Long-term cannabis user reflects on adolescent risks of early marijuana use

A long-term cannabis user, looking back across two decades of daily consumption that began at thirteen, offers what science is only now learning to say plainly: that legalization and safety are not the same thing, and that the adolescent brain — still forming its architecture for mood, memory, and impulse — is uniquely vulnerable to lasting harm. The accumulation of research on psychiatric risk and neural change has outpaced the cultural messaging that followed legalization, leaving a generation of young people navigating a substance whose legal status has quietly come to imply a safety it doe