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Michelle Thompkins wants to empower her son about cannabis and drug use, not scare him.
“They didn’t really do a good job with steering millennials away from those things,” Thompkins said. “It kind of made us want to rebel even more.”
The 34-year-old mother brought her son, Micah Thompkins, to the “It’s Not Just Weed,” community forum, held at Kenwood Academy High School Wednesday night.
Micah Thompkins, 15, is a first-year student at Kenwood, and is clear that he’s not interested in trying cannabis anytime soon.
“That’s just the personal boundary of mine. I’m not too really bright on trying anything that I don’t really want to,” Micah said.
The Thompkinses were two of about 60 people — mostly parents — who were present. Attendees expressed their concerns about weed and THC-based products getting into the hands of young people.
After marijuana was legalized in Illinois in 2020, medical professionals predicted an increase in emergency room visits due to consumption of products with higher THC concentrations.
Those predictions have come to pass, according to Dr. Maria Rahmandar, an event panelist and medical director of the substance use and prevention program at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
“There is a risk of cannabis-induced psychosis following cannabis use, particularly in young people,” she said, explaining teen consumption of highly concentrated products.
In 2023, five teens were hospitalized after taking gummies while at school at an Uptown neighborhood high school.
In Illinois, people are most likely to start using cannabis between the ages of 18 and 25, according to the Illinois Cannabis Project at the University of Illinois Chicago. But youths ages 12-17 are not far behind.
Kenwood Academy Principal Karen Calloway said she hopes this is the first of many events to address the community’s fears.
“I think it’s important because we have a large population of Chicago public school students,” Calloway said. “We’re currently around 2,300 students, and so if we can provide more information to them, I think eventually it becomes a movement around making different and better decisions as it relates to this type of THC usage.”
Impacts of teen cannabis use
In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a proposed rule to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III drug, which would define it as a drug with less potential harm than Schedule I drugs that are more likely to be abused. This year, Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order solidifying that reclassification.
Proponents hailed the move, arguing the drug has medical benefits and that the decision both legitimizes medical marijuana programs and eases barriers to research.
But critics worry it sends the wrong message to users — especially those who are younger — causing them to underestimate the drug’s effects.
Johnny’s Ambassadors founder Laura Stack created the nonprofit to educate parents and teens about the dangers of teen cannabis use in honor of her son, who died by suicide after suffering from cannabis-induced psychosis.
“There’s a lot of confusion out there and a lot of misinformation, and we just really want people to understand why teens should not smoke weed,” Stack said.
Kenwood first-year student Jarriah McGee, 14, chooses not to use cannabis for a very simple reason.
“I’m an athlete, I don’t want to partake in those things and ruin my body,” she said.
She said she sees how it influences her peers who seem “off a little bit, sleepy, head down, a little energetic, too energetic, hungry, thirsty, all those things.”
She made this decision even before her grandmother, Kimberly McGee, who was also at the forum, made her attend.
Kimberly McGee, a Chicago police officer, said she’s seen young people overdose on marijuana because it’s been laced with meth or rat poison. She has also seen how it affects young people’s ambition.
“They have no drive, no motivation,” she said. “It’s ‘wake up, get dressed, go get high.’ Over and over. They have nothing to look forward to. They don’t care.”
Rahmandar points to advertisements and social media that expose young people to cannabis early on, which encourages them to try it.
“Regulations that allow for colorful packaging that is marketed to youth without sufficient age verification practices, with Instagram models that are appealing to youth, all of that is very concerning,” Rahmandar said. “[These processes are] going to normalize cannabis use for adolescents and young adults and increase their risk of use and negative consequences in the future.”
‘I ain’t doing that’
Kenwood Academy’s auditorium can hold 780 people, more than 10 times the number of people who attended Wednesday’s forum.
Patricia Jones Blessman, a clinical psychologist and panel member, said many schools shied away from hosting the event.
“We have gone to a number of high schools around this city, and there were folks who just really didn’t even want to touch this subject,” Jones Blessman said. “There’s a certain stigma attached to admitting or acknowledging that there may be students or family members who have a substance abuse problem in their home or in their school.”
Panelists discussed how to amplify the dangers of marijuana, just like how the dangers of teen pregnancy were marketed to previous generations.
After Stack’s lecture about higher-concentration products, like oil used for dabbing, which involves inhaling vapors of highly concentrated THC wax after burning, Chicago Public Schools board member Che “Rhymefest” Smith referenced users not knowing what’s really in the weed they’re consuming.
“What I learned today about the dab, they done turned weed into crack,” the Grammy Award winner said. “I’m thinking about family members that I talk to, and I say, ‘You’ll buy an Adderall off the street and take it. You’ll smoke whatever they give you out the dispensary.”
Fellow Grammy-winning songwriter Adam “Bruza” Wright shared his story of smoking four to five joints a day. Now celebrating two years of sobriety, he said he used to smoke because the products he used were a status symbol.
“It’s all just kind of filtering back into consumerism,” Wright said. “And just exploitation because it all just surrounds flex culture, which all comes back to just making you more fanatic and more addictive.”
Smith said there needs to be a new narrative.
“But you gotta make it enticing for young people to say, ‘I ain’t doing that,'” Smith said. “Young people don’t really smoke cigarettes. You don’t have a lot of teenage pregnancies no more. You used to have a lot of that. There are a lot of negative things that used to happen that young people just don’t engage with anymore. How do we do that?”