[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program, Laura Stack. Laura is an award-winning keynote speaker, best-selling author, and noted authority on personal productivity. A past president of the National Speakers Association and Hall of Fame speaker, Laura's keynote speeches and seminars have helped organizations increase productivity for more than 30 years. After losing her 19-year-old son to suicide in November 2019, she founded the nonprofit Johnny's Ambassadors with a mission to educate parents and teens about the effects of today's high THC marijuana on adolescent brain development, mental illness, and suicide.
[00:50] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:52] SPEAKER_01:
Laura, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:54] SPEAKER_00:
Thank you so much, Justin. Happy to be here.
[00:56] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I know this is a serious topic, but I want to start with the inspiration for your foundation. Tell us a little bit about your son.
[01:04] SPEAKER_00:
Oh, I could talk all day about my son. But Johnny was a wonderful young man. He had a 4.0 GPA. a perfect SAT score on the math section, 800 out of 800, literally was a genius in math, a scholarship to Colorado State University. He was charming, funny, smiling, full of life.
[01:25]
We're a Christian family. He loved Jesus. We volunteered at church, taught Sunday school to four-year-olds for many, many years together. He had a heart for the homeless. He played the piano, the guitar. He had a brown belt in karate, played soccer and ran cross country.
[01:40]
I mean, he was just a great kid and a wonderful person. And, you know, you talk about protective factors in life. I think everything, you know, he was busy. He was smart. He was engaged. He had a lot of friends.
[01:54]
We went on a lot of trips together as a family. I have a home based business for 30 years, so both parents were always home. So unfortunately, we live in Colorado where he got involved with marijuana at a very young age at 14, sadly, because we are the first state to recreationalize marijuana and it's everywhere in our schools here.
[02:17] SPEAKER_01:
Laura, I'm glad you mentioned legalization because I think that's a big indicator of our society's much more relaxed attitudes toward marijuana over the past decades. And I think we kind of recall earlier reactions to the 60s and 70s, I think there has been this view that really marijuana is not a big deal, that it's natural, that there are health reasons to legalize marijuana, and that really the risks are overblown. What's true and what's false in that perception that's entered our society over the past few decades?
[02:55] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, that's a great point. You know, there's a running kind of false narrative out there that the marijuana industry really promotes because addiction is an adolescent onset disease. So they need to addict our children to these very potent marijuana products that are out there today, which a lot of people don't understand. And maybe we can talk more about that. But indeed, research does show that youth perceive the risks of using marijuana much lower. than they do of alcohol and vaping, smoking.
[03:29]
But the challenge with that is that marijuana, being fat-soluble, stays in your body for three weeks. Alcohol is bad for your liver, and smoking is bad for your lungs. You know, if they get drunk, obviously that's not good. We don't want them to use alcohol either. We don't want them to use any substances. They have a really bad hangover and they're fine in 24 hours.
[03:53]
Marijuana is insidious in that you use it. It doesn't go away. It stays with you in your fat for three weeks and slowly just leaches out into your system. And so even when high schoolers say, oh gosh, you know, I'm only a weekend user. I only use once a week. Well, the marijuana has never left their bodies.
[04:14]
And so there are bigger ramifications, especially in the way of adolescent brain development, that the smoking and the vaping does not affect because there are receptors in the brain where the THC binds and prevents the body's natural endocannabinoid called anandamide from getting into the brain. And so it causes brain damage, structural damage in that ways that alcohol and vaping do not. In addition, you can't get alcohol and vapes now until you're 21. But in Colorado, it's a rite of passage with our high school seniors when they turn 18. All they have to do is go to our pot shop docks that we have here. You pay a few hundred dollars.
[05:02]
You say you have a migraine and you get your shiny new medical marijuana card and you can go to any dispensary at the age of 18 and legally buy shatter and wax and dabs. And people don't really know what those are. We can talk more about them. They're highly potent. And then what they do is they take them back to the high schools. And fortunately, the middle schools, one in 10 of our middle schoolers is using And they sell it.
[05:30]
So the students are getting it from other students, getting it from older siblings who have med cards. That's where Johnny first got his first marijuana was a boy down the street whose brother had a med card and it was at a party and they sell it to each other. They get it from their parents and we kind of call that the gray market here. And sadly, it's legal and it's at 18. And Johnny had no physical conditions, no chronic debilitating conditions that you're supposed to have. He doesn't have seizures.
