, “like background voices, in a train station.” Again, he could offer no help other than to recommend moderation. When we met with him and his supervisor, weeks after Mila’s death, my husband, an emergency room physician, asked what type of medical intake they do with these kids to identify medical emergencies. “None,” they said, telling us that they use “the first four or five visits to build up a relationship.” “You have to understand,” they told us, “Mila was an anomaly. We don’t see honor-roll kids come to us on their own. We see troubled kids being dragged in by teachers and parents. We don’t have ties to the school nurse, and we are not here to identify medical needs. Our framework is one of relationship-building and usage mitigation.” However, Mila did not need a “friend” to tell her to “mitigate.” She needed immediate medical attention. She was having a medical emergency, and it was missed.

School was off again. She was taking one calculus class online. She went to work and did her job, charming the world with her thousand-kilowatt smile while she crumbled inside. The world loved her. And all around her, the lock­downs persisted while the authorities insisted, “The new normal. The new normal. The new normal.” The old world was gone; the new world had arrived. Ordinarily, she could have navigated the changing world and persevered as she always did, but her brain was no longer her domain. Her good reason and sound judgment were circumvented by a biochemical storm that she mistook as, in her words, her own “f***ed-up mind.”

On the morning of her death, our daughter called a drug addiction crisis line. They said they would email her a link to a drug program. She wrote of the conversation in her diary, “Too little, too late.” (The link came via email the day after her death.) When the school counselor belatedly tried to reach out to her, feeling there was something more serious about what she had shared with him, it was also too late.

That evening, we were awoken by the police knocking on our door. When they told us Mila was dead, I was certain she had been murdered. There could be no other explanation—nothing else was even within the realm of possibility. But our Mila, strong and true, had died of sui­cide. That night, I dreamed that an angel stood before me. Her outstretched arms were empty and her water-soaked wings dripped a puddle around her feet. Her head was bowed. “I failed.” That was her message, and that is what is most excruciating to us—in the end, she saw herself as irredeemable. Broken. “F***ed up.” She was so deeply lost in a mind run amok that she couldn’t even recognize the difference between herself and the poison pulsing through her body, overriding her beautiful brain, stealing her sense and her peace and her joy. Instead, she saw it as her utter and inescapable failure at life.

WHY I TELL MILA’S STORY

There are endless studies on the growing prevalence of cannabis-induced psychosis, which, in up to 50 percent of cases that present themselves to emergency departments, progress to schizophrenia.⁶ In addition, there are studies on a whole host of other side effects that come from using these concentrated THC products. There are support groups where thousands upon thousands of parents come together to grieve for their beautiful children who died by suicide after having their brains hijacked by THC. There are books written by the heartbroken and the fed-up. But there are no governmental resources for kids, and that’s why I’m writing this. It’s the only reason. If I could be so blindsided—an at­tentive mom when it comes to everything from organic food to the goings-on of my kids to the chemicals in the synthetic clothing I took care to avoid for them—it can happen to anyone. I want it to happen to no one. Ever again.

Please talk about this with your children. This is not about me; instead, I ask for your efforts to educate yourselves, to protect and educate your babies and to inform others on the realities of what is no longer “just pot.” I’m not here to judge anyone’s choices; I’m sharing this very intimate and painful part of our lives because I am being asked to, because it’s the right thing to do and because Mila has been speaking to my heart. For those who smoke pot, hopefully you can see beyond your defenses of a habit to a bigger picture that involves the future and safety of our young.

When I tell you of things Mila said in her diary, it’s not because we had to go looking for it. She left her diary for us, and she wrote notes to us in it. She wanted us to have it. Sadly, she was often so obliterated by the “pens” that she, an honor-roll student, couldn’t spell or form words in its pages. But she left us her diary because I believe that she knew we wouldn’t ever understand otherwise.

And now we live our days. Every day, every moment. Inescapable. And still, we must love and be open to love. This essay is me loving even in the pain. My hope is that some of you might explore some of the resources, read some sto­ries from other parents and come to understand what is happening to too many of our bright and beautiful. It is trite to say, “If one person can be saved, it’s worth it.” I don’t want one person—I want every single one of those beauties ripped back from the clutches of a greedy industry gone wild. Every single one.

write this essay for every parent who doesn’t know about this threat to children. My deepest desire is to have these words find the persons they are intended for. I know they’re out there; I just don’t know who they are. And I write this because my daughter, Mila, who died by suicide on May 10, 2021, insists that I do. For you, Mila. I did as you asked.

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SIDEBARS

SATURATED WITH TOXINS

After Mila’s death, we compiled hundreds of pages of studies, documents and evidence and submitted it to our provincial coroner with an official request for a coroner’s inquest. Included in this package were the results of the chemi­cal analysis we had done by a federally regulated laboratory on the vaping pen products that were in Mila’s possession. The vaping pens were saturated with illegal, banned chemicals and dangerous levels of heavy metals. The expert who reviews such documents recommended that the coroner proceed with the inquest based on a multitude of “deficien­cies” in the system.

