As weed gets more potent, teens are getting sick

Is this in the US? What state? I've only seen menus in NJ, IL, and most edibles are like 5-10mg per piece and seem to top out at 25mg per piece, but those tend to be big pieces that look like they are meant to be broken apart (like a Hershey bar).

I think setting national standards around this would be just one benefit of legalizing recreational use at the federal level.

There's quite a lot of subtle, and not so subtle slant in this article. If you didn't know the background and the other side of the story, you 'd walk away with a very warped impression of the scale and scope of this issue.

> Christina Caron is a reporter for the Well section at The New York Times, covering mental health and the intersection of culture and health care.

Weird - because I've gone back over years of her articles and she doesn't talk about the biggest issues affecting mental health. It's all fluff. Yet she found the time to do three veiled hit-pieces on cannabis so far this year.

If you ever wondered why the impressionable don't talk about systemic racism, violence, propaganda, exploitation and poverty as being major mental health issues, instead blaming cannabis (a great boon to mental health, overall!), or blaming themselves, it's because writers like this are given such a major platform.

I live in the Netherlands where there is a "coffeeshop" culture, with some of these coffeeshops having a connaisseur-like focus - as in, they sometimes even offer extremely exotic strains that you've never heard about and aren't even on Leafly etc yet, sourced from god knows where 10000 miles away, and then carefully and passionately grown and cured - and I can 100% guarantee you that people are not necessarily getting sick from more potent strains or over-the-top breeding as a direct correlation to potency. With good potent strains, cleanly grown, you simply naturally smoke less while still enjoying the strains unique effect and flavour profiles.

Are there people who get sick from being stupid and smoking half a dozen pure blunts in a row? For sure. I once almost hit two totally greened out Asian tourists who were vomiting onto the bicycle path in Amsterdam, and I've seen people just blacking out for a few seconds in the coffeeshops after smoking one blunt after another for hours on end. Teens in their endless, hormone-guided stupidity are probably getting sick from time to time too, and the higher potency very likely does not help, neither does having zero tolerance and not being advised about the strength at hand.

However, I definitely beg to differ, and to not conclude that potency equals sickness. Stupidity or naivety does, and potency is definitely not a "public health risk". You probably wouldn't call Scotch a public health risk either simply for it being stronger than beer. The user determines the risk, education and controlled dispensing help mitigate it and even the most insane ultra-potent strain will not kill you, only deliver you a 1-2 hour lesson in personal responsibility.

I don't smoke much any more, but I still like to visit every new coffeeshop I see and haven't been at before, so I have probably seen and smoked over a hundred different strains by now. They all have more or less different effects, flavours, potential medical applications, benefits and disadvantages, but exactly nil of them have/had a "making sick" property by default. In fact, with most of them, you only have to inhale one or two puffs to immediately notice how and how strongly they will affect you, and the only way to ever get sick is by ignoring common sense and forcing it.

IF there is weed you can actually get dangerously sick from these days, it is unregulated and adulterated street weed, which is absolutely flooding Europe these days and people are consistently dying left and right from smoking it, but even that has nothing to do with the weed itself.

I get a strong effect from 5mg already. I can’t imagine what 150mg would do to me

This line has been reliably trotted out every few years since the 1990s at least:

But experts say today’s high-THC cannabis products — vastly different than the joints smoked decades ago — are poisoning some heavy users, including teenagers.

The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly, just as with alcohol - drinking one liter of beer, everyone knows, is not the same as drinking one liter of vodka. Concentrated hash products were also widely available in past eras. Imagine a headline like "Concentrated alcohol products cause vomiting in teenagers! It's not your parent's booze!"

Regardless, THC negatively impairs learning, as does alcohol, particular when it comes to memory and retention. People who choose to use such substances recreationally should really moderate their intake and not engage in daily use.

This doesn't apply to people who use cannabis for legitimate medical uses, such as an adjunct to opiates to manage serious chronic pain without crossing the addictive threshold with opiates (i.e. avoiding opiate tolerance, which leads to opiate addiction).