Thursday, 30 October 2014
Friday, 17 October 2014
Your kid’s brain on pot:
The real effects of marijuana on teens
Photo illustration by Matt French/The Globe and Mail
Like it or not, your kids will probably try marijuana. So will their friends. Canadian teens are more than twice as likely as adults to smoke pot – and have the highest rate of cannabis use in the developed world. Marijuana has become as much a part of Canada’s youth culture as hockey or Katy Perry.
Fully 28 per cent of Canadian children aged 11 to 15 admitted to using cannabis at least once in the past year (compared to 23 per cent in the United States, where pot is legal in the states of Colorado and Washington, and 17 per cent in the weed-friendly Netherlands), a 2013 United Nations Children’s Fund study found. As much as 5 per cent of Canadian adolescents – and as much as 10 per cent of Grade 12 students – smoke pot every day, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse.
Canada’s youth are not only top consumers of the world’s most widely used illicit drug – they are also lab rats for the most potent bud the world has ever known. The pot smoked at Woodstock in 1969 contained about 1 per cent of the psychoactive ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol. It was mere shrubbery compared to today’s street-grade marijuana, which typically has THC concentrations of at least 10 per cent, but may contain upwards of 30 per cent, according to Health Canada.
As Canadian youth take advantage of easy access to the street drug, despite law-enforcement efforts, pot’s reputation as “nature’s medicine” continues to grow, fuelling the debate over whether to decriminalize or legalize recreational marijuana use. Legalization is shaping up as a key election issue. Just last week, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto declared criminalization a failure at “preventing or reducing harms associated with cannabis use” – prompting support from Bill Blair, chief of police of Canada’s biggest city.
Politicians are staking out ground on marijuana, with the Liberals championing legalization and regulation, the NDP favouring decriminalization and the Conservatives holding the line on enforcement. But do Canadians actually know how the drug affects our most prolific users? For tweens and teens, whose brains are in a crucial stage of development, is there such thing as a harmless pot habit?
To determine what science has to say about the effects of high-octane pot on the developing brain, The Globe interviewed top researchers in the field and combed through dozens of peer-reviewed studies, taking reasoned critiques into account. Here are some key ways cannabis use could affect your child’s brain.
Your kid's brain on pot: READ MORE HERE
Wednesday, 8 October 2014
What 20 years of research on cannabis use has taught us...
Published Tuesday, October 7, 2014 11:19AM EDT
VIEW VIDEO STORY
What 20 years of research on cannabis use has taught us:
- In the past 20 years recreational cannabis use has grown tremendously
- Almost as common as tobacco use among adolescents and young adults, and so has the research evidence.
A major new review in the scientific journal Addiction sets out the latest information on the effects of cannabis use on mental and physical health.
The key conclusions are:
Adverse Effects of Acute Cannabis Use
- not fatal overdoses
- doubles risk of MVA if intoxicated
- use during pregnancy slightly reduces birth weight
Adverse Effects of Chronic Cannabis Use
- Regular cannabis users can develop a dependence syndrome the risks of which are around 1 in 10 of all cannabis users and 1 in 6 among those who start in adolescence.
- Double risks of psychotic symptoms and disorders (especially if they have a personal or family history of psychotic disorders, and if they start using cannabis in their mid-teens)
- Regular adolescent users:
- lower educational attainment
- more illicit drug use
- produce intellectual impairment
- doubles risk of schizophrenia
- higher risk chronic bronchitis.
Cannabis smoking by middle aged adults probably increases the risk of myocardial infarction.
Read more: http://canadaam.ctvnews.ca/health/dr-marla-20-years-of-cannabis-research-1.2043052#ixzz3FZE190Q9
Friday, 26 September 2014
Wednesday, 24 September 2014
STORY BY
VANESSA GILLIS
Can awareness save lives? Daniel
D’Or hopes his new show can.
Teens 101 is a 13-part TV series
aimed at helping young adults deal with the stresses of adolescence, ranging
from bullying, depression, and anxiety to addiction and body image.
“I’m really excited about doing
this. It’s a passion project, it really is,” said Daniel
D’Or, senior executive producer at Canamedia
and creator of the show’s concept. “No one really knows what the outcome will
be, but I can comfortably say that we can probably save lives.”
According to Statistics Canada, suicide is the
second-leading cause of death for people under 24.
“There’s a million reasons why
they do it, but it all comes down to ‘I can’t handle this anymore,’” said D’Or.
“Kids kill themselves in this country every year,
so you tell me that this
project isn’t important.”
D’Or came up with the concept to
reach out to young adults who are experiencing these issues and to make others
aware of them as well.
“Think of all of these things that
we don’t want to think about but that many kids go through,” he said. “This is
to put that on the surface.”
Each episode will deal with a
different issue and will begin from the perspective of someone who has been
through the crisis. That issue will then be dramatically recreated so the
viewer goes through that moment in their life. Finally, mental health
professionals will offer advice and their thoughts on the issue.
“I’ve researched this quite a bit
and I’ve realized there’s nothing quite like this out there to really connect,”
said D’Or. “If you’re in that category, you keep to yourself and you feel
isolated. I want to get it out there that this happens.”
Susan Raphael,
an mental health and addiction counsellor working with the show, said the
show is meant to raise awareness about youth mental health and addiction issues
and some of the dissolutions that are out there.
“There’s a lot out there on
addiction and mental health that’s more of a reality show and sometimes
bordering on exploitive,” said Raphael. “What interested me about this idea is
that it’s meant to be educational. I like that it’s not exploitive.”
So far, D’Or said they have some
local organizations that have come on board, including Raphael, the Canadian Mental
Health Association, and the Reach Out Centre for Kids, or ROCK.
Accompanying the show, D’Or said
they are also working on a lesson plan that will be incorporated into classroom
curriculums to help teachers introduce these topics because “teachers generally
don’t have that type of education of mental health in their teaching course.”
They will also be creating a
website based on the show that will show adolescents how and where to connect,
and offer a blog for those who want to seek further help.
This will be accompanied by a
mobile application that will help with self-esteem by offering an inspirational
phrase or pep talk every morning.
“Basically, we’re going to build a
program to help kids get help,” said D’Or.
“I absolutely know in my heart that this project will help so many kids.”
Teens 101 will be broadcast
nationally on ichannel
and is scheduled to go on air next September.
D’Or urges anyone interested in
participating with the show to contact him at dan.dor@canamedia.com
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