screening August 28th<\/a> to raise awareness and are urging parents to attend.<\/p>\n\u201cWe do have hearings quite often here with our juvenile hearing officers in the Clovis Police Department Youth Services Division,\u201d said Armando Negrete. \u201cA very high majority of them were seeing issues with substance use disorders and primarily with THC or marijuana use.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Clovis police drug education officer says marijuana use at a young age can affect brain development. Officials are also concerned about vaping products and marijuana being mixed with other drugs, potentially increasing the risk of addiction and overdose.<\/p>\n
Fresno County District Attorney Lisa Smittcamp says there is a troubling connection between marijuana use and fentanyl exposure among local teens.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Fresno County there has not been one case where a teenager has overdosed on fentanyl that they didn’t start smoking marijuana,\u201d Smittcamp said.<\/p>\n
Smittcamp also points to the increasing potency of THC products compared with marijuana in previous decades.<\/p>\n
She says newer products can also be difficult for parents to recognize.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes they look like a thumb drive on a computer. Sometimes they actually look like a pen,\u201d Smittcamp said. \u201cAnd for parents who don’t know what they look like, and even for parents who do, they’re very easy to conceal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smittcamp says California law provides limited penalties for adults who sell marijuana to minors, which she believes contributes to how easily young people can obtain the drug.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we do find out that people are selling to minors, [they are] subject to a misdemeanor, which in the state of California today, there’s almost no penalty at all,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
With children returning to school, both Smittcamp and Negrete are urging parents to have open conversations with their kids about marijuana and other drugs.<\/p>\n
\u201cChildren’s brains don’t stop developing until they’re 25 years old,\u201d Smittcamp said. \u201cAnd so an influx of regular use of marijuana can definitely be damaging to the child.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clovis Police are also asking the community to get involved. The department plans to host a free screening of *THC, Inc.*, a documentary examining the evolution of marijuana and THC products over the past two to three decades.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to partner with the community, first of all, to show this screening,\u201d Negrete said. \u201cIt’s a free screening.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marijuana has been legal for California adults for years. But as students head back to school, law enforcement…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437038,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[112,114,113],"class_list":["post-437037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fresno","tag-fresno","tag-fresno-headlines","tag-fresno-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}