Posted on November 14, 2025 View all news
My beautiful daughter graduated with two college degrees, earned a professional health care license, passed the state exam on the first try, and landed a job at one of the best facilities in the state. She was a born athlete, excelling in soccer, track, hockey, and fitness.
Like many others who use cannabis, my daughter suffers from severe anxiety and self-medicates with cannabis. She once told me, cannabis is legal and is medicine, so get over it. Seventeen years after chronic use of cannabis, she is physically present, but emotionally gone. Part of her is deceased. She is mentally impaired and cannot even function or hold a job.
My daughter can’t remember conversations from the day before. She lives isolated in a room, uses Cannabis 24/7, can’t work, demonstrates aggression and anger at anyone who suggests that cannabis is making her more depressed, isolated, and driving her delusional thoughts. She lives with no friends, only users of cannabis. All her friends have moved on with their lives.
She has been involuntarily committed more than a dozen times because she hears voices, sees visions following her, experiences feelings of death, thinks her thoughts of being tracked by the FBI, wanders the streets all hours of the night, sleeps outside, and has attempted to seek court orders against family members who tried to help.
Do you really think an educated professional would choose to live like this, or is she too ill from the cannabis, causing her to remain in this psychotic permanent state of psychosis? Our broken mental health system claims my daughter has a right to sleep outside and be homeless. Health care professionals have told me that if she committed a crime or had a record, she has a better chance of being committed to a longer-term facility or court-ordered into a program. Is this what we hope for, a criminal offense, because our current mental health system fails those like my daughter?
I’m being told that the new mental health places for those like my daughter are jails since hospitals can only hold patients for a few days. Can you clear up from a severe psychosis state from cannabis in three to five days and agree to accept help? If these outcomes were occurring, hospitals would not be seeing the same patients re-entering and being involuntarily committed again so soon after their last stay. Insight into any mental health condition, a cannabis addiction, and psychosis cannot be achieved in three to five days! This expectation is a failure of the law, allowing everyone to profit from the hospitals, doctors, and the cannabis industry. At the same time, patients recycle back to hospitals without a chance to gain insight and accept help.
I live watching my daughter’s life deteriorate into a shell of a person with a broken mental health system, along with a greedy cannabis industry that is so powerful that it threatens and sabotages those who speak out and advocate against cannabis. I have worked with organizations and researchers who were denied publications on the dangers of cannabis and whose websites have been sabotaged for suggesting cannabis has placed their loved ones in permanent psychosis or death.
In all these hospital commitments experienced, I was not only sickened by my daughter’s mental psychotic state, but I witnessed firsthand an epidemic of young adults in ER rooms in the same condition. Many progressed into a permanent psychosis altered state, taking their mental illness to a new level from this strong cannabis. Doctors are overwhelmed witnessing an average of twenty young adults arriving in the ER weekly in psychotic states from cannabis, but no one wants these statistics to be heard. If this information were publicized, the cannabis industry would suffer, but it’s okay for us to watch lives be destroyed or lives end.
Watching this once functioning young adult deteriorate before my eyes is unbearable pain bestowed from a greedy industry, a government that did not care to regulate any restrictions on cannabis and failed to consider half of Americans already suffering from current mental health conditions, many undiagnosed, along with a broken mental health system.
The laws changed to a society where those with mental health issues who are too sick even to recognize their own symptoms as part of their condition, and who are in psychotic states from cannabis, are expected to make decisions to accept help. These individuals addicted to the potent, powerful hallucinogen of cannabis fall through the cracks in this broken mental health system, unless they have criminal offenses and are court-ordered into treatment or into a long-term facility.
We are in an epidemic of mental health crises among young adults, and cannabis has driven this crisis deeper. I encourage all who have lost a loved one to cannabis or are living with a loved one addicted to cannabis to please continue to support, speak out, and publicize experiences in lives lost to both cannabis and a failed mental health system.
A loving self-advocate Mom
