Attitudes toward pot are changing among youth — with alarming results

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  Attitudes among teens about marijuana use are shifting as pot becomes more socially acceptable — and legal. Mail Tribune illustration / Jamie Lusch
   
•  Teresa Thomas
  
  
  

  Affordability, availability and more potent forms of marijuana are spurring alarming trends in pot use among teenagers, law enforcement and school officials say.

  Not only are more youths being cited for minor in possession, but how they view and use the drug is shifting as marijuana becomes more socially acceptable — and legal.

  “Pot’s chill,” says Kate, a 17-year-old North Medford High School student whose name has been changed to protect her anonymity. “It just chills you and opens your eyes. I don’t see it as a bad thing.”

  “I’d rather smoke marijuana than take my ADHD medication,” says Mikal, 16, a junior at North Medford whose anonymity also is being protected because of his age.

  Medford police Lt. Kevin Walruff, who oversees the interagency Medford Area Drug and Gang Enforcement task force, says MIP citations have increased 30.5 percent, from 105 in 2014 to 137 in 2015. The numbers do not include citations for those age 18 to 20. Marijuana is legal only for those 21 and older.

  Countywide, 222 youths in fiscal year 2014-15 were referred by local law enforcement agencies to Jackson County Juvenile Services after they were caught with less than an ounce of marijuana. But between July 1, 2015 — when recreational pot became legal for adults under Measure 91 — and Feb. 23, there were 189 referrals, including 131 between October and December, for possession and possession by consumption, says Joe Ferguson, deputy director of the juvenile department.

  “If the trend continues, then we are looking at around 300 police reports (for MIPs this fiscal year),” Ferguson says in an email.

  “It’s similar to what we saw when medical marijuana went into effect,” he says. “We saw a similar upswing then, too.”

  Ferguson also attributes the increase to the availability of marijuana and new legislation that allows police to issue MIPs to minors who are high, regardless of whether they were found with marijuana in their possession.

  House Bill 3400, signed last June by Gov. Kate Brown, makes laws that govern use of marijuana by minors similar to alcohol rules. Before that, a juvenile could not be cited for being high, Ferguson says.

  Now, if minors exhibit “objective symptoms” of having used marijuana in the last 24 hours, admit to being high or were witnessed using, they can be cited for possession by consumption, says Mike Jackson, a school resource officer at South Medford High School.

  Walruff says that while it’s too early to know the full impact of the new marijuana policies, police have found that more potent products of marijuana, namely butane honey oil, have become much more popular among youth in recent years.

  “It is a high THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) substance. They use a chemical process to extract the THC from the plant and then they smoke it," Walruff says.

  In 2012, the average THC concentration of marijuana confiscated by police nationwide was 15 percent, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. However, honey oil — commonly called shatter, herbs, hash, errl, 710 (“oil” spelled backward) or budder — has THC levels between 50 and 90 percent, Walruff says.

  “They call it 'dabbing,'” he says.

  Walruff says teens are turning their bedrooms into hash oil laboratories to extract THC from parts of the marijuana plant that might otherwise have been discarded. But extracting the concentrates is dangerous, especially when using a flammable gas such as butane.

  In January, hash oil explosions caused three Medford house fires and injured five people. In mid-February, a teen girl in Grants Pass was severely burned when an explosion likely caused by hash oil production turned her clothes into a ball of fire.

  “Butane honey oil is to marijuana as crack is to cocaine,” Jackson says. “It’s a more potent form of the drug. And now that marijuana is more socially acceptable, it’s almost as if it’s not naughty enough, and they’ve found a way to make marijuana more potent.”

  Mikal says he prefers dabbing because it is more medicinal and helps him to focus.

  Kate, on the other hand, says she prefers edibles.

  “Cakes, brownies, lollipops, I’ve even had it in cotton candy,” she says.

  All forms of marijuana are illegal for anyone under the age of 21 unless they have an Oregon Medical Marijuana Program card. (As of last October, there were 257 minors statewide with medical marijuana cards.) The amount in a minor's possession determines the severity of the charge. Possession of more than a quarter ounce of honey oil or extract is a felony, Walruff says.

  Students in the Medford School District are suspended for possessing or consuming any controlled substance on campus and expelled for distributing, says Amy Tiger, director of athletics and staff and student safety.

  “There’s the school track of consequences and the legal track of consequences,” she says. “We were always able to suspend for students that were under the influence.”

