Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence
<b>In “a brilliant antidote to all the…false narratives about pot” (<i>American Thinker</i>)</b><b>, an award-winning author and former <i>New York Times </i>reporter reveals the link between teenage marijuana use and mental illness, and a hidden epidemic of violence caused by the drug—facts the media have ignored as the United States rushes to legalize cannabis.</b><br /><br />Recreational marijuana is now legal in nine states. Advocates argue cannabis can help everyone from veterans to cancer sufferers. But legalization has been built on myths—that marijuana arrests fill prisons; that most doctors want to use cannabis as medicine; that it can somehow stem the opiate epidemic; that it is beneficial for mental health. In this meticulously reported book, Alex Berenson, a former <i>New York Times</i> reporter, explodes those myths, explaining that almost no one is in prison for marijuana; a tiny fraction of doctors write most authorizations for medical marijuana, mostly for people who have already used; and marijuana use is linked to opiate and cocaine use. Most of all, THC—the chemical in marijuana responsible for the drug’s high—can cause psychotic episodes.<br /> <br />“Alex Berenson has a reporter’s tenacity, a novelist’s imagination, and an outsider’s knack for asking intemperate questions” (Malcolm Gladwell, <i>The New Yorker</i>), as he ranges from the London institute that is home to the scientists who helped prove the cannabis-psychosis link to the Colorado prison where a man now serves a thirty-year sentence after eating a THC-laced candy bar and killing his wife. He sticks to the facts, and they are devastating.<br /> <br />With the US already gripped by one drug epidemic, <i>Tell Your Children </i>is a “well-written treatise” (<i>Publishers Weekly</i>) that “takes a sledgehammer to the promised benefits of marijuana legalization, and cannabis enthusiasts are not going to like it one bit” (<i>Mother Jones</i>).