While powerful pressure groups are militating in favor of the legalization of cannabis, the debate among adults is skewed because its development is centered on the question : is cannabis neuro-toxic or not ? Now, today’s adolescents do not use cannabis so much to “ get high ” as to “ go to sleep ”, including during the day, at school or in the workplace. Most cannabis use is no longer recreational and is no longer associated with partying or with transgression. This new kind of use, whose effect is cannabis intoxication and whose goal is to make commonplace intoxication in the activities of daily life, is coming ineluctably closer to the other well known form of intoxication, alcoholic intoxication. This is a very good reason to worry about the present and future of these adolescents.

Adolescence, septembre 2002, 20, 3, 591-602