Is Colorado paying enough attention to marijuana's toll?

Just before Javonte Hill got out of the Navy and settled in Denver, he was diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety and depression but had not sought treatment yet.

His girlfriend, an occasional marijuana user, recommended he try pot as a way "to chill out."

"You know I'm not like a pot smoker. I just got out of the military," he recently told a New York Times reporter. But he'd heard it was a much safer alternative to alcohol, and he wouldn't wake up hung over, so why not?

The second time he used it, he ended up seeing devils.

"Slowly, surely, as the night went on, I completely lost all touch with reality, and I replayed a lot of my time in Afghanistan," Hill told Megan Twohey. "It's almost like all my worst fears came to the forefront."

Hill was quickly overwhelmed with dread, paranoia and hallucinations. An hour or so into the psychotic episode, as the couple's two dogs started fighting, he went upstairs, retrieved his gun and started shooting, injuring his girlfriend and killing one of the dogs.

"It was like reality dissolved in front of me. I was seeing depictions of the devil in hell and demons," said Hill, 33. He was diagnosed with drug-induced hallucinations, medical records show, and is on probation after pleading guilty to animal cruelty and assault charges. He is suing the dispensary chain, claiming it failed to warn him about the risk of psychosis.

This Election Day, recreational marijuana could become legal across more than half the country, a trend that started right here in Colorado 12 years ago.

But as more Americans consume more potent forms of the drug more often, A New York Times investigation, reprinted in today's Gazette, has revealed that some of the heaviest users are experiencing serious and unexpected harms to their health, including psychotic breaks like Hill's.

Among the key takeaways from the landmark Times reporting:

• Millions of people are addicted to marijuana despite repeated assurances from the now-$33 billion industry that pot is non-addictive and safe to use.

• About 18 million people — nearly a third of all users ages 18 and older — have reported symptoms of something called cannabis use disorder, with significant health problems associated with frequent and ongoing use. This can develop into an acute condition researchers have now identified as cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting and severe stomach pain that can last several days, even weeks. In extreme cases, CHS can lead to dehydration, seizures, kidney failure and cardiac arrest, and even death.

• More than 4.5 million 18- to 25-year-olds use pot daily or near daily, the report found, and 81% of those users meet the criteria for the disorder.

• In Colorado, 51.5% of adults who use marijuana use it daily, which means half of all pot users in our state are at risk of contracting the disorder.

• The rate of cannabis use disorder among people ages 18 to 25 has soared to 16.6% since legalization has spread nationwide, which means it has caught up to the rate of alcohol use disorder, 15.1%.

• The Times reporting also found that marijuana use can affect brain development, particularly during the critical period of adolescence through age 25. This is also the period when psychotic disorders typically emerge, and there's growing evidence associating the two. Recent studies show that the more potent the pot, the more frequent the use and the earlier the age of consumption, the greater the risk.

• Most frighteningly, The Times reported that paranoia and hallucinations can happen to people of all different ages, chronic users or first-time users alike, and people who are already at risk of experiencing psychosis, or those that don't have risk factors.

To honestly assess the health risks of cannabis use, The Times examined medical records and public health and insurance data; reviewed scientific research; and interviewed more than 200 health officials, doctors, regulators and consumers. Reporters also surveyed more than 200 physicians in about a half-dozen specialties and almost 600 people who suffer from cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome.

"The dangerous misconceptions about marijuana were a really striking theme for us," reporter Twohey told me.

"As we pieced this together it was like this realization that the way that legalization and commercialization was being done in this country ... amounted to a large public health experiment. Few people understood they were the unknowing participants," she said.

That experiment on the unknowing happened "because there was a whole lack of science to inform the drug use, and because there was so little oversight in tracking by government and the medical field."

There is still no federal oversight of legalization or federal funding for research into harms because pot is still illegal on a federal level. As a result, you have a "hodgepodge of state laws that are inadequate," she added. "And you don't have consistent public health messaging on the risks of those products."

This is especially true in Colorado.

"I don't think Colorado went about legalization in the most thoughtful way," Dr. Kennon Heard, an emergency physician at the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, told me.

During his medical residency in the 1990s, Heard had been taught that cannabis-related issues were rarely seen in the emergency department. But that changed after legalization.

"Once Colorado got to the point that we had dispensaries, we started seeing more and more of these cases" of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome.

Now, he said, his hospital treats patients with the syndrome every day.

Yet there is still no specific diagnosis code for it yet, so it is not tracked by Colorado hospitals.

But "if you talk to emergency physicians pretty much at any of the hospitals throughout the state, everybody sees it fairly regularly," Heard said. Still, "there's nobody really championing this as a significant problem," Heard notes. "It's not cancer, it's not alcoholism. So there's not a big push to look at it."

This is not what we were promised when Colorado became the canary in a coal mine for retail marijuana 12 years ago. We were told it would be safe, arrests would go down, the black market would disappear, and all would be mellow.

But these emerging harms documented by Times reporters are certainly hitting our start harder than other states, given how prevalent pot has become in the last decade. Since usage is higher here than the national average in every category, that means these harms are happening at a much higher rate as well.

The most recent report by Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program on Colorado shows that since legalization, marijuana use (ages 12 and older) in Colorado is 61% higher than the national average, currently ranked 3rd in the nation. And yet the same study showed treatment for marijuana use for all ages decreased 34% in Colorado from 2013 to 2020.

The Times report lands just as Colorado Springs voters are deciding whether to allow recreational marijuana sales, or outlaw retail pot permanently. Right now, only medical marijuana is allowed in the Springs, one of the few cities in Colorado that prohibits retail pot outlets. Ironically, just as research about serious emerging harms is being published, some political prognosticators are saying they think this is the year the Springs will make it legal.

All of which begs the question:

Why don't we have prominent warning labels telling users about all these documented risks?

Why don't we have caps on the potency of marijuana in Colorado?

Why isn't there much much better public messaging by state and medical officials about the risks of marijuana? "In many ways, the government and the medical community have been cosigning the marijuana market and what's been happening," Twohey said.

Or the biggest question of all: Why is pot still legal without any restrictions for anyone under 25, when the risks for developing brains are clearly so much greater? What are we doing to our kids?