Raising Teens in the Age of Cannabis

For readers of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, this is the next essential book about what happens when the developing adolescent brain collides with a modern force it was never designed to navigate. Dr. Yasmin Hurd explains how today’s high-potency, highly commercialized, destigmatized cannabis is reshaping the risks for teens—and gives parents the science and language they need to respond.

Today’s cannabis is more potent, more accessible, more socially accepted, and more deeply embedded in adolescent life than at any point in history. Yet when it comes to how today’s cannabis impacts the still-developing brain, most parents still understand cannabis through the lens of the marijuana they encountered decades ago—a fundamentally different drug in a fundamentally different world.

Drawing on more than three decades of pioneering research, internationally renowned neuroscientist Dr. Yasmin Hurd—Director of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai, Ward-Coleman Chair in Translational Neuroscience, and one of the world’s leading experts on cannabis and the developing brain—explains why today’s cannabis presents a fundamentally different challenge than the marijuana previous generations remember. Combining neuroscience, decades of clinical experience, and compelling stories of real families, Hurd takes readers inside the adolescent brain at a particularly vulnerable stage of development, when critical neural connections are still being strengthened, refined, and pruned. She reveals what today’s increasingly potent cannabis can do to learning, memory, motivation, and mental health; why some young people are more vulnerable to addiction and psychosis than others; and what parents can do before, during, and after cannabis becomes a problem.

At once authoritative, accessible, and deeply compassionate, Raising Teens in the Age of Cannabis, gives parents, caregivers, educators, and healthcare professionals the tools they need to understand what has changed—and the knowledge and confidence to protect, guide, and support the young people in their lives.