The X factor affecting the mental health of Colorado’s kids | Vince Bzdek | Health

As the state continues to experience what Children’s Hospital has called “an emergency” in children’s mental health, I’ve been wondering why Colorado is so much worse than other states in quality and access of care, as well as rates of teen suicide and mental illness.

We’re a fairly healthy, happy state by most measures. Why is mental health such a challenge for us?

Clearly the pandemic has exacerbated things for our children, especially as they have tried to cope with remote school and a wholesale collapse of their social supports.

But the whole country has been dealing with those setbacks, and Colorado is still generally worse than most other places.

Then I saw an op-ed written by the head of the Colorado Medical Society.

“In 2000, Colorado bought a pig in a poke,” our top medical official, Dr. Mark Johnson, wrote recently in the Colorado Sun. That was the year we legalized medical marijuana. “We truly didn’t know what we were getting. Can we finally admit it?”

Dr. Johnson said there is no question that marijuana is one of the factors in the declining mental health of our kids. “We are gambling with the health and future of our teens,” he said bluntly.

“As I speak with my colleagues in emergency medicine, physicians are seeing what some of them consider to be an epidemic of acute transient psychotic symptoms in their patients who use marijuana, particularly adolescents.

“Research, too, has shown a dose-related increase in psychosis in adolescents using marijuana — meaning the more they use the worse the effects are … ”

This isn’t some partisan think tank saying this. This is the state’s top doc.

Johnson recommended I talk to another Colorado doctor who has done extensive research on the subject, Ken Finn, editor of the book, “Cannabis in Medicine: An Evidence-based Approach.”

I asked Finn directly: Is the mental health emergency among children related to the liberalization of marijuana laws?

“Absolutely,” was his immediate answer. “Marijuana is a piece of this puzzle, without a doubt.”

There are several things contributing to the crisis, he said, including social media, and the pandemic has had a huge impact on mental health, “but with that comes an increase in substance abuse, with depression and anxiety. Marijuana is the most prevalent substance found in completed teen suicide in our state.”

Alcohol used to be the most prevalent substance found in 12- to 19-year-olds who completed suicide in our state. After 2012, when we voted to legalize, pot became the most prevalent.

“The developing brain is so vulnerable to addiction, and vulnerable to multiple substances,” Finn said.

“The frontal cortex, which is the executive functioning of the brain, is the last thing to develop. That’s the part of the brain that would make you make good choices. The first thing that evolves in the teenage brain is the thing that says ‘This is going to be so much fun to go down I-25 at 80 mph.'”

There have been conflicting reports on whether more kids are using marijuana now than did before it was legalized. “Overall, I don’t think the youth rate of use has increased,” admits Finn.

But those reports ignore some things. “One is that kids now are using high-potency marijuana,” Finn said. When pot was legalized, the state relied on studies conducted on pot’s effect on mental health that were conducted prior to the widespread access to high potency cannabis products available now.

A substantial body of more recent research on high-potency marijuana “now supports a relationship between chronic marijuana use and an increased risk for suicide, while an emerging clinical literature suggests acute use can lead to the sudden development of suicidal urges in an important minority of subjects,” according to research cited in Finn’s book.

In addition, the number of kids who said they used marijuana and got behind the wheel went from 9 percent before legalization to 32 percent in two years, according to the annual Healthy Kids Colorado survey. “Kids who are using are actually becoming more dangerous drivers.”

But why is no one talking about this?

They are in other states. 

“I’m speaking to legislators in South Dakota and Alabama this week” about the downsides of legalization, Finn said. “One of the South Dakota legislators said, ‘Thank you for the front row to the horror show.’”

“I was very grateful because my state legislators will never listen to anything I ever say. I’ve called them, I’ve emailed them, I never get return phone calls or emails. Never.

“I’m helping these states kind of maneuver and I told them, ‘You cannot claim ignorance,’ Finn said. “Because in Colorado and Washington, Oregon and California, we didn’t know there was going to be this increase in potency products, we didn’t know about these marijuana-related driving fatalities, or kids going to the ER for accidental exposure and poisoning. You can’t claim ignorance, because you are very well aware of what’s happening.”

When you measure profit and loss after 20 years of legalized marijuana in some form, you can’t help but suffer buyer’s remorse. In 2018, we collected about $240 million in tax revenue, but hospitals lost about $500 million in the cost of marijuana-related ER visits, and marijuana-related traffic accidents cost the state another $136 million, Finn estimates. So even if you don’t factor in the increased costs of regulation and law enforcement that come with pot, you’re $300 million in the hole.

“It’s not a winner at the end of the day,” said Finn. “It’s not making the state more money than it is costing the state. We know more now. And that’s what I tell these other states.”

At the end of the day, Finn and Johnson say this is not a partisan issue. This is a public health and safety issue, and education is the only answer since the genie is probably not going back into the bottle.

“Politics, not science, has determined it is ‘safe’” to distribute to our kids,” Johnson concluded. “Let’s make that clear.”