Below is a list of the seventeen pesticides and seven heavy metals that exceeded the safety limits in the vaping pens we had tested. These are just the ones that exceeded official thresholds—there were many more pesticides and heavy metals present that fell under the “acceptable” level. Of course, this was one sample from one store, so the results can­not be interpreted as what’s in all vaping pens—it is likely that there are a lot more chemicals and metals in some, and maybe less in others.

PESTICIDES EXCEEDING SAFETY VALUES:

Azoxystrobin (systemic broad-spectrum fungicide) Metalaxyl (systemic fungicide)

Bifenazate (miticide/insecticide) Myclobutanil (fungicide—five hundred times allowable limit)

Boscalid (broad-spectrum fungicide) Paclobutrazol (plant growth retardant, fungicide)

Cyprodinil (systemic broad-spectrum fungicide) Piperonyl butoxide (added to pesticides to enhance toxicity)⁹

Dichlorvis (organophosphate insecticide) Propiconazole (fungicide—three hundred times limit)

Fludioxonil (contact fungicide) Pyraclostrobin (fungicide)

Fluopyram (broad-spectrum fungicide, nematicide) Pyrethrins (insecticide)

Imidacloprid (systemic neonicotinoid insecticide) Pyridaben (miticide/insecticide)

Malathion (organophosphate insecticide)

HEAVY METALS: Aluminum, boron, bismuth, copper, nickel, tin, zinc

ORGANIZATIONS, ADVOCACY and PARENT SUPPORT GROUPS

Americans Against Legalizing Marijuana (AALM)¹⁰: An excellent video on this page, “Chronic State,” addresses the genetically modified plants commonly sold today.

Every Brain Matters¹¹: See, for example, “Learn about cannabis-induced psychosis (CIP)”¹² and the video, “THC: The Human Consequences.”¹³

Institute for Behavior and Health: “Develops new ideas to reduce illegal drug use.”¹⁴

International Academy on the Science and Impact of Cannabis (IASIC)¹⁵: The IASIC website is loaded with studies and information; see the extensive list of cannabis-related studies by category in the IASIC medical library.¹⁶

Johnny’s Ambassadors – Youth Marijuana Prevention¹⁷: Johnny Stack said to his mother, three days before he died by suicide, “I want you to know you were right. You told me marijuana would hurt my brain. It’s ruined my mind and my life, and I’m sorry. I love you.” See the Johnny’s Ambassadors list of resources for parents.¹⁸

Moms Strong: “Real stories, unmasking the marijuana charade.”¹⁹

Parent Movement 2.0 (“Parenting just got a lot harder with legal marijuana”)²⁰: Review the “Know the Drug” tab,²¹ or see “Marijuana-induced psychosis – what is it?”²²

Parents Opposed to Pot: “Bursting the bubble of marijuana hype.”²³

Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM)²⁴: “Preventing the next Big Tobacco.” See Impact Report 2023-2024: Lessons Learned from State Marijuana Legalization.

BOOKS, ARTICLES, STUDIES AND VIDEOS

If you do not read any other articles, please read Laura Stack’s “Marijuana killed my son! Doctors, let me tell you something about the dangers of cannabis.”1 Every parent should also read Alex Berenson’s 2019 book, Tell Your Children: The Truth about Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.²⁵

Adams A. Marijuana legalization was a mistake. Highly concentrated pot is destroying my son’s life. USA Today, Oct. 17, 2021.

Adomite A. A panel study of the effect of cannabis use on mental health, depression and suicide in the 50 states. Drug Free America Foundation, Inc. & Johnny’s Ambassadors, Jun. 29, 2022. https://johnnysambassadors.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/JAcommissioned.pdf

Bartolo J. High potency THC may lead to psychosis, suicide, according to former Pueblo psychiatrist. The Pueblo Chieftain, Jun. 9, 2022.

Berenson A. Tell Your Children: The Truth about Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence. Free Press, 2019.

Canadian Consortium for Early Intervention in Psychosis. Access to cannabis should not occur prior to age 21, according to a position statement by the Canadian Consortium for Early Intervention in Psychosis. GlobeNewswire, Feb. 2, 2017.

Cermak TL. The complex link between cannabis use and psychosis. Psychology Today, Jan. 17, 2022.

Crocker CE, Carter AJE, Emsley JG, et al. When cannabis use goes wrong: mental health side effects of cannabis use that present to emergency services. Front Psychiatry. 2021;12:640222.

D’Souza DC, DiForti M, Ganesh S, et al. Consensus paper of the WFSBP task force on cannabis, cannabinoids and psychosis. World J Biol Psychiatry. 2022;23(10):719-742.

Di Forti M, Marconi A, Carra E, et al. Proportion of patients in south London with first-episode psychosis attributable to use of high potency cannabis: a case-control study. Lancet Psychiatry. 2015;2(3):233-238.

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This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Winter 2023

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