SAN DIEGO ER SEEING UP TO 37 MARIJUANA CASES A DAY — MOSTLY PSYCHOSIS:

Kyle’s now in recovery, but his is a story that is becoming familiar to more and more American families. Someone begins showing classic signs of hardcore drug addiction. Eventually, they suffer a full psychotic break. But the only drug history is for cannabis.

“We’re now counting 37 cannabis-related diagnoses a day,” Dr. Roneet Lev, an addiction medicine doctor at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, said about her emergency department. “It’s been steadily increasing over the years. When I started in the 1990s, there was no such thing. Now I see 1 to 2 cases per shift. The most common symptom is psychosis.”

“We probably see 20 THC-induced psychoses for every amphetamine-induced psychosis,” said Ben Cort, who runs a drug and alcohol treatment center in Colorado. One study showed an increase of 24% in cases of psychoses in emergency departments in Colorado in the five years following marijuana’s legalization in that state in 2012.

Since then, legal marijuana has been transformed into a potent and unrecognizable product.

“When I speak at parent nights at schools, most adults still think it’s like the weed we smoked when we were teens in the ’80s, [which had] between 3 to 5% THC per gram of flower,” said Laura Stack, an advocate against cannabis abuse in Colorado. “We never had today’s high-potency concentrates, vapes or edibles.”

Laura’s son Johnny was driven into acute psychosis by years of high concentrate THC usage. He believed his dorm room was bugged and that the mob was after him.

Earlier: How Weed Became The New Oxycontin.