The Orange County Register, April 14, 2015
By Fred Swegles/staff writer
About 300 South County students, parents and community members got a taste of what marijuana legalization could bring to California if the state follows Colorado’s lead.
Guest speakers Ben Cort and Dr. Judith Landau visited San Clemente on April 2 to describe what can happen when a state legalizes weed – taxing and regulating it like alcohol.
Cort, a recovered user now a manager for the Center for Dependency, Addiction and Rehabilitation in Aurora, Col., said pot is embedded in the state’s culture since voters passed Proposition 64 in 2012. “Now we have a marketing machine pushing it on you,” he said.
He showed ads marketing marijuana with images of Santa Claus and the Cookie Monster. One ad said, “Bring in an empty beer can and get a joint for a penny.” Other ads touted highly concentrated pot.
“We know nothing about what this is doing to the brain,” Cort said. Meanwhile, he said, Denver has 80 more pot shops than Starbucks and McDonald’s combined.
Landau, a neuropsychologist with 30 years’ experience working with substance abusers and their families, said marijuana also pervades Colorado ski slopes.
“Try and go skiing and you’re in the gondola or in a chairlift,” she said, “and you are surrounded by blue smoke. We are all impaired when we get out of the chairlift.”
“We get high in Colorado across the age spectrum,” Cort said. “We’ve normalized (it), which means young people start sooner.”
“Our laws are going to change,” warned Susan Parmelee, director of the San Clemente Wellness & Prevention Center, which presented the Colorado speakers at the San Clemente Community Center. “There are people applying for permits in our town for dispensaries. They are going to be here. It’s time that we also work on advocacy efforts to keep it out of our town and to how we are going to vote when this referendum comes up.”
It could come in 2016. California has legalized medicinal marijuana, and groups are pushing for a ballot measure to legalize casual use. Alaska, Washington, Oregon and Colorado have legalized recreational marijuana.
Despite regulation, legalized pot in Colorado is upping the toll that alcohol already was taking in accidents, violent episodes and deaths, speakers said.
Parmelee, who counsels students at San Clemente High School three days a week, also had local speakers.
Dr. Richard Granese, a specialist in psychiatric disorders of the brain, said marijuana has potential to cause irreversible damage. “You are born with one brain. … It’s not like putting a cast on an arm or a leg if you break it,” he said. “For somebody who spent his whole life and career trying to fix the damaged brain, it’s not easy.”
He said 12 percent of eighth-graders and 36 percent of high-school seniors use marijuana, and using can lead to psychotic symptoms, lung damage, emphysema and cancer.
“All drugs work at first, and all of them stop,” said Dr. Daniel Headrick, who has 22 years’ experience in addiction medicine. “They pretend to look like a chemical that is already in your brain. So it works at first … makes you feel better at first. But the more and more you put in the substitute, the less and less you make of your own. You build up tolerance, and you have to keep taking more. Eventually, if you take enough – and people get there at different rates – but everybody is going to start painting themselves into a corner where the only way you can feel good is to take the substitute.”