[05:57]
He didn't have autism or he didn't have any anything that necessitated the marijuana. But yet he was able to get a hold of a med card when he turned 18. So it's a big problem here in Colorado and a high schooler can get marijuana in five minutes.
[06:12] SPEAKER_01:
So the availability is very different, but it sounds like also part of the issue is the potency is very different. I think we're used to thinking of marijuana as something that's natural, that's safe, and certainly it's a different risk in the sense that we don't have people overdosing on marijuana, right? There are harder drugs that You know, we worry about overdose, heart attacks, things like that that are more acute. Take us in some of the dangers of the higher potency marijuana that's available now, because I think it's just a different type of danger that we're not really accustomed to thinking about.
[06:43] SPEAKER_00:
Well, and I'm glad you did mention overdosing because it actually is possible to overdose on marijuana just because there are no CB1 receptors in the brainstem and marijuana cannot prevent you from breathing. You won't die from using too much marijuana, but you can indeed overdose. And in fact, every day we have teenagers in the emergency room who have overdosed on the very potent marijuana. It causes acute psychotic episodes. It causes incidents of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, CHS, which is uncontrollable nonstop vomiting. They can't stop vomiting.
[07:19]
We see poisonings every day where a teen doesn't understand how much THC is in an edible substance. and eats too much, too high. We see instances of where they just are frozen and they believe they're frozen and they can't move. I mean, it can cause acute paranoia, thoughts of delusion. Johnny thought the mob was after him after suddenly he was using dabs and thought the mob was after him. So indeed you can overdose on today's very potent marijuana.
[07:55]
We have a scientific advisory board here at Johnny's Ambassadors. I'm not a clinician. And we just had a big fundraising walk on Sunday. And one of our doctors, Dr. Karen Randall, who's an emergency room physician in Pueblo, came to speak. And she described a typical day in the ER with all of the teens coming in in acute psychosis.
[08:17]
So because there are CB1 receptors in the amygdala, which is what normally regulates emotion, panic, fear, anxiety, right? All of a sudden you have these extremely high doses of THC in the brain and it misfires. And the brain can't get the anandamide and 2-AG there. And so it over-regulates that and causes delusional thinking. And if they continue to do it, continue to use and have repeated psychotic episodes, which is what happened to Johnny, even then now when the marijuana is removed, the delusional thinking does not go away. And now they have to take antipsychotics just to control that thinking.
[09:01]
And sadly, sometimes it can convert to full-blown schizophrenia, can be triggered where in fact they would not have had schizophrenia genetically had they not used marijuana. So we're seeing because of these potency issues, so much more cannabis use disorder, a much elevated risk of cannabis use disorder with higher potency. So people may not understand what they're doing with the plant. Most of the kids here in Colorado, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, our Healthy Kid Colorado survey that comes out every two years, Smoking marijuana is on a huge decline, right? And isn't that good news? Everybody goes, yay, that's good news.
[09:41]
Well, you have to look at the opposite, which is the dabbing, which is way up 156%, the vaping, which is way up, the use of edibles, which is way up. So this is really concerning because the lower potency uses of marijuana are on the downturn. The higher potency uses are very, very popular. So what they do is they take the plant and they run a solvent through it, usually butane, propane, ethanol, different solvents. And it breaks off the trichomes of the plant, which is what contains the THC in the bud. And they toss the plant.
[10:17]
OK, so there's no plant. And this is what people have to kind of wrap their brains around. The new marijuana doesn't have any of the natural matter. It just has the chemical. In other words, they strip the THC out of the plant. So you have this solution that contains now the solvent and the THC.
[10:39]
And then they further attempt to filter it, extract all the solvent out of it. And in fact, the ingredients in a bag of shatter still lists butane. They cannot get it all out.
[10:51] SPEAKER_01:
This is essentially a petroleum product at this point rather than a plant, right?
[10:55] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, like a hash oil, but they make it into different things and they name them by how it looks. So batter looks like cake batter. Crumble looks like a cookie. Shatter looks like glass. And they're all collectively kind of called dabs. It's inhaling the vapors of a concentrated marijuana.
