How to Deal With Teen Marijuana Use

All right, this session is all about the most difficult drug there is to get people off of. What do you think it is? Do you think it's heroin? Maybe alcohol, maybe methamphetamines? Who is that bath salt stuff? That's pretty crazy if you hear about that. Actually, it's none of those things. Believe it or not, the most difficult thing that I personally think to get people off of is actually marijuana. You're gonna hear me call it weed. I've been doing this work for a long time, and so I'm pretty casual in my conversation, so I'll just go.

Ahead and tell you.

I mostly refer to it as getting people off of weed. Let's talk about why that is. You hear. Very commonly, you hear people talk about, oh, weed is not addictive. In fact, most parents think that. Most young people think that. Most everyone thinks that they think it's not addictive. Or they might say something like, well, it's addictive, but not really physically, only psychologically. Okay, let's start right there. The idea about the difference in physical dependence and psychological dependence. You know, when people say that, I get the impression that what they're trying to say to me is it's less serious because it doesn't have the physical withdrawals. Let me tell you something. The physical dependency of any addiction is the easiest thing to fix anyways. That's not the big problem with any addiction. You can take almost anyone off of almost any substance in about five days in a medical detox unit, seven, if it's complicated, 10 days at the worst. So if you've ever gone through detox or you work in this field, then you'll know that the physically getting somebody off something, that is just the tip of the iceberg anyway. So it just irks me when people say, well, it's only psychologically addictive. That's the hard part anyway, it's not the physical part. Although I don't really agree with the fact that it's not physically addictive. But we'll talk about that. Here's what I need to say before we go any further in this discussion. Number one, I don't think weed is terrible. This isn't an Amber makes weed the villain and recover the superhero discussion. That's not what we're talking about. Lots and lots and lots of people smoke weed and don't have any problems. It's very commonplace. A lot of people do it, and they don't have any addiction issues. And it really isn't causing them problems in their life. And so this isn't me saying no one should ever do it, ever. But to be honest with you, I would say the exact same thing to you about alcohol, about pain pills, about benzodiazepines, about amphetamines, and any other substance that you can think of out there to talk about. Because it really isn't the substance that's a problem. It's whether or not the person has those addictive tendencies. So it's not the substance, it's the person. So every single day it feels like.

Maybe not every day, but, oh, my.

Gosh, it feels like it. I have this discussion with some young person about marijuana. They come in because their family member or multiple family members have caught them smoking weed a bunch of times. And so they get dragged into my office and immediately, this is what happens. This is what I call. Now we're going to go into the weed PowerPoint discussion.

I don't bring out the PowerPoint, they do. So usually they come in and they don't really break out a PowerPoint, but.

The way they talk about it, I kind of expect that there should be with like a red laser pointer, like, they're trying to give me all the, like, marijuana debate. And here's how I handle that. Number one, I don't argue with them. I don't. Do not. I'm not ever, ever, ever going to get in that hole. Like, well, it's better than alcohol, because, you know, alcohol people have wrecks and DUIs and alcohol people get drunk and beat their wives. I mean, I can tell you this argument word for word. You know what's most frustrating? It's because it's never original. It's the same dang argument from every.

Single one of them.

And I've been doing this for years. It's like, can you come up with something better? Because I've done heard this 50 million times. I know it's kind of mean, right? So here you go. Let's have the argument. Number one, this weed is natural, man. It comes from the earth. God put it here, and if he didn't want us to smoke it, it wouldn't be here. It's natural, okay? Yeah, it comes from the plant cannabis. And yes, the plant grows natural, but so does the coca plant and every other plant that suppl us with every other drug that we use. I mean, alcohol comes from grapes and other fruits and vegetables.

So that whole it's natural it came.

From the earth argument, it's so kind of lame because everything we have comes from the earth. Come on, you can do better. Alright, next argument. Weed isn't a problem because it's only psychologically addicted to. Well, I've already given you my take on that, which is the psychological addiction is way harder than the physical addiction anyway.

So even if I were to go.

