INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -
School resource officers at Indiana’s largest high school are reporting a
surge in students being sent to hospital emergency rooms after they used
marijuana’s psychoactive ingredient in electronic cigarettes to get so high
they had to seek help at the school nurse’s office.
Shane VanNatter, a
Carmel High School resource officer, said he’s seen students who had vaped
THC and were walking hallways “so stoned that they don’t know where they
are.”
“They’ll
self-report. They’ll come to the nurse and say, ‘I’m too high. Something’s
wrong,’” he told The Indianapolis Star.
VanNatter said 17
students at the school with an enrollment of about 5,000 students have been
caught this school year for using, possessing or dealing THC vaping
products.
The potency of the
devices can give students a much more powerful high than expected, experts
said.
THC levels in
marijuana plants typically range from 15% to 24%, but VanNatter said one
vaping cartridge that the school seized contained THC levels exceeding 80%.
Vaping devices burn
liquid, or sometimes leaf, by using a battery-powered igniter in a chamber
that looks like a pen or USB flash drive. The aerosol that’s inhaled and
exhaled is not smoke but mirrors water vapor. The liquid can be a tobacco
product or THC.
A study conducted
four years ago explored teen marijuana vaping by looking at a sample of
Connecticut teens. Around 5% reported vaping marijuana, and 18% of teen
e-cigarette users said they filled their vaporizers with cannabis.
As more teens have
started to vape, adults’ fears about teens vaping in general and vaping
marijuana have intensified, said Meghan Morean, an assistant professor of
psychology at Oberlin College and one of the study’s authors.
“My guess is that
this is going on and they’re just not aware of it and they have recently
become aware of it,” she said. “We get lots and lots of schools calling and
freaking out about regular vaping. It’s a thing, and I think it’s a
continuing thing that people need to be aware of.”
From 2017 to 2018,
teen students around the nation putting marijuana in their vape pens rose
from 4.9% to 7.5%, according to a study conducted by Monitoring the Future.