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Pot Hole
By Renae Brumbaugh
It all started on a summer day in Yonkers, New York, when Alby was 13.
His parents were drug addicts and couldn’t handle parenting, so Alby got bounced from a foster home to his grandmother’s house to a group home. He was standing on a street corner and felt like he had a grudge against the world. So when his friend told him he should smoke a blunt (a hollowed out cigar filled with marijuana or a mix of cocaine and marijuana), Alby didn’t have the strength he needed to say no.
Alby tried marijuana hoping that it would make him feel better. It did—for a little while. “It had me in another state of mind,” he told Scholastic, who interviewed him. “I was relaxed and all my problems seemed like they were disappearing.” But Alby’s problems weren’t going anywhere. They were getting worse, and now he had another problem to add to them: he was addicted to marijuana.
For five years Alby kept smoking marijuana a couple times a day, every day. He dropped out of school and started dealing drugs to pay for his habit. This landed him in jail where he says he feared for his life. “I saw people get stabbed,” he says.
The marijuana that so seriously messed up Alby’s life is a dried mixture of shredded leaves and flowers of the hemp plant. It is gray or green in color. Most commonly smoked as a cigarette, or “joint,” it can also be cooked into foods or brewed into teas (this is another reason not to accept food or drink from people you don’t know).
There are more than 200 slang words for marijuana, including pot, Mary Jane, chronic, weed, and gangster. The drug that is grown and sold today has been altered, and is much more powerful than the marijuana smoked by the hippie generation of the 1960s. The effects of today’s marijuana are more dangerous than ever before.
Below are 10 reasons to steer clear of marijuana:
1. Marijuana makes you dumb. Marijuana has numerous short- and long-term effects on the brain. It causes learning and memory problems as well as difficulty in thinking and problem solving.
2. Marijuana makes you depressed. Studies have shown that marijuana use among teens doubles the amount of depression experienced and triples the amount of suicidal thoughts.
3. Marijuana makes you clumsy. Use of this drug causes distorted perception and loss of coordination.
4. Marijuana makes you cowardly. People who have used marijuana report increased heart rates, greater anxiety, and more panic attacks than people who have not used this drug.
5. Marijuana makes you sick. Marijuana users often develop respiratory problems, a daily cough with mucus (yuck!), frequent chest colds, and even chronic bronchitis.
6. Marijuana makes you crazy. A 2005 study showed that four out of five patients diagnosed with schizophrenia used marijuana regularly during their teen years. (Schizophrenia is any of several psychotic disorders characterized by distortions of reality, disturbances of thought and language, and withdrawal from social contact.)
7. Marijuana deforms your brain. Two studies have shown that marijuana use causes arteries in the brain to shrink.
8. Marijuana makes you a bad parent. Babies born to mothers who use marijuana weigh less and are more sickly than babies born to drug-free mothers. Marijuana in an infant’s system can also hurt motor development. Babies whose parents use marijuana show more anger and tend to have serious emotional problems.
9. Marijuana can make you a slave. Marijuana is extremely addictive. In 2003, 65 percent of teenagers who were treated for chemical dependency claimed marijuana as their main drug—even more than were treated for alcohol dependency! Marijuana is also known as a gateway drug; people who use it are more
likely to become dependent on other drugs than people who do not use it.
10. Marijuana makes you a loser. College students who use mariijuana often flunk out or drop out, and adults who use it have trouble holding a steady job.
And Alby? He was able to go to a drug rehabilitation center and was finally able to start fixing the problems in his life. But even though he doesn’t smoke marijuana anymore, he suffers from its effects. “Some-times I want to say things, and I can’t get them out. I can’t find the words,” Alby says. “I never had that problem before I started smoking.”
Alby is looking forward to the rest of his life and hopes to become a mechanic. He’s planning to avoid any more pot holes in the road of his life.
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