With the argument, that's what I would say to you. But I will say that when I've dealt with people that were marijuana dependent, they definitely have some physical withdrawal, headaches, anxiety, difficulty sleeping and pretty significant marijuana dependence. You're going to see people can't or they have a hard time eating without smoking virus because they have like no appetite. So yes, there are some physical symptoms to marijuana withdrawal. Shocking, right? Okay, now I say a lot of this stuff tongue in cheek, but probably because I have to have this discussion so many times it just gets kind of old.

But the main thing I can tell.

You if you're a family member and you're having to talk to someone about this is to avoid getting into the whole is it better or worse than alcohol? Because then you're going to find yourself starting to drown in this conversation and then you're going to say like your ace card and you're going to throw that out there and you're going to say, well, it's illegal in this state at least, and until it's not illegal.

You can't do it.

Or maybe if you live in a state where it's legal, you might say, well, you're not old enough to do it so it's illegal for you or whatever. And I also think that's kind of like a really bad argument against it because as soon as you say that, they're gonna say, well, it's legal in other states and they use it for medical purposes and it helps with this and that and the other. And I'm telling you those are all irrelevant arguments because honestly, people do use.

It and it doesn't cause a problem. And so my discussion with an individual about marijuana really isn't about. I really try super hard not to get in this whole argument about legal versus illegal or physical versus psychological dependency or any of those other power struggles that are so high risk.

When you talk about this subject, I.

Really like to keep it basic. How is this substance affecting this particular person? I don't care how it affects everyone else. I really don't care if they legalize it or not. Oh, I guess I kind of care. I guess if I'm like, if you really press me on it, I would say I wish they wouldn't. But that's probably because I'm an addiction counselor, but I'm not like crazy about that. Like, it doesn't make me lose sleep at night. Oh my gosh, what if they legalize weed? There's a lot of things out there that are legal that I still treat addiction. I treat people that have addictions. Alcohol is legal and people develop addiction to it all the time. Legalizing it doesn't make it not addictive. The fact that it's legal in some states doesn't make it not addictive. Really, the question has to do with the individual person. So here's what I like to, here's my discussion or argument, if you will, about marijuana. Here's what I like to say, Number one. Yeah, you know what? You're probably right. In most cases, marijuana probably, probably won't take you to your bottom, meaning completely, like in a crazy short amount of time, like destroy every single thing you have and take every single thing from you. But it will keep you stuck. So what I like to say about marijuana is, okay, maybe it's not taking you on a bullet train to your bottom, but it's probably keeping you stuck exactly where you were when you started using it, like every day. So we've all met like the 40 year old guy that's sitting in the basement with all the teenagers and he's still smoking weed all the time. And he acts like he's 15. That's because he's been smoking weed to deal with everything since he's 15 years old. And he's used that as his primary coping skill. And it's to the point now that he doesn't really have a lot of other coping. So weed is his coping mechanism for celebrating, for being sad, for being worried, for being anxious. So basically the person learns to deal with life by smoking marijuana, which is a problem because coping is like a muscle and if you don't use it, it atrophies and then you lose the ability to cope with things. And so then it's like you have to run back to a substance to cope. And you really aren't taking the time and energy to self reflect on what those uncomfortable feelings are and what they mean and what they're trying to tell you to do. So if you're smoking marijuana habitually, if you're smoking marijuana habitually, then probably you're not responding to those emotional indicators that I like to say. They're kind of like the lights on your dashboard that say check your oil or check your engine or your tire pressure is low. You're just sort of like covering those up. So it'd be kind of like putting duct tape across your dash so that you couldn't quite tell what was going on. And even though it's not fun to see one of those things light up on your dash, you kind of need to see them in order to take the appropriate action. So marijuana can keep you stuck. It keeps a lot of people stuck, so keeps people from moving forward in their life. The other thing, the biggest problem, I guess I would say, with marijuana is the fact that everybody views it as such a non problem and it's so culturally accepted everywhere that people just don't want to really take a look. Look at how this drug is affecting them. The last thing I'll say that can be really tricky about this particular problem is the way that it actually affects people over such a long period of time. You may or may not. I'm not sure if you've heard me say this. I say it often in a lot of my talks, is the fact that the difference in the addictions is how fast of a train that takes you to the. Excuse me. The difference in it, in all the addictions are how fast of the bullet train it is. So heroin take you real fast. Alcohol will take you pretty fast, methamphetamine will take you on a bullet train, and marijuana will take you to the same place. But it'll just take you so slowly that it's really difficult to see what's happening to you. Best way I can explain to you is this metaphor. If you've ever been to the ocean and you've been out there, maybe you have memories of being a kid and you're out there and you're playing in the water, you're having so much fun, and you got your cool boogie board, and your parents or your friends or whoever, they're up on the shore and they're laying out and getting some sun or whatever they're doing, and you wave at them and you're like, watch me, mom do this cool trick. And you're playing, and your family was right there. You saw them on the shore, and you just went back to playing for 10 or 15 minutes. And then you look up and you can't find them. And you're like, oh, my gosh, they left me. I can't believe they left me out here.

