In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the opioid epidemic, and the recent vaping crisis, parents are uniting in Parent Movement 2.0 via the “I’m in” pledge, an instrument designed to create an online community intent on reducing the use of marijuana, alcohol, nicotine and other drugs among kids. These drugs can hurt and kill. “Because it attacks the lungs, COVID-19 could be an especially serious threat to those who smoke or vape tobacco and/or marijuana,” warns Nora Volkow, MD, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Drugs are different from what today’s parents may have known when they were young, and how kids use drugs today is also changing.  Via an email campaign, Parent Movement 2.0 helps today’s parents become more drug and alcohol savvy — providing ways to connect with other parents to get educated around issues of teenage substance use. Parents join Parent Movement 2.0 by reading and signing the “I’m in” Pledge, the same way parents joined the first parent movement.

Parent Movement 2.0 is patterned after the original parent movement that reduced illicit drug use among high school seniors by 66 percent — from 39 percent in 1979 to 14 percent in 1992. Sue Rusche and Carla Lowe, mothers who helped lead the effort in 1979 and who now lead National Families in Action (NFIA) and Americans Against Legalizing Marijuana (AALM), are helping launch the new movement.

Drug use up again

Since 1992, adolescent drug use has moved back up. Today, nearly one-fourth (22 percent) of 12th graders use marijuana, an 86 percent increase in marijuana use alone. Adolescent cigarette use is virtually nil, but vaping nicotine has skyrocketed, and alcohol continues to be the national drug of choice among 12^th graders, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) study, Monitoring the Future.

“Parents need to get up to date. Rivaled only by their children’s peers, parents have the greatest influence over a child’s decision to use any drug,” says Debbie Berndt, director of the new movement. “Not every parent will be successful in helping their kids choose not to use, but every parent certainly is the first line of defense, and they become the first responders if their child begins to use.”

Take the “I’m in” Pledge

Surgeon General VADM Jerome Adams warned in August that no amount of marijuana is safe during adolescence or during pregnancy. He added that recent increases in both marijuana potency and in access to the drug, along with misperceptions about the safety of marijuana, endanger children and youth, the country’s most precious resources.

“We’re excited that through Parent Movement 2.0 and the “I’m in” Pledge, parents now have a process to get quickly educated, to understand the drugs their kids face every day, and to learn how to take action to protect them,” says Carla Lowe, President of AALM.

Addiction industries target youth

The well-funded marijuana, alcohol, and nicotine industries are driving the narrative in our country through lobbyists, PR firms, and an increasing number of current and past legislators on payroll. Parents have a difficult time sorting through what might be true or not. Kids, who are the target audience for many industry marketing dollars, become unwitting industry mouthpieces, especially with their parents. Parents frequently hear from their kids, “vaping is safe; it’s no big deal mom” and “marijuana is safer for me than alcohol.” On no scale of measurement are these claims true.

“Parents get duped by the narrative and the same incessant media beat that we all do,” says Sue Rusche, president and CEO of NFIA. “The increasingly permissive national narrative on drug use, legalization, and medical claims that have not been vetted by the FDA drive drug ‘normalization’ at the cost of our kid’s mental health and well-being. We know so much today, more than even ten years ago, about adolescent neuroscience, as well as how drugs can change the function and structure of the brain, especially kids’ brains.”

Few parents today are aware of this new knowledge, which compounds this normalizing affect.

“It’s time for parents to re-engage,” says Ms. Berndt. “We invite them ‘all in’ to Parent Movement 2.0.”

Parents can read and sign the “I’m in” Pledge to become part of the new Parent Movement here.

Published on Parents Movement 2.0.  Most parents of teens today don’t realize there was a massive parent movement (1979-1992) that influenced Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign of their youth. Prior to the slogan in the early 1980s, those parents were taking very practical steps to change the local environments in which their kids grew up — reducing access and visibility of pot and drug paraphernalia and offering other parents at the time a way to think about teen drug and alcohol use and team up against it.

