Cannabis Can Distort Teen Psychological Development

Adolescents must be considered a separate subpopulation in any discussion of the effects of cannabis. While most public debate about the increased risks of cannabis use for adolescents focuses on their still-developing brains, it is equally important to understand its impact on their psychological development. The following, excerpted from my book Marijuana on My Mind, explains how cannabis is uniquely capable of distorting adolescent psychological maturation.

Adolescence begins with puberty when the frontal lobes of our brain undergo rapid development. This neuromaturation produces new vistas of abstract thinking. Combined with new sexual surges produced by puberty’s hormonal changes, these two unexpected changes thrust children into adolescence. Several psychological tasks need to be completed to integrate these foundation-shaking changes and prepare for adulthood.

When cannabis is added to the mix, completing these psychological tasks can be subverted. Cannabis not only impairs new cognitive functions, but it also offers an illusion of maturity that requires little psychological growth.

I do not envy American youth today, growing up in fear of climate change, embroiled in racial and gender identity issues, in a time of gross economic disparity and insecurity, buffeted by a global pandemic of uncertain duration with its educational disruption, and with contradictory role models offered by political leaders, Obama/Biden and Trump.

During this disorienting national and global uncertainty, waves of children continue to be thrust into adolescence, their bodies resculpted and minds shaken and turbocharged by puberty. These changes push them into new challenges, willingly or not. The basic psychological developmental tasks of adolescence remain what they have always been despite the new circumstances in which these tasks must be undertaken. As always, satisfactory completion of these interlocking developmental tasks is necessary to launch successfully into adulthood.

During adolescence, each person must meet developmental challenges in the following four broad psychological areas:

• Autonomy and separation

• Identity and values

• Peer group attachment

• Transcendence

Adolescents need to develop a sense of autonomy that is independent of their parents. Even when they choose to follow in their parents’ footsteps, maturation requires that each adolescent choose this life course for their own internal reasons. A simplistic way to declare separation from one’s parents is to become the opposite, but this stance still keeps parents at the center of your outwardly rebellious identity. Instead, a more mature and authentic identity needs to be forged out of one’s own freely chosen values. The question of what values will guide an adolescent is largely answered by the peer group with which one chooses to affiliate.

Attaching to a peer group substantially adds to an adolescent’s sense of identity and autonomy, easing the process of separating from the family identity.

In addition to establishing autonomy from parents, developing one’s identity with a clear sense of values, and forging intimate attachments to peers outside the family, most adolescents also have a need for transcendence. Bereft of the simplistic, magical perspective of childhood and far from the competence and power of adulthood, adolescents long to transcend their position in the offstage wings of life.

With growing awareness of the hypocrisy and pretense among adults that come with increasingly abstract thinking, adolescents long to create a more perfect world to live in. Suddenly unsure of life’s meaning and no longer comforted by childish beliefs in Santa Claus or religious ideas they previously accepted without question, all the cards in the deck they played with as children are thrown into the air.

Adolescence is a way station rife with uncertainty and suffused with the singular purpose of maturing beyond one’s simplistic childhood identity. A longing to transcend one’s present circumstances leads many adolescents to have a natural curiosity about anything that fosters new horizons of consciousness.

Drugs offer an easy vehicle for transcending day-to-day experience. While tobacco offers symbolic relief from mere adolescence, and alcohol offers the relief of gaiety and being comfortably numb, cannabis is something altogether different. Cannabis offers a sense of expanded consciousness, and Cannabis Culture offers an exciting new peer group and set of values.

Adolescence Essential Reads

Narrating Growth Predicts College Students' Well-Being

How to Argue Calmly With Your Teen (for Immigrant Families)

The moment a teen decides to smoke their first joint, they experience stepping unequivocally out of their childhood, beyond the wishes and confines of their parents and traditional society, and into a new peer group that unconditionally accepts their belonging. They have taken on a new identity: risk-taker, explorer, outlaw, mystic, deep thinker.

It’s easy for some adolescents to be enthralled with cannabis when it feels simultaneously joyful, fascinating, and stress relieving while also offering a new community, ego-transcending spirituality, and a shortcut to meeting the challenges of psychological development. The act of using cannabis feels like a personal, autonomous decision that breaks parental expectations. Cannabis instantly supplies a new facet to one’s identity.

Only a minority of adolescents who ever use cannabis are fully committed to traveling this route, but it is an important minority. Over 16 percent of adolescents who begin using cannabis by age 13 show signs of addiction within the next two years. A third of that group is still addicted at age 30. These are the youth most likely to have their psychological development derailed by regular cannabis use. At the same time, adolescents less seduced by cannabis may well have their psychological maturation delayed by temporary flirtations with the simulacrum of maturity provided by pot.

Cannabis provides an imitation of maturation, but the roots are too shallow to survive. While cannabis can reveal a universe of new possibilities, it does not help an adolescent realize any of these possibilities. For adolescents who lack the life experience or adult guidance useful for resisting the allure of such temptations, and especially for those who are genetically prone toward addiction, cannabis may seem like the key that unlocks their way into a different world. They see a finger pointing the way and then suck it with delight rather than follow the direction it points.

To check your general knowledge about cannabis, visit Test Your Science Literacy About Cannabis.