The point is that the teenage brain is much more susceptible to permanent damage than the more mature brain of an adult, over 18. Unfortunately drug use among teenagers is multiplying at a much higher rate than adult drug use, which is declining. The worst affect of the laissez-faire attitude toward certain drugs, the drugs won’t hurt you attitude is that it sends the wrong message to teen-agers.
I have a friend who has never stopped using drugs, all kinds of drugs and brags that she never became addicted to anything and that is proof that drugs are harmless if used in moderation. Well, the drugs may not have hurt her, but they have hurt a lot of other people in her family and circle of friends, and I blame her.
Her son is a heroin addict, he blames her also. He says that it is her fault because she never stopped him when he was a teenager and bragged about how cool her drug use was to anyone who would listen. He says that she was the worst mother in the world. I agree.
She grows her own marijuana and is known to share it with friends and family members. She likes to bake it into cookies. She shared it with one young man , who left her house and got into an accident, killed a guy and went to jail for 3.5 years. She was scared to death that he would tell where he got the marijuana and she would go to jail too. Maybe she should have.
But then you’re dealing with whether or not the drug does damage. We always knew marijuana had pharmacological side effects, the question was how many and how much did you recover from it, same as with booze. The data we have on 50 odd years of LSD testing is it doesn’t do damage, and not doing damage to the brain means the susceptibility of the age group to permanent damage doesn’t matter. That the important of this phrase: “there is no evidence for long-lasting effects on brain and other parts of the human organism”.
The right attitude is one of truth. Especially in the internet age with all the data out there. The boogieman picture is usually built on false data, and the kids can look it up. If you tell kids “everybody that does this gets hooked and it destroys them” then they look up the internet data and see the addiction rate is under 15% they know they were lied to and now they don’t believe you. Be truthful, let them know it’s a crap shoot, and each drug is different.