In 1976 in Atlanta, Keith Schuchard and her husband gave a backyard birthday party for their oldest daughter turning 13. At the party, the children were found to be using marijuana, PCP, and high-test alcohol. Shocked, the Schuchards called the parents of the party invitees to a parent meeting in their home the next day, creating the nation’s first Parent Peer Group. Ms. Schuchard founded the Parents’ Resource Institute for Drug Education (PRIDE) at Georgia State University.

Parent Peer Groups addressed the transitions children make from neighborhood elementary schools, where most families know each other, to middle schools and later high schools, where neighborhood support can be gone altogether. Parents reached out to the parents of their children’s new best friends at each transition. Together, they explored common values and established family expectations they could all agree on to protect the four or five children in this new friendship group. These parents supported each other as they jointly steered their children through the pitfalls and temptations of adolescence and endeavored to raise healthy kids who avoided the use of any addictive drugs,  Also, there were fewer addiction treatment options in the 1980s. Parents with a child actively addicted to marijuana or other drugs could find understanding and not scorn among their parent peer group.

A coast-to-coast movement

In 1977, in Atlanta, in the same community where the birthday party took place the year before, Sue Rusche noticed several shops introducing lines of drug paraphernalia, which served as the marketing arm of the drug culture, targeting adolescents and young adults. She reached out to other parents and community leaders to form National Families in Action (NFIA), the nation’s first Parent Community Group, which led the effort across the US to seek laws banning the sale of drug paraphernalia and opposing marijuana legalization. Interestingly, the first drug legalization organization, NORML, filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the laws banning paraphernalia but ultimately lost that battle when the US Supreme Court upheld parents’ right to raise children in healthy, non-exploitative environments.

At the same time on the west coast, Carla Lowe was struck by survey results published by the PTA of the high school that her children attended. The survey said the number-one parent concern was “the increasing use of marijuana among their high school students.” She was also seeing “head shops” in her neighborhood. Carla sponsored a ballot initiative to rid California of drug paraphernalia and later founded Californians Against Legalizing Marijuana (CALM, now Americans Against Legalizing Marijuana or AALM).

Parents from both coasts and other parts of the US met each other in Atlanta in 1980 at the annual Pride (Parents’ Resource Institute for Drug Education) Conference of the time, where they founded the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth (NFP) to represent parental interests in Washington DC. NFP became the national voice of a movement that was working.

Success – youth drug use plummeted

Over the next decade (1979-1992) illicit drug use among 12th graders decreased 66%

The first two directors of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) credit this Parent Movement (1.0) with reducing past-month illicit drug use among American adolescents and young adults by nearly two-thirds between 1979 and 1992. The graph above shows this reduction among high school seniors whose daily marijuana use fell from one in 11 to one in 50 (Monitoring the Future).

The parent groups started to dissolve for a variety of reasons.  Things like… although a completely non-partisan or certainly bi-partisan issue — marijuana affects the brain health of both liberal and conservative teens equally — the parent groups became aware that they were largely tied to the GOP.  As US politics started to wane back to the left in the early 1990s, support and understanding of the issues around marijuana drifted.  Also, one “ages out” of being a parent of teens.  After high school graduation, parent focus tends to shift to many other things.  Some succession planning efforts were attempted in the late 1990s/early 2000s.  They were even quite successful, but a lack of funding made it difficult to keep them in place for long.

What happened in the mid-1990s

At the same time and unfortunately, in the mid-1990s, a handful of billionaires began pouring money into NORML and other drug legalization organizations. All involved began to believe that positioning marijuana as “medicine” might be an important step on the path towards full recreational legalization. It seems they were right. They strategically chose states with ballot initiatives, wrote laws legalizing marijuana for medical use, bought signatures to place these initiatives on the ballot, and misled voters about the true intent of these laws. The first state law allowing medical marijuana was passed by California voters in 1996. Illicit drug use, especially marijuana use, began to rise again.

California’s medical marijuana law launched a commercial marijuana industry that continued to pour money into lobbying other state legislators and state elections — quite successfully. As of early 2019, 31 states have laws allowing marijuana for medical use. Then in 2010, this cadre of pro-pot organizations and the billionaires that back them attempted to legalize marijuana for recreational use in California.

