Last week, New York State launched “Cannabis Honestly” — a statewide campaign to help students, schools, and parents talk to young people about weed. It came out of a yearlong listening effort: 23 facilitated sessions with more than 450 young people, parents, educators, and community members. The goal is to dispel myths and give families real tools for the conversation.
This should have been launched before the first legal dispensary hit the street, but better late than never. Here’s the thing. It’s pretty simple. Talk about weed to your kids like you talk about alcohol and sex. Directly, honestly, early. Here’s what’s actually scary: roughly a third of teens surveyed couldn’t correctly guess the legal age for cannabis consumption in New York. And that confusion isn’t happening in a vacuum.
It’s happening while illegal stores are everywhere — bodegas, underground operations, unlicensed delivery services all selling product with zero oversight. So parents are scared. Of course they are because you have to be 21 to buy legal weed, and the reality is kids can buy weed underage anywhere but a legal dispensary. Just like alcohol and sex (although you don’t have to be of age to have sex), teenagers are partaking in all of it. If you don’t think so, you are kidding yourself.
Parents are not just worried their kid might try weed — they’re worried their kid will buy something laced with god-knows-what from an unlicensed shop down the block. A campaign teaching families how to talk about cannabis? Great. Necessary, even. But it’s treating the symptom, not the disease. The real problem isn’t the conversation — it’s that illegal weed is still everywhere, undermining the entire point of legalization and regulation in the first place. You can hand every parent in New York a conversation guide. It won’t matter if the corner bodega is still selling untested product to a sixteen-year-old. Fix the enforcement problem. Then the conversation gets a lot easier.