  Last semester, 119 students districtwide were suspended for drug use, compared with 116 students in the first semester of the 2014-15 school year and 95 students in the first semester of the 2013-14 school year. Suspensions are reduced if the student agrees to get drug and alcohol counseling.

  “It’s important that the school district sends kids a clear signal,” Tiger says. “It’s illegal for students, something we don’t want on our campus and something that has potential health consequences.”

  School administrators are trained to detect signs of marijuana use and to differentiate between the smell of a student who has been using and one whose family grows or uses marijuana.

  “For several years now, we’ve had kids who don’t touch the stuff and don’t want to touch the stuff, but they come from a family of growers,” Jackson says. “And when you live in a house where marijuana is being grown, you can wash those clothes as much as you want, but you’re still going to smell like it.”

  Jackson says some kids are sent to his office regularly for smelling like pot, and some keep an extra change of clothes or an extra backpack in their lockers to use at school.

  Affordability and availability continue to make marijuana an attractive drug for teens.

  According to a 2015 Oregon Healthy Teens Survey, 10.4 percent of eighth-graders and 26.2 percent of 11th-graders countywide used marijuana at least once in the last 30 days.

  In the same survey, 40.6 percent of local eighth-graders and 70 percent of local high school juniors reported that it was easy to get marijuana. Both groups reported that it was easier to get marijuana than cigarettes, and 11th-graders said marijuana also was easier to get than alcohol.

  Jackson County health promotions manager Tanya Phillips says the 2017 Oregon Healthy Teens Survey will be a better indicator of the effects of Measure 91 on minors, as the last survey was conducted prior to the legalization of recreational marijuana.

  Both Kate and Mikal say they get marijuana for free.

  “It’s easy for me to get because I know the right people,” says Kate, who says she started using at age 8 and now uses about once or twice a month on her “really bad days.”

  “When there are so many people growing it in the valley, there’s always going to be extra,” says Jackson. “Alcohol is expensive in Oregon, and if you want some of it as a kid, you have to tap on someone’s shoulder to buy it for you or steal it from the old man’s liquor cabinet. But when marijuana is being grown all around you, it is ridiculously easy to get.”

  A little baggie of marijuana can get a lot of kids really high, whereas it would take a lot of beer or liquor to affect the same number of people, Jackson notes.

  Furthermore, kids no longer view marijuana as dangerous, he says.

  Eleventh-graders countywide considered smoking marijuana once or twice a week as less harmful than drinking between one and two alcoholic drinks a day, according to the 2015 Oregon Healthy Teens Survey.

  “Alcohol makes you go around fighting people,” Mikal says. “Weed makes you want to kill a bag of Doritos.”

  Mikal's companions viewed the drug as less harmful than other controlled substances and praised its medicinal properties.

  “If you’re drunk, you run red lights,” says a 17-year-old North Medford junior who asked not to be named. “If you’re high, you sit at a stop sign waiting for it to turn green.”

  “(Marijuana) heals you from cancer,” says Chazz, 16, a North Medford High School junior, adding that the school posters have it all wrong.

  Chazz, who says he smoked his first joint when he was 10, says he now smokes pot almost every day because it helps him with his anxiety and anger and helps him fall asleep at night.

  “School starts at 8:45 a.m., so I get high around 8 a.m. so that it’s wearing off by the time I get to school,” he says.

  “I try not to get to a point where I’m so f----- up that I can’t do anything,” says Chazz, who is only weeks away from earning his GED.

  When asked whether his high ever interfered with his homework, Chazz says, “I hate homework either way.”

  Kids referred to OnTrack either by juvenile court or the schools are educated on the dangers associated with marijuana use, says Harrison Lockhart, a certified drug counselor and OnTrack’s adolescent program manager.

  According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, marijuana affects the parts of the brain responsible for learning, memory, coordination and decision-making.

  “We work with them to determine if it’s peer pressure that's causing it, if it’s their home life that’s causing it, or if it’s a lack of or faulty education that’s causing it,” Lockhart says.

  “Kids will cite that no one has ever died from marijuana use, and so we show them research about people who have died from overdose or driving under the influence,” he says.

  The goal is to persuade kids to either abstain from use or delay use until their mid-20s after their brains have fully developed, Tiger says.

  “Even if a kid can function at a basic level while high, it doesn’t mean that they are going to have a quest for learning or care about the things they should care about,” Jackson says.

  “They say marijuana is a gateway drug, but even for people who don’t move on to meth or heroine or other serious drugs, for so many it’s a gateway to nowhere,” he says.