Hey