What?

And you get that panicky feeling because you can't find your family. And they were just right there. And now they're gone. Can't see their stuff or anything. What's happened? You know, the Answer to this. You moved, but you moved so slowly, you didn't feel yourself moving. That tide just sort of slowly drifted and you didn't even notice. That's what marijuana addiction is like. It gets you so slowly.

That's what makes it so doggone difficult.

Is the fact that it gets you so slowly. It's sneakier than those other addictions, which makes it harder to treat because all of a sudden you wake up and you're 25 or you're 30 years old and like your friends all left you and they went out and they like got themselves a life and everything and a career and a family and you didn't. And you might still be in your parents basement or you might still just be fighting with your same girlfriend that you've had forever or whatever it is, and it just doesn't seem to be going anywhere. And you feel like, what the heck happened? Everyone left me. But the truth of it is you got stuck and life was moving by and you weren't. But it was really hard to notice because that's the way that this particular drug gets you. It's just a little bit different in the fact that it's a little slower for a lot of people. It's so culturally accepted and. And you hear so many people talk about the fact that it's not addictive, so you're getting so many wrong messages. It doesn't hit that alarm button in your head the way that other substances do. Which is why I personally think it's so tricky. And that's why I think it's actually more dangerous in some ways, especially more dangerous for a recovering person. The reason is because it's pretty commonplace for people to think, oh, I have a very serious problem with cocaine or alcohol or pain pills or whatever it is, methamphetamines. But I mean, weed, everyone smokes that. Everyone does that. It's no problem. So they'll put a lot of effort, energy into stopping some other drug and want to keep smoking weed. I call this the marijuana maintenance plan. And this is a bad idea because it kind of makes your brain forget that you're not doing all those other drugs and you let your guard down and so many people relapse back on those other drugs. In fact, there's a statistic with cocaine. I'm trying to remember it off the top of my head, but it's something like 99% of all cocaine relapses are precipitated by alcohol or marijuana. It truly is kind of a gateway drug because people just they don't see it as threatening, so they don't have any guard up at all. They don't even know what to look for for it being a problem. And so they're just not paying attention. And it sneaks in on you like that. And like I said, it happens so slowly, and it kind of just stops you from moving forward. And a lot of people say, me, but you don't understand. I'm not like, somebody people like. I'm still really motivated when I smoke. Like, I do my homework and I play sports and I, like, go to work and get all these bazillion things done. And I'm not saying that that's not true, but what I am saying is that you might begin to rely on it so much that you're not coping with life the same way. You stop being interested in other things that are fun or fun to other people that don't smoke or use drugs. Your family starts to get upset with you because you become less and less and less interested in engaging in other activities, family activities, social activities, things that don't involve smoking weed. It's going to give you that same set of problems that other addictions do. It's just going to get you slower, which honestly makes it more difficult. And occasionally I will get a claim, and I love this one. Happens when they come straight in the door. They're like, I'm addicted to weed. Had this client this year, he said, oh, my gosh, I hate when people say, you can't be addicted to weed.

I'm so addicted to weed.

I've, like, sold everything to you weed. And he just, like, cracked me up because he knew, without a doubt, like, he was totally addicted to weed. So occasionally I do get patients or clients that absolutely know it, but most of the time, it's really, really difficult to treat. And so in some later classes, we'll talk about how to go about doing that. But I do want you to kind of understand what's happening there. It is addictive, why it's so difficult, and what are some of those signs and symptoms to look for. All right. Hope you enjoyed my talk on weed.