By: Benjamin He

These days, teens receive a ton of stress due to all the schoolwork, extracurriculars, and tons of other stuff piled upon them. As a result, a lot of teenagers turn to vaping cannabis as a stress reliever. But unfortunately, there is a problem with that.

These teens are getting seriously ill due to the high THC levels within these drugs. It messes up their vision, causes fainting, is extremely addictive, and can lead to even more fatal results, like suicide.

Teens are often attracted to cannabis because they not only make you feel good and happy in general, but also because vape pens are relatively easy to hide since they don’t smell, and are very convenient (Two-step procedure: 1. Press the button. 2. Inhale). But behind the feel-good moments and convenience lies a dark secret: almost an insanity sort of feeling and getting very, very ill.

According to Elysse, a teenager who started vaping cannabis at age 14 and is now 18, during the time she was vaping cannabis, she had vomited at least 20 times over the course of 2 hours in the time she vaped. That’s not even all of it. The marijuana would often make her more anxious or sad, and she once passed out in the shower after smoking. Laura Stack, who is a mother of a victim of weed addiction, lost her son Johnny to suicide. Johnny was at age 19 and died after jumping from a six-story building. He had left a note a few days before the incident, saying that smoking weed had ruined his mind and life.

This is already a growing problem, as more and more teens are taking up this trend. In 2020, a survey on the issue was held, and the results were that 35 percent of high school seniors, and as many as 44 percent of college students, reported using marijuana in the past year.

Many parents, upon hearing about this from their child, will overlook it, because to them, frankly, it’s not a very big deal. This happened to Miss Laura Stack, who, upon Johnny’s confession of smoking weed, was just happy that he wasn’t using cocaine.

But not that much after, Johnny had changed. He went from a healthy person with great grades in school to threatening to kill the family dog unless his parents gave him money, and he had also begun dealing weed to younger children as well. And all of that is due to the higher doses of THC inside this drug.

Higher doses of THC are more likely to produce anxiety, agitation, paranoia, and psychosis. According to Dr. Sharon Levy, the director of the Adolescent Substance Use and Addiction Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, the younger you are, the more vulnerable your brain is to these problems. That’s why it’s such a large growing problem in the U.S. The cannabis drug has also been linked to cannabis hyperemesis syndrome, cannabis addiction, mental health conditions, and more.

But whenever a problem appears, people will do two things, first, they will study it, then try to find a solution. Dr. Levy says there’s not really a safe limit to cannabis consumption, which means that you can’t just take it once a month, and boom, you’ll be alright.

Doctors agree that staying off drugs entirely is probably the safest option. But whatever happens (and doctors agree on this one, too!), we’re all in this one together.