Bruce Anderson, the publisher of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, has been a careful observer of the local schools. His drug of choice is alcohol, and he has that automatic scorn for marijuana that so many drinkers evince. But I don’t think that scorn is heavy enough to distort his perception of reality, and this is the conclusion he published recently:
“MARIJUANA IS BAD FOR YOUNG PEOPLE, and by young I mean people between the ages of ten and twenty… I don’t know a single kid in the Anderson Valley who started heavily smoking pot as a high school kid who didn’t run all the way off the rails as an adult. Not one.”
Maybe all those kids would have run off the rails as adults if they hadn’t been heavy pot smokers. Maybe their heavy marijuana use was caused by —not the cause of— underlying problems. But to me, Anderson’s generalization is more credible than all the brain scans cited by all the neuropsychiatrists at the elite medical centers.—FG
