Health Center Looks At Treatment Options For Adolescent Pot Smokers

FARMINGTON – The drug content of today’s marijuana is seven times stronger than the marijuana of 1969.

In the early ‘70’s, the average age of the marijuana smoker was 18. Now it is 15.

In Connecticut, 25 percent of teens regularly use marijuana.

Teens in the suburbs use marijuana as often as teens in the city.

Pot is a problem and a University of Connecticut Health Center team is doing something about it.

The Health Center houses the Connecticut Youth Team, a federally-funded project examining three types of counseling for adolescents with problems related to marijuana use.

The CYT offers free outpatient counseling, highly qualified therapists and confidential treatment for youths who use marijuana.

Pot is not a harmless weed.

“Marijuana is now the primary substance of abuse among adolescents entering treatment,” said Charles Webb, Ph.D., a psychologist and co-principal investigator of the CYT. “It is the substance most often mentioned in adolescent emergency room admissions and autopsies,” he said, “and there is a growing perception among adolescents that marijuana is harmless.  Well, it isn’t,” he said.

Adolescents who use marijuana increase the risks associated with adult substance abuse: acute short term, and chronic long-term memory loss; increased pulmonary difficulties and heightened cardiac problems. Adolescent males using marijuana compound these health risks and can suffer stunted emotional development and acute hormone imbalances.

Dr Webb said adults who experienced or experimented with marijuana when they were young were part of the reason pot has a reputation as harmless fun. But marijuana today is a much  different drug than that smoked in the 1960s and 70s. Illegal cultivation now draws on a generation of experience and the drug content and the hazards have shot up.

“Current methods of cultivation have potentiated the drug by increasing the level of a active drug in it,” Dr Webb said. “This is a powerful and dangerous substance.”

For additional information about the Connecticut Youth Team project call 877/CY-TREAT.