Dear Laura and John,
When I read the article about your son Johnny in The Epoch Times it was identical to my daughter, Abby, except she fortunately is still with us. I got chills reading and was emotional. I’m in Canada (Ontario) which legalized Marijuana in 2018 under our disingenuous hopeless Liberal government, who used it in the campaign to secure the young vote and use it as a tax grab. Anybody over the age of 19 can buy it in Ontario. As many of us know (or maybe our politicians don’t) a person’s frontal lobe or Cerebral Cortex which is basically the CEO of the brain and responsible for cognitive functions, emotions, problem solving etc isn’t fully developed until age 25, so marijuana under 25 can be VERY dangerous! It’s disgusting how many of our young people this is hurting! My daughter Abby (Abigael – Abs for short) was born one day after Johnny on February 8, 2000. In late 2018 and early 2019 she experimented with weed and found it helped her when she was having trouble falling asleep. It worked briefly, but she became dependent on it over time and it started to make her anxious and on and on. As a result, she was smoking every day and tried dabbing. In late May, she started to feel the effects and began to experience some odd thoughts, not quite herself. I noticed she was acting a bit goofy and told her to lay off the weed. She didn’t! On June 13th, she came to talk to me and was NOT herself. She was acting very out of it and not making sense, I said Ab you HAVE to stop smoking!” She said I know. The next night, she went out to a bar but before they even went in her boyfriend called me, scared, because she was so out of it. She was acting paranoid and delusional but kept saying she’s not suicidal. God Bless her, she knew something was wrong. She said to her boyfriend, “Call my Dad.” Those 3 words are so dear to me it meant she trusted me but was scared! When I went to get them, she was so whacked and out of touch with reality. I said, “What else are you on besides weed?” and she said nothing else. When we finally got her blood results (weeks later) all she had in her system was the THC. I was up all night with her, she kept calling me to come to her room and stay with her and she finally fell asleep at 6am. I really hoped she would sleep it off, but nope! She woke up at 10am the same, so on Father’s Day, Sunday June 16th 2019 I took her to the emergency room, and the real nightmare began. I won’t go in to every detail but the next four months after Father’s Day were a complete nightmare. We were so frustrated with the system, and the doctors at the hospital were ZERO help and gave us no information and released her after 6 days. Abby’s Mother and I were taking care of a 19-year-old, who was an adult and could conceivable go and do anything she wanted and had mostly lost touch with reality suffering brain damage. She was having conversations with Siri in her room and called the Police and asked if they were following her, every day for weeks she thought she was going to fall asleep and never wake up it was HEARTBREAKING!. Long long story short, Abby made it I give her all the credit. In December 2019, she wanted to go off her anti-psychotics, but her Psychiatrist wanted her to stay on for three more months. When we left the office, she told me they were messing with her head. The fear was she would relapse off the meds, she knew she wouldn’t! She also told me that she stopped taking them cold turkey for 6 days so I made her promise me to keep taking them if I agreed to lower her dose to wean off. I made her promise me to take half a pill for one month, so I literally self-medicated her but it was better than cold turkey, I was alone with no help. She’s been off ever since 100% recovery attending freshman year at University! She no longer smokes anything God Bless her! PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW this tax grab is hurting our beautiful kids. Legalized Marijuana is something that is here to stay like it or not but the legal age for purchase MUST be raised to 25.
I applaud you and John’s efforts I think you are making a difference I’m so proud of you!