Marijuana takes center stage

By John Rohlf



CLINTON — Local organizations hosted a town hall on marijuana Monday, hoping to educate the community about the negative effects of the most commonly used drug.

The event, hosted by the Camanche-DeWitt Coalition, Gateway Impact Coalition and the Abbey Treatment Center, discussed the myths and facts relating to marijuana use in the community. Steve Cundiff, co-chairman of the Camanche-DeWitt Coalition, said while working on a drug task force for 10 years, the force often arrested the same people multiple times and even arrested children of the people they had previously arrested.

He estimated about 80 percent of the people who are booked in the Clinton County Jail are under the influence of drugs, stating many of the people are making bad decisions and winding up with mental health and substance abuse problems.

"A felony record can change your life forever. Substance abuse problems can change your life forever," Cundiff said. "I knew that sending these people to jail was not stopping the demand for drugs so we needed to get the message out to our youth and our parents in our communities and tell them they need to choose a different path. The Camanche-DeWitt Coalition is here today to tell people that drugs are out there and if you choose to use them you too can go down the path of destruction."

Joseph Lemon, founder of the Abbey Treatment Center addiction program, said approximately 9 percent of people who use marijuana become addicted to it. He also said marijuana can have an impact on the adolescent brain, which he classified as anyone who is under the age of 25 years old.

According to Lemon, using marijuana frequently can have a permanent negative effect on people who frequently use marijuana. The use of marijuana also impacts the likelihood of graduation from college, according to Lemon. He said people who have used marijuana 400 times or more have a 2 percent chance of graduating college, while people who do not use marijuana have a 36 percent chance of graduating college. He also said the likelihood of schizophrenia increases by five times for people who used marijuana over 50 times as opposed to people who did not use marijuana.

"These are direct correlations. These are facts. These are statistics," Lemon said. "And what you see in particular is if you use early that is heightened. There's a higher chance you're going to develop schizophrenia as a result of that."

Lemon said the dangers of marijuana have changed recently as the amount of THC in marijuana is 22 times higher now than it was in the 1960s. He also cited a study from the National Institute of Health, stating marijuana is the single most used illicit drug with almost 20 million users.

"It outpaces by huge margins of these other kinds of illicit drugs," Lemon said. "So we've heard a lot about heroin in the news recently. Heroin's terrible. Heroin kills people. Three hundred thousand people are using heroin. Twenty million people are using marijuana. So the scope of the problem is astronomical by comparison."