TROY – Wednesday was an important day for Laura Stack.

It was a day filled with commemoration while focusing on good times and good memories … while desperately trying to bury or at the very least, ignore, the bad ones.

Referring to it as an “angel-versary,” Stack’s then 19-year-old son, Johnny, died Nov. 20, 2019 after jumping off the roof of a six-story building.

The coroner classified his death as a “suicide” because he ended his own life. But Stack isn’t buying it. At least not entirely.

She knows, if not for any other reason than Johnny told her days before, he was metaphorically pushed off that roof. Not by a person, but by marijuana.

“There is a video of him, and I will never watch it, but it was de- scribed to me. He jumped off the top of a six-story building, and it looked like he could fly,” Stack recalled in a recent speech at the North Roads Church in Troy. “In the video, he truly actually thought, in his body language, he would fly right off that building. It was called a suicide, because he did kill himself, but did he mean to die. I don’t know, we’ll never know.”

By the time her son had jumped off that roof, he had been using marijuana for more than five years, starting at the age of 14 at a party just a few months after the first dispensary opened in Colorado.

Stack freely admits when he told her he first tried marijuana at that party, she had no idea how dangerous the drug had become compared to when she tried it as a teenager in the 1980s.

“When he told me he was using weed, I said to myself, ‘whatever,’” she said. “That’s literally what I said to myself. I was like, it’s just weed. I mean, come on, what’s the big deal? I used it when I grew up. It obviously didn’t hurt me. And I was really, really wrong. And I was very ignorant, and I was very uneducated about what had happened to marijuana since I was a girl.”

Stack said herself and seven or eight friends were in a friend’s basement when she tried it and expected her son’s experience to be similar.

“I remember kind of giggling a little bit and then we went to Denny’s. But I personally just didn’t I didn’t like it very much. It just wasn’t my thing,” she said. “So now I have a kid in high school and Johnny tells me that he used it at the party, I think he’s talking about the same stuff I used at Jim’s in the basement. I just thought it was the same thing. A nd I think that’s what a lot of people think. I think in Colorado, when we voted for it, I think parents thought they were voting for Jim’s basement weed. You know, pass it around, giggle, go to Denny’s. [But] Jim’s basement weed is gone and its never coming back.”

Stack further discussed the “evolution” of marijuana, starting with the stuff the “hippies smoked” at Woodstock, which typically contained about 2 percent THC, the chemical that provides marijuana’s intoxicating effects.

By the time she first tried in the 1980s, it had been modified to 3-5 percent THC.

But today, she said you can walk into any dispensary and buy marijuana flower with 20-30 percent THC, and even as much as 40 percent.

However, while her son may have started smoking marijuana 15-20 times as strong as she did in her teenage years, it wasn’t until he started “dabbing” that his mind was truly wrecked.

Stack explained dabbing is a method of consuming marijuana in a concentrated form which can contain up to 90 percent THC. She further stated that one “serving size” of a typical concentrate contains the same amount of THC as 50 marijuana cigarettes from the 1980s.

And the use of this highly-potent narcotic can be especially damaging to youth’s brains that are still developing, which is up to the age of 25 for women and 28 for men.

“That is what the problem is. Not, again, that you smoked Jim’s basement weed, but I shared one joint, and I can’t even imagine if I did 50 all at one time, what that would do to me,” Stack asked. “But now we know what that is doing to our kids. And it is changing the way that their brains form. “

Stack said as Johnny continued to smoke weed and started dabbing more and more, the changes were very gradual as he remained a high-functioning student for quite a while.

“Johnny never thought he was going to ever have any problems because it didn’t look like he was having problems. You can’t see what’s going on in the brain and he’d be like mom I got straight A’s you know I’m going to be the valedictorian obviously this isn’t hurting me,” she said. “It didn’t look like it was hurting him until it did and it was like that (snaps her fingers) and it was like an alien came and took my child and left another one and this one was mean.”

She said he started sleeping a lot, quit all of his extra-curricular activities and distanced himself from friends. Then in his final semester of school, his straight A’s turned into D’s.

As an 18-year-old, Johnny had become more and more obstinate and unwilling to listen to his parents, eventually moving out before going to college.

After dropping out of the first college, Johnny was institutionalized after threatening to commit suicide. He was released and for a while, was sober. However, he returned to using and the paranoia returned as he was convinced his new college was an FBI hidden base and that the mob was out to get him.

Stack said the prevalence of schizophrenia with regular marijuana users is something most people don’t realize, and that the problem is magnified with youth.

“Sadly, in Colorado, the number one cause of death in our youth now, ages 15 through 18 is suicide,” she said. “And guess what the number one substance is that they find in their toxicology? THC. Not fentanyl, not opioids, not alcohol.”

Stack believes her son had a moment of clarity just days before his death, which happened to be the last time she saw him alive.

“He said ‘Mom, I just want to tell you, you were right.’ And I said about what,” Stack recalls. “He said, ‘you probably don’t remember, but you told me many years ago that marijuana would hurt my brain. And it has ruined my mind and my life. And I’m really sorry, Mama. I love you.’ And I guess I thought he would tell me, you know, because he told me before that he felt like killing himself. And I guess I just thought he would tell me. So I probably missed it. This was, you know, probably suicidal. And it was probably him telling me goodbye. And I have to live with that because I missed it.”

After Johnny’s death, Laura formed Johnny’s Ambassadors, a not-for-profit organization that educates parents, teens, and communities about the dangers THC products.

Lincoln County’s Drug Alcohol Reduction Team (D.A.R.T) sponsored Stack’s presentation in Troy, which also included visits to Troy’s middle schools.

For more information about Johnny’s Ambassadors, go to https://johnnysambassadors. org/ I mean, they think that because of the cannabis induced psychosis, that maybe he thought he wouldn’t die, that maybe that number… made him think he was magical.