KHTS Radio Santa Clarita Radio – Santa Clarita News
With marijuana becoming more socially acceptable, and laws continuing to be more lenient, it’s important to talk to your kids about marijuana at an early age, drug and alcohol experts said Thursday.
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“Kids are never too young to start to talk to them about marijuana use,” said Cary Quashen, of Action Family Counseling in Valencia. “It needs to be hardwired in their brain from an early age.”
The conversation is an important one, but also one that will be ongoing, he added.
“This is not a conversation that will happen once, it will happen over and over again,” Quashen said.
Using marijuana at an early age could have long-term consequences on your brain, and it might even lower your IQ, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Researchers found that compared to nonusers, people who smoked marijuana starting as early as age 14 have less brain volume, or gray matter, in the orbitofrontal cortex,” according to a recent CNN article. “That’s the area in the front of your brain that helps you make decisions.”
“Parents need to understand that if they don’t learn it from them, they’ll learn it from someone else,” Quashen said.
Many parents get caught up in the “how” to talk to your kids about marijuana.
“Parents need to not be afraid,” Quashen said. “You need to tell them that there will be peer pressure in school, and how to deal with it.
“If you are adult enough to have kids,” Quashen said, “you are adult enough to have the conversation with them about drugs.”
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Action Family Counseling has drug and alcohol residential treatment locations in Santa Clarita, Piru, and Bakersfield; Intensive Drug and Alcohol Outpatient in Santa Clarita, Simi Valley, Ventura, Pasadena, and Bakersfield, Action Family Counseling is here to help you.
Action Family Counseling’s primary goals are to maintain abstinence, stabilize co-occurring illnesses, and increase quality of life. We support and reinforce change in behavior patterns so that adolescents and adults, or clients and their families can fully indoctrinate the philosophies and principles needed to remain abstinent and stabilized for life.
Action Family Counseling accomplishes this by providing an effective treatment approach developed by the Department of Health and Human Services that includes a multi-disciplinarian personalized approach by a treatment team. Once a patient is identified, we provide an initial screening and assessment, which allows us to properly diagnose and place patients in the appropriate treatment setting.
Once a patient completes our intake process to our residential program he or she receives 24-hour crisis management, individual counseling, group therapy, family education and counseling, treatment planning, routine and random toxicology screening, pharmacotherapy and medication management, education about Alcohol and Other Drugs and mental health issues, self-help and support group orientation, case management services, and discharge service planning with a transitional service plan to our Intensive Outpatient treatment program to ensure a continuum of care.
CNN news contributed to this story.
That is correct, kids are never too young to make them understand how to deflect lies made about the most powerful and safest medicinal plant in the world. Every “study” has long been debunked in this article, none of them are true. Just google every study and type debunked after them.
How about tobacco, alcohol and prescription “medicine”? Sugar (at one point was considered a drug, google it), caffeine, TV?
As a social worker, I make sure that every child I come in contact with becomes familiar with the lie and informed about the truth, as much as kids can understand about this. Read the Rick Simpson and google cannabis oil.
Come over here son and let’s talk a little about marijuana. You may not realize it but marijuana is a significantly less-harmful and less-addictive alternative to alcohol and you could prevent a lot of the harm that alcohol causes by choosing marijuana instead of alcohol. For unlike alcohol, marijuana doesn’t cause liver disease, heart disease, brain damage, cancer of any sort, violent rages or death.
Now, don’t be fooled by the government’s classification of alcohol as “legal” and marijuana as “illegal” – that does NOT mean that alcohol is safe and marijuana unsafe! There’s tons of reputable scientific evidence proving that marijuana is significantly safer than alcohol. But unfortunately for the American people, and especially for the taxpayers forced to fund the federal marijuana prohibition, the government has made a mistake regarding marijuana and it now refuses to admit that it made a mistake.
So my best advice to you is to do everything you can in your life to get marijuana placed on the same legal footing as alcohol and then, whenever possible, for you to choose marijuana instead of alcohol. And always remember this son, if anyone ever offers you something that could harm you – like pharmaceuticals, meth, alcohol or tobacco – that you can always get out of the situation safely by telling them “No thanks man, I just smoke the herb”.
I would like to apply for a card, how do I do it and where? Its gotten to expensive for me..please help!
Yes how can i receive my license