Using marijuana increases the risk of developing mental disorders by 40 percent, adolescents who smoke pot al least once a month over a yearlong period are three times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than those who don’t use the drug, teens who use marijuana to minimize the symptoms of depression are at high risk of becoming addicted to pot and the chances that they develop an advanced form of depression and anxiety, which may lead to suicide, increase, a new White House Office of National Drug Control Policy report shows. The report, called Teen Marijuana Use Worsens Depression: An Analysis of Recent Data Shows “Self-Medicating” Could Actually Make Things Worse, is based on data obtained after analyzing about a dozen studies looking at marijuana use, including research by the by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. “Marijuana is a more consequential substance of abuse than our culture has treated it in the last 20 years,” said John Walters, director of the office, according to the Associated Press. “This is not just youthful experimentation that they'll get over as we used to think in the past.” “I've seen many, many kids' lives negatively impacted and taken off track because of marijuana,” said Elizabeth Stanley-Salazar, director of adolescent services for Phoenix House treatment centers in California, according to the same source. “It's somewhat Russian roulette. There are so many factors, emotional, psychological, biological. You can't predict the experimentation and how it will impact a kid.” According to the report, above 2.3 million children currently use marijuana at least once a month.
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