[11:15]
So just like a distillate, if you distill vodka, right, you can take a, say an 80% butane hash oil and distill it. to a 95% of vape cart, for example, that would go into a vaporizer. And people think they're using a Juul, but they're not. They're vaping THC. They don't smell. They're very easy to hide.
[11:36]
Even we have THCA crystalline, which is 99% THC. So now it's very similar to taking the cocoa plant, making cocaine, and then turning it into crack, right? So highly, highly potent. And So when you have a dose-dependent relationship, we see higher incidences of addiction, higher incidences of cannabis use disorder, higher incidences of what's called cannabis withdrawal syndrome, CWS, which is defined in the DSM-5, because it takes so many weeks for the marijuana to leave their brains and their blood. they never really stop using. You know, we tell them, oh, you think you don't need it every day, but you're using it every weekend?
[12:19]
Oh, try not to use it for a month. Cannabis withdrawal syndrome is extremely uncomfortable. And that's why many teens can't stop because they have to use then more just to make themselves feel normal, right? Which is the cycle of addiction. And then sadly, why some go on to harder drugs. The CDC just came out with their youth Behavioral Risk Survey in 19, and it was analyzed in 20, showing that lifetime marijuana use is now the number one predictor of whether a high school senior will have abused opioids in the past 30 days.
[12:55]
Not alcohol has turned into the original gateway drug.
[13:00] SPEAKER_01:
Right. And which I think people had started to think that that was kind of a myth, right? The idea that gateway drugs aren't really a thing. Now, let's talk a little bit, if we could, about the other side of the mental health argument, because I'm hearing a lot about anxiety. And you mentioned migraines earlier, this angle that says that marijuana is a good thing therapeutically. What's the picture like for young people?
[13:25]
Because we're hearing a lot of people, a lot of kids are stressed out. A lot of kids are saying, hey, I need this for my anxiety. But you're saying this is linked to quite a few mental health issues.
[13:34] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. Marijuana is actually counter indicated for anxiety. In Colorado, you will not be able to get a medical marijuana card for anxiety because it can increase anxiety. Now they do say, oh, you know, we need it for pain, which studies have shown indeed that it does not relieve pain in the doses that we're talking about. See, what's happened is that the botanists have cultivated the marijuana so that even the flower that was in the Woodstock days, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s was 2% a tetrahydrocannabinol, THC, right? When I was in high school in the 80s, I'm dating myself, I'm 52 now.
[14:11]
I used marijuana a couple of times. I didn't like it. I didn't use it after high school, but you would put it in a paper and roll it up and smoke it in a joint, right? So then, back then, the 2% THC, and now, you know, if you could get the really good stuff, you know, the Maui Waui, 5%, woo, you know, that was really good stuff. Today, the botanists have cultivated all the CBD out of the plant. So there is no more protective factor in the plant.
[14:36]
They have boosted the THC levels to astronomical levels that botanists didn't even think the plant could hold. So in Colorado, you can buy 30%. flour. So the flour itself is potent. It is impossible to buy flour here in Colorado that is low THC. In the Netherlands, anything over 10% is illegal.
[14:59]
It's considered a narcotic or a hard drug. And there have been no, let me repeat, no scientific studies that show that these high potency products are beneficial medically. None. All the research has been done with very low THC marijuana, which you cannot buy in a dispensary. And it has CBD in it. All the FDA approved versions, pharmaceutical grade CBD cannabidiol, for example, for seizure disorders, they have CBD in them or very low grade THC, like 2.5 milligrams.
[15:40]
Now there's 800 milligrams THC in a gram of shatter if it's 80%, for example. So We're talking apples and oranges. We're talking huge differences in any of the quote medical properties and the reasons that people used medical marijuana. So for example, I have met two parents here in Colorado. One has a child with a rare seizure disorder where hundreds of times a day their child was having seizures. And with a low level of THC drop, very not smoked, right?
[16:16]
Medical marijuana is never smoked for medicinal purposes. Then she was able to control her daughter's seizures to just a few times a day. We don't want to take that away, right? I have another parent I met whose child has severe autism. And by using some THC, that child is able to participate in the classroom. normally, where otherwise he would not have been.