They would not be successful in California until 2016, but they did convince Colorado and Washington State voters to legalize recreational marijuana in 2012, then Oregon, Alaska, and Washington DC in 2014, California, Maine, Nevada, and Massachusetts in 2016, and Michigan and Vermont in 2018. These nine states have the highest rates of marijuana use in the nation — and in history. In some, nearly 40 percent of 18 to 25 year-olds have used the drug in the past month, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Until 2019, this had all been done through direct contact with voters in states with initiative processes that can be easily manipulated by special interests. The Marijuana Industry was successful in finally convincing a legislature to inflict the harms of recreational pot on its citizenry in Illinois in 2019.

Please pay attention to announcements from Parents Movement 2.0.

Hundreds of businesses in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York closed due to the coronavirus outbreak.  However, “medical” marijuana stores remain open as officials revise public health orders to include cannabis as an essential medicine.

Who is Vulnerable to Coronavirus (COVID-19)?

Is keeping marijuana stores open a good policy? The science shows that it is not.

The Centers for Disease Control states that the people at high risk of getting very sick or dying from COVID-19 include:

1. Older adults

2. People who have serious chronic medical conditions like:

Heart disease

Diabetes

Lung disease

Asthma — People with asthma may be at higher risk of getting very sick. COVID-19 can affect your respiratory tract (nose, throat, lungs), cause an asthma attack, and possibly lead to pneumonia and acute respiratory disease.

What does the science say about marijuana use and impaired immune function or lung and respiratory problems?

A comprehensive study of the dangers of marijuana smoke by the Hazard Assessment Branch of the California Environmental Protection Agency concluded in part that: Marijuana smoke is genotoxic, immunosuppressive, and can alter endocrine function. Studies of 9-THC and other cannabinoids provide evidence for alterations of multiple cell signaling pathways, in endocrine function, and suppression of the innate and adaptive immune response. Prolonged exposures to marijuana smoke in animals and humans cause proliferative and inflammatory lesions in the lung.

Immune function impairment

One of the most serious findings in marijuana research was the effect of marijuana on various immune functions. Cellular immunity is impaired, pulmonary immunity is impaired, and impaired ability to fight infection is now documented in humans. This impairment leaves the patient unable to fight certain infections and fatal diseases. The potential for these complications exists in all forms of administration of marijuana. Habitual smoking of marijuana has a number of effects on the respiratory and immune systems, including alterations in lung function, increased prevalence of acute and chronic bronchitis and airway injury.

A study published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine states: “We conclude that smoking marijuana, regardless of tetrahydrocannabinol content, results in a substantially greater respiratory burden of carbon monoxide and tar than smoking a similar quantity of tobacco.”

Guy Cabral, author of the book, Marihuana and Medicine, pp. 317-325 concludes in the chapter on marihuana and the immune system:  “Marihuana has been shown to decrease host resistance to bacterial, protozoan, and viral infections in experimental animal models and in vitro systems. Recent immuno epidemiological studies suggest that marihuana may also influence the outcome of viral infections in humans. The main substance in marihuana that exerts these immuno depressive effects is its major psychoactive constituent Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).”

Marijuana Contamination Poses Serious Risks to Health

Contaminants of marijuana smoke include bacteria, molds and fungi. Those at particular risk for the development of infection due to inhaling marijuana smoke are people with impaired immunity. For example, Aspergillus is a group of molds that can cause allergy-type illnesses to life-threatening generalized infections. Aspergillus is found in marijuana and can cause illness in marijuana users. This is thought to be due to the direct inhalation of fungal spores that are present on the surface of the plant. The heating of cannabis buds may not be sufficient for sterilization and so users (particularly those with compromised immune systems) are potentially exposed to life threatening pulmonary infection.

A study done at the University of California, Davis, discovered that medical marijuana from 20 dispensaries contained multiple fungal and bacterial contaminants that can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections among marijuana users. Smoking, vaping or inhaling aerosolized marijuana is a serious health risk, especially for people with chronic conditions or other conditions requiring immunosuppressing therapies. The study revealed a multitude of microorganisms, many of which are known causes of serious lung infections, including Cryptococcus, Mucor, and Aspergillus fungi.

