Everyone Praises the Healing Power of This Drug—but Many Don’t Realize the Damaging Effect It Has on Teens

In 2014, Gilman published research on 18-to-25-year-olds that showed differences in the brain’s reward system between users and nonusers. Teens who smoked marijuana had significant abnormalities in the areas of the brain linked to emotion, motivation, and decision-making (see diagram above). “I got a lot of hate mail after that,” she says.