On Monday evening, leaders in the Upper Valley’s substance abuse prevention community held a forum at Hartford High School that featured the film The Other Side of Cannabis — Negative Effects of Marijuana on Our Youth.
The independent film was named the best feature documentary at the 2015 Sunset Film Festival in Los Angeles, so apparently the critics liked it.
But judging from what I saw Monday, I’m not convinced teens will give it a thumbs up. Every time I turned around in my seat, the half dozen or so Hartford High students sitting in the auditorium’s back row were either staring up at the ceiling or down at their smartphones.
Who can blame them?
We’re 40-something years into the war on drugs, and the so-called experts are still under the illusion that the way to educate teens and parents about the dangers of marijuana is to scare them straight.
“Today’s marijuana is not the same drug it used to be,” the narrator warned at the film’s outset. The current crop is much more potent than the weed of your parents’ generation is a much-heard argument against legalization, which Vermont is now considering.
The 60-minute documentary also relies on first-person accounts to frighten the bejeezus out of any kid who thinks about using marijuana. “Ever since I took my first puff, I basically became addicted,” said a reformed pot smoker.
Besides scare tactics, the film isn’t above trying to make teens feel guilty about what they’re putting mom and dad through. Staring into the camera, 18-year-old Maggie said her parents had to constantly worry: “Is she going to come home tonight? Is she going to get arrested tonight? Is she going to be alive tomorrow?”
All because she smoked marijuana.
I’m not making light of substance abuse. It’s one of this country’s most pressing social ills. And the two organizations — Second Growth and the Hartford Community Coalition — that put together Monday’s forum do important work in the Upper Valley.
But I’m not sure a film that has Harvard Medical School professors preaching about the potential health ramifications of using marijuana is the way to get kids’ attention. Most people who experiment with marijuana don’t become addicted or suffer mental breakdowns. And for the vast majority of recreational users, pot isn’t a gateway drug.
Otherwise Vermont’s heroin problem would be even worse than it is. According to a 2014 state-commissioned study performed by the Rand Corporation, roughly 80,000 Vermonters had used marijuana in the last month.
The state’s 2015 Youth Behavioral Risk Survey showed that 51 percent of Windsor County high school seniors had tried marijuana at least once. Statewide marijuana use by teens hasn’t changed in 10 years, according to the survey.
It’s worth paying attention to marijuana use among young people because of the potential adverse effects on brain development.
But using kids to bolster the argument against the legalization of pot is a stretch. In an interview with Valley News staff writer Matt Hongoltz-Hetling, Matt Simon, the New England political director at the Marijuana Policy Project, pointed to statistics that indicated teen consumption of marijuana has remained flat over the years, while use of tobacco and alcohol, which are legal and regulated, has dropped.
“If we want to regain our credibility, I think we need a realistic, evidence-based discussion on marijuana,” Simon said. “It’s not harmless, but it’s less harmful than alcohol and tobacco.”
Simon has been lobbying for a bill currently being debated at the Statehouse in Montpelier that would make Vermont the fifth state to legalize recreational marijuana. As a regulated and legal drug, marijuana might even become less readily available to kids than it is now.
At the start of Monday’s forum, Barbara Farnsworth, executive director of Second Growth, told the crowd of about 70 people that “we’re not here to debate legalization.”
Farnsworth told me the airing of the film was meant to be a “conversation starter.” The tuned-out teens sitting in the back row had already watched the film, so she wasn’t surprised they seemed less than engaged. The main reason for them being there was to participate in small discussion groups that gathered after the showing.
Although I could have done without watching a remake of Reefer Madness, the forum served a purpose. Ashley Hutton, a counselor at Second Growth, a Hartford nonprofit that provides substance abuse treatment and prevention education services, brought up the problem of smoking and driving.
The 2015 Youth Risk Survey indicated that 8 percent of high school students in Windsor County had been in a car during the last 30 days where the youth doing the driving had been drinking alcohol. But when the same question was asked about getting in a car with someone who had been smoking pot, the response rate jumped to 16 percent.
“It’s important (for teens) to understand how dangerous it is to get into a car with someone who has been smoking,” Farnsworth said.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s scary, but I wouldn’t make a movie about it.