The authors of the study concluded:  “Our results suggest that handling marijuana in any form might expose the patient to a number of both bacterial and fungal pathogens well known to cause serious infections in the immunocompromised population. Smoking or vaporization provides a direct portal of entry into the terminal bronchioles and alveoli. Moreover, the recovery of these organisms in a symptomatic patient would be unlikely to initiate a search for unusual exposures. Aspergillus and other molds may therefore be attributed to breakthrough infection, and recovery of Gram-negative bacilli would be attributed to healthcare-associated pneumonia and/or a failure of prophylaxis.”

Vaping

Use of vaping devices such as those used for vaping marijuana cause a serious, potentially fatal lung disease called Vaping Associated Lung Injury (EVALI).  Most of the sick EVALI patients used THC extract products in their vaping devices.  THC is the addictive psychoactive mind-altering compound of marijuana that produces the “high.” Having vaping lung injury will hurt your chances of survival if you get CONVID-19.

From: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/severe-lung-disease.html; https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/balanced/202001/vaping-and-evali (Posted Jan 31, 2020); https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/products-ingredients-components/vaporizers-e-cigarettes-and-other-electronic-nicotine-delivery-systems-ends

This may be especially true with young people who vape marijuana.

Can marijuana use open your body up to a virus?

A study from Harvard Medical School showed that marijuana use opens the door for the virus that causes Kaposi’s Sarcoma. This is a serious life-threatening problem for people with HIV infection. The major active component of marijuana could aid the Kaposi’s sarcoma virus in infecting cells and multiplying, according researchers. They report that low doses of THC, equivalent to that in the bloodstream of an average marijuana smoker, could be enough to facilitate infection of skin cells and could even foster malignancy. “These findings raise some serious questions about using marijuana, in any form, if you have a weakened immune system,” said lead study author Jerome E. Groopman, M.D., professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “

Damage to Our Emergency Health Care System

In addition to the damage to marijuana users that results from marijuana use, marijuana user causes problems for our health care system, especially the emergency medicine system. We do not need more overloading of our health care system.

Emergency rooms in states that have legalized marijuana have to deal with Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome. CHS is a condition with recurrent bouts of severe nausea, vomiting, and dehydration. It can lead users to make frequent trips to the emergency room, but can be resolved when a person stops using marijuana. CHS which can result in kidney failure.

Marijuana users flood the Emergency medicine system when users become paranoid and psychotic.

Marijuana related emergency room visits by Colorado teens is substantially on the rise. They see more kids with psychotic symptoms and other mental health problems and chronic vomiting due to marijuana use.

Marijuana Exposures Increase

The rate of marijuana exposures among children under the age of six increased by 610% in the “medical” marijuana states according to a study published in Clinical Pediatrics. The data comes from the National Poison Data System. 75% percent of the children ingested edible marijuana products such as marijuana-infused candy. Clinical effects include drowsiness or lethargy, ataxia [failure of muscle coordination], agitation or irritability, confusion and coma, respiratory depression, and single or multiple seizures.

In Colorado one in six infants and toddlers hospitalized for lung inflammation are testing positive for marijuana exposure. This has been a 100% increase since legalization. Non-white kids are more likely to be exposed than white kids.

Conclusion

In these times of peril from infection by the COVID-19 virus, it’s  unwise to use marijuana.  Anyone at risk of getting COVID-19 should not use it as a medicine. Marijuana use hurts the users and contributes to overloading our health care system.

See also: www.civel.org, submissions to the FDA,” The Failures of the States to Regulate Marijuana, Studies Show That Marijuana Products Have High Levels of Contaminants Including Pesticides, Fungus and Heavy Metals and Solvents”

From our website, there’s much more medical documentation on the dangers of marijuana.

For more information, go to the website, www.aalm.info  

Contact  Americans Against Legalizing Marijuana

For More go \’Weed sick? Time to Get Clean\’