THE WASHINGTON POST: I smoked cannabis for nearly 20 years. Here’s what I wish I knew at 13.

When I was a teenager in Upstate New York, I passed joints the way other kids passed notes in class.

Friday nights behind the bleachers with my friends felt like the only place I could exhale, an escape from the chaos waiting at home. We walked on eggshells, bracing for the next eruption from my father, who was an addict himself.

It was 1980, long before Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, which researchers later said was ineffective, and before the war on drugs became the cultural crusade of the mid-’80s. In ninth grade, I wrote a detailed report defending marijuana, titled “The Decriminalization Picture.”

I got a B-minus. Nobody called my parents.

So much has changed since those Friday nights behind the bleachers; the world has evolved in ways that 13-year-old me would have cheered. Today, cannabis dispensaries line the streets of cities and suburbs across the country, as normalised as coffee shops.

Recreational marijuana is now legal in 24 states and D.C. and decriminalised in several more. But I’ve changed too.

What I know now about cannabis, especially what it does to a teenager’s brain, I learned the hard way.

When the Trump administration moved to reclassify marijuana from Schedule I - a designation that includes heroin and PCP - to Schedule III, alongside less addictive drugs, I applauded the decision.

After all, I’d been arguing that case since high school. But now, months after medical cannabis was rescheduled, and with a formal Drug Enforcement Administration hearing on broader rescheduling underway, I’ve been digging into the research, and I’ve been forced to rethink everything I thought I knew.

Here’s what I wish I’d realised at 13.

If you’re self-medicating, cannabis won’t solve your problems,

Anxiety was the genesis of my addiction. Before my first day of kindergarten, my stomach hurt so badly that my parents rushed me to a clinic. Nobody had a name for it.

I was just a nervous little girl trying to make sense of the world, and I spent much of my life searching for relief.

When I was 13, I didn’t have a name for what I was feeling, but that relief arrived when I started smoking.

At the time, my options for treating my constant stress felt limited. Anxiety was barely on anyone’s radar.

Today, it’s a crisis that doctors and scientists take seriously: According to a JAMA Network Open study tracking nearly 2 million children, anxiety-related doctor visits jumped 300 percent from 2014 to 2023.

“The earlier you start using marijuana in your life, such as 12, 13 or 14 years old, and the more frequently you use it, the more these highly pure THC levels will cause traumatic brain changes which can be devastating,” Harold C. Urschel III, a psychiatrist and the co-founder of the addiction disease management company Enterhealth in Dallas, told me.

Those changes can include abnormal brain growth and development and serious psychiatric illnesses including psychosis, manic depression and, in some cases, permanent schizophrenia, as well as increased risks of heart attack, stroke and lung cancer, Mr Urschel said.

If you start in your teens, it can be worse for your mental health.

Meanwhile, a 2026 University of California at San Diego study of more than 11,000 young people revealed that teens who use cannabis regularly show slower gains in memory, attention and thinking skills compared with nonusers, with THC exposure linked to worse memory over time.

As I get older, I find myself obsessing over what’s natural brain ageing and what’s the lasting fingerprint of 17 years of daily use. I may never know the answer.

Decades of Schedule I classification restricted researchers’ ability to obtain and test cannabis, meaning that, for me and many others, these findings arrived 40 years too late.

Even as I graduated, grew up and became a mother, I kept smoking. The only time I quit both cigarettes and marijuana was during my pregnancy, convinced I was done for good. It didn’t last.

Instead, I managed to earn degrees in nursing and culinary arts while raising my son, even as weed and cigarettes were as dependable as the sunrise.

There can be a real impact on your physical health

For 17 years, every time I smoked a joint, I wasn’t reaching for weed, but desperately searching for the confidence that eluded me. I felt deeply inadequate, though I never admitted I had a problem. I loved creative writing, but I only wrote when I was high because the words refused to flow otherwise.

The drug didn’t give me a voice. It just quieted the one telling me I didn’t deserve to be heard.

There was a moment, just after inhaling, when the sharp edges of everything melted away. Pot quieted my anxiety without teaching me how to manage it. The confidence I thought I was borrowing, I was actually postponing.

The fear never disappeared but evolved into paranoia; I would walk into crowded rooms convinced everyone was scrutinising me and replay conversations long after they’d ended.

When I spoke with Riley Guinan, a physician assistant and adolescent substance use specialist at Zellig Psychiatry, she put it plainly: “Sometimes the most durable consequence of heavy adolescent cannabis use is not a persistent direct neurochemical injury but the way it shaped development, opportunities, coping style and identity.”

The damage was physical, too, though. Throughout my late 20s, I coughed up blood and other substances, and bronchitis struck in relentless waves every few months. My chest felt like it was caving in.

One night, my son found me passed out while cooking dinner after a heavy smoking session. He ran to the neighbour’s for help. When I came to, I had to say the words out loud for the first time: I smoked too much.

Admitting the truth proved more effective than any intervention or program. I finally saw my addiction for what it was. I was done.

But quitting wasn’t that simple. Years later, I learned why.

“Withdrawal from marijuana can take weeks or months, notably longer than cocaine or crack because the substance stays in your body longer,” Mr Urschel explained. The drug I thought was softer had the deepest roots, and for the 17 years I smoked, it was probably always in my system.

A decade after quitting, I slipped into depression, slowly at first, then crushing. Some mornings, I couldn’t get out of bed.

Twice, I sank into the darkest place I’ve ever been, suicidal, with a plan. Both times, a week of hospitalisation and medication brought me back. Now I wonder about all those years I spent numbing a nervous system that never learned to regulate itself.

Recent research links long-term cannabis use to major depressive disorder because the brain’s dopamine system fails to reset when you stop. Use that begins in adolescence leaves scars that outlast the addiction.

According to Mr Urschel, 15 to 20 percent of formerly addicted individuals who developed severe psychiatric symptoms continue to experience them permanently.

I also learned that today’s cannabis is nothing like the marijuana I smoked as a teen.

“Most of the cannabis in the 1970s was 1 to 2 percent pure, whereas today it is 20 to 50 percent,” Mr Urschel said, and that could have, paradoxically, created problems for me.

“If you think you’re drinking a weak beer and you’re actually drinking Everclear, anyone would realise that you could do devastating damage to yourself medically.”

A user’s age matters regardless of potency. “Lower potency does not make early heavy use benign,” Ms Guinan said.

“Age of initiation matters independently. The adolescent brain is developmentally sensitive to cannabinoids, and beginning heavy use at 13 would still be clinically meaningful even in a lower-potency era. I would describe it as a real risk factor, just not equivalent to heavy adolescent use of high-potency modern products.”

I still wonder what long-term effects from my early use are still to come. I’m 59 now and have good days and bad.

But the anxious girl who believed she needed a high to find her voice has emerged as a professional writer, sober, clear-eyed and finally expressing herself. Now I have the opportunity to tell the truth nobody told me at 13.

Back then, scare tactics and propaganda wouldn’t have convinced me to stop smoking. But if someone had said, “The drug that makes you feel like yourself is actually keeping you from becoming yourself,” I might have listened.