[16:41]
Okay, that's not what we're talking here. We're not talking about the few hundreds of children in Colorado who are under the age of 18 who have medical marijuana cards. So that's kind of one extreme. The other end of the spectrum, are the children like Johnny who have no medical issues, who are perfectly healthy, who are lying about their maladies, claiming they have migraines, backaches, whatever it is that they can say that it isn't provable, paying money to a criminal pot shop doc who's giving them a medical marijuana card that should not because they do not have any of these debilitating medical conditions. There are 4,000 teens in Colorado who suddenly at the age of 17 years, 364 days developed a chronic condition.
[17:32]
No, they just, they want to get high, Justin. It's sad, but this is a recreational thing where they get together and they get high at parties and it's everywhere. It's at parties, you know, and the sad thing is with these high potencies in a high frequency environment, in a young child with the brain formation changing, instead of helping any of the medical problems, it exacerbates the medical problems. So Johnny, for example, had no depression. We didn't have mental illness. We don't have psychosis in our family.
[18:08]
None of these things showed up until years after he had been using And so this whole chicken egg thing that a lot of people say, oh, you know, the poor thing was self-medicating, you know, because he was depressed. No, he wasn't depressed. He wanted to get high with his friends and that it was a recreational thing. And then years later, yes, he became anxious. Yes, he became depressed. Yes, he had mental health issues.
[18:34]
And the psychosis appeared many years, four years after he started using when he admitted to me at 14. he had used it at a party. So that's one thing we really want people to understand. Marijuana can cause mental illnesses that otherwise would not have happened. And because many parents don't understand the falsehoods of some of the safe messaging that the marijuana industry is promoting, and they don't understand that the adolescent brain is forming until the age of 25, up to 28 for young men, sometimes parents unwittingly buy their children these products. thinking that they're helping them.
[19:13]
Dr. Chris Thurstone, who's the medical director at Denver Health, said very point blank in one of our webinars, there is no safe level of THC in the developing adolescent mind. Zero. It will cause harms regardless. Now, you might not get psychosis in every child and you don't. You may see a motivational syndrome.
[19:36]
You may see memory problems. You may see a reduction in IQ. You may see a lack of scholastic aptitude. You may see changes in the outcome of their life. You may see isolation. You may see withdrawing from activities that otherwise gave that child joy.
[19:53]
So you do see effects. And not every child uses marijuana. You know, that's the other side we need to look at. There are children in school who are not using, but the ones who are using are making their problems worse, making their anxiety and depression worse, not better.
[20:09] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. And I think we hear a lot of those effects and we think, well, those are kind of the typical stoner stereotypes. And certainly not all teenagers are highly motivated. But if we're talking about triggering serious mental illness that was not there, that this is not treating something, this is creating something new, a problem that was not there before. Help us think about our role as adults because, you know, parents from time immemorial have realized that sometimes when we talk about how bad something is, sometimes that actually makes kids want to do it more, right? And I know there have been studies of various, you know, prevention programs that have found actually, you know, if we do a big assembly about this, if we're not careful about it, we can actually increase the desire of young people to try the very thing that we're telling them is dangerous simply because, you know, that teenage and, you know, an adolescent kind of kind of curiosity and rebellious streak that, you know, that everybody kind of has at that age.
[21:02]
How can we avoid, you know, how can we share the dangers without making things worse, you know, without sparking that curiosity?
[21:09] SPEAKER_00:
Sure. Well, when I speak to students and, you know, I just did one for South Dakota SAD when I come into schools and talk to youth or even coalitions, I do a lot of speaking with youth and coalitions. You know, the whole Drugs are bad. You know, I never go that route. This is your brain on drugs, right? You don't want to go that route.
[21:27]
Don't do this because I said so. You know, I mean, obviously none of that works. And what does work is to teach them about neuroscience. They're actually very fascinated by the brain. I'm teaching them about their endocannabinoid systems, about natural highs, what makes their body naturally feel good. They're interested in understanding those chemicals, the brain formation.
[21:54]
I basically talk to them and respect them, right? I teach them. They want to know why shouldn't I use drugs? And so when you outline that process and you go through physiology, you show them the molecules and how they bind and what the effects are. You show them MRIs, a 14-year-old. using marijuana versus one that's not.
