BREWER, Maine — The Bangor Area Recovery Network is hosting a series of community education sessions to discuss the potential pitfalls of legalizing recreational marijuana.
The sessions come as two petitions seek to place citizen-initiated referendums on the November 2016 ballot that would legalize recreational marijuana in Maine.
“Most of the people just assume this is going to happen, but the facts about this subject are being left out of the conversation,” said Jean Baker, an organizer, in a statement. “We need to hear both sides of the story.”
The first session is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Wednesday in the community education room at Bangor Area Recovery Network’s recovery center at 142 Center Street in Brewer.
The presentation will feature a slideshow titled “Marijuana in the New Millennium.” The group will do the same presentation on the third Wednesday of July and August.
The presentation also will be offered at various locations throughout the community by the Substance Abuse Task Force for the Bangor Regional Public Health Advisory Board.
The effort will culminate with a summit on marijuana education in September, featuring leading national experts. That summit will include a forum to be held at the Gracie Theatre at Husson University.
Baker, who chairs the Bangor Area Recovering Community Coalition, a group of recovering addicts and their allies organized under the Bangor Area Recovery Network, was not available for comment Tuesday afternoon.
In an interview, Bangor Area Recovery Network board of directors member Bruce Campbell, clinical director at Wellspring, an addiction treatment agency, expressed concern about the commercialization of marijuana and the increasing potency resulting from new strains and delivery methods.
“The truth of the matter is that the marijuana that we’re talking about now is not the marijuana that came out of the Woodstock generation,” he said.
Everyday marijuana then was about 1 to 3 percent THC, the primary psychoactive component of marijuana, he said. The average marijuana of today is about 15 percent THC, he said.
According to Campbell, regular marijuana use among teens is rising, which can result in learning challenges and increase the likelihood of substance abuse later in life.
“During adolescence, the last 20 percent of that hard wiring in the brain is being established,” he said. “When you introduce substances into that process, you’re basically training your brain to respond to the substances as opposed to normal development.”
Campbell also said marijuana overdoses and dependency are possible. The problem, he said, is that marijuana overdoses and dependency do not look the same as with alcohol or opiates.
In a marijuana overdose, he said, the user is not necessarily in danger of death as he or she is with a heroin or alcohol overdose, but he or she can become extremely anxious, have a panic attack and become paranoid.
“Depending upon the intensity of the produce itself, it can induce psychiatric crisis, and so you’ll see them in emergency rooms,” Campbell said.
Similarly, those with marijuana dependency do not experience the same intense physical withdrawal sensations as a late stage alcoholic or opiate addict would, but physical, emotional and psychological dependency is possible, he said.
The problem, he said, is that because the user does not appear to be suffering acute withdrawal symptoms that the substance is seen as benign, but it can actually take more time to kick a marijuana dependency.
The two marijuana ballot initiatives, one from the Maine-based group Legalize Maine, propose legalizing marijuana as well as regulating and taxing it. Legalize Maine’s website points to the effective medical use of marijuana, as well as its potential as a commercial crop, as part of the basis for widening its use.
Another sponsored by the national group Marijuana Policy Project would only approve marijuana use for adults 21 years or older and would tax at 10 percent in addition the state sales tax of 5.5 percent, according to the Portland Press Herald.
The first $30 million in resulting tax revenue would be used for school construction, and revenue beyond that would be used for the state’s General Fund, the Press Herald reported.
Follow Evan Belanger on Twitter at @evanbelanger.