My son Joe was an average to good student, Varsity level baseball player, and golfer in High School. He was kind, sensitive and thoughtful of others. Fast forward to his sophomore year in high school. He began using marijuana at 15 years old. Unprompted, he recently sat down and wrote about the impact that his “weed” use has had on him.
This is what he wrote, “I am a schizophrenic. I used to smoke weed. Weed is awful. If you keep on smoking it every day, it takes you away from yourself and turns you into someone else. And you become addicted to it. It made me: anxious, paranoid, delusional, and it caused burn out. It’s a dangerous drug. I don’t want to smoke it anymore. These days I stay away from it because it scares me. It’s all I wanted to do before school, after school, at night. It was all I spent my money on. I went from getting Bs and Cs in school to getting Ds and Fs. It was all I thought about, “Who am I gonna get it from? How will I get the money?”
Weed made me paranoid. I thought people were trying to frame me for a crime I didn’t commit. I thought I was under surveillance. I was 21 and 22 years old. Weed made me think that people were talking about me behind my back. I began to become psychotic, and I would take my problems and others’ problems out on my mom. I wasn’t nice to her. I hurt her. Now, I’m forever sorry for it.”
“If I could go to every Junior High and High School in the world, I would tell them all, “Do not start cannabis. It is not a good friend to have.”
I can tell you, with certainty, this is happening to families across Massachusetts and across the country. Loved ones are being held hostage by their daily cannabis use, which escalates to severe psychosis. That is followed by experiences of rotating in and out of acute psychiatric hospitalizations and ends as unsuccessful admissions due to the awful struggling and inability to let go of their daily cannabis use.
The public needs to know that this can happen, and families need help finding effective dual-diagnosis services and treatment that address both the cannabis addiction and the psychosis.