[22:18]
And then you show them again at 19 and you show them, look how thin the prefrontal cortices are in the child who was using marijuana and how it actually stunted their brain growth and their development. So that's a big key. We also show them the marketing that is being used to attract them. They actually are quite indignant about when they realize that they are being preyed on, they don't like that. They don't like being taken advantage of as teens when they really find out the big marijuana is controlled by several few rich white men who are preying on them and trying to just like, you know, the playbook of big tobacco. Let's get these young kids addicted.
[23:07]
We show them the statistics of suicide. Sadly, In Colorado, since legalization, our suicide rates have drastically climbed. Suicide is now the number one cause of death here for children ages 15 through 19. We talk about suicide in teens and the connection with marijuana. And our own National Institutes of Health just came out with a connection between marijuana and suicide, a seven-fold connection. increase.
[23:35]
And we show them how over 50% of all suicides, youth ages 15 to 19, teens here in Colorado, 51% had THC in their toxicology reports. And that's only 65% of the suicides. We now have a bill here in Colorado that just passed. I worked on the coalition, 13, 17. They have to do an autopsy and a tox test. on all children ages 25 and younger.
[24:02]
So now we will get a full picture and I think it's going to be even higher. Very low incidence of alcohol in suicidal teens and much higher in the THC. So I think, Justin, you have to respect them, talk to them as you would an adult rather than a, I'm in charge, you're an adult, don't do it because I said so. But also setting very clear expectations. We know how influential teachers, parents, other trusted adults are in their lives. And sometimes we have the tendency to forget that.
[24:35]
We just go, oh, they don't listen. They don't care. They don't want to hear from me. They actually do. Studies do show that if you firmly disapprove of marijuana, your student is less likely to use it. We know that if a mother uses marijuana, a child is 80% more likely to use himself or herself.
[24:55]
If a father is actively using marijuana in the home, the child is 90% more likely to use it himself or herself. So that would be a really critical thing to say, don't use it yourself, that you have to be a role model. That if it is normalized in your home, don't be surprised when your child use it. But see, your brain is formed and theirs is not. And that can trigger severe mental illness and sadly, suicidality, just like what happened with Johnny. He came over three days before he died.
[25:29]
He was 19 and he was eating dinner at our home. And he said, mom, hey, I just want you to know you were right. And I was like, what are we talking about? About what? And he said, about the marijuana. He said, you told me years ago that it would hurt my brain and it has ruined my mind and my life.
[25:46]
And I'm sorry. And I love you. And three days later, he was dead. So we have to really take this topic very seriously. I am quite concerned. that we are going to lose many generations of our youth to psychosis and sadly suicide.
[26:04]
And if it takes as long as it took for big tobacco, 60 years, it's going to be just devastating, especially when legal marijuana happens nationwide, which I think it will eventually happen. Our work at Johnny's Ambassadors to educate parents, teens about the dangers of this high potency marijuana on adolescent brain formation and mental illness and suicide, it's going to become even more critical. So I wrote a book about it, The Dangerous Truth About Today's Marijuana, Johnny Stack's Life and Death Story, and would encourage any teacher, administrator, counselor, to read this book and really understand. We have a new online marijuana training that we are bringing to schools for health classes so that we can teach the actual science behind cannabis use, if that's something anyone's interested in.
[26:58] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, and I'm glad you said teach and educate and you focused on the neuroscience because I think back to the, you know, this is your brain on drugs, you know, frying pan with an egg in it commercials. And what's missing from those compared to what you're saying is, you know, we're scaring kids with those commercials, which can backfire, but we're not educating. We're not saying this is how your brain is affected. This is what is happening. we're just kind of giving a scary metaphor. And it sounds like students need the much more detailed scientific information and they actually like it.
[27:29]
They listen. They're curious about that. So if school leaders want to get in touch with you, learn more about Johnny's Ambassadors, learn more about the online programs that you're developing or the in-person, you know, assemblies and things like that, what can they do to get in touch with you?
[27:44] SPEAKER_00:
Sure. They can just go to our website, johnniesambassadors.org, or just send me an email directly, Laura, L-A-U-R-A, at johnniesambassadors.org. I would be happy to help any way that I can.
[27:57] SPEAKER_01:
Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Justin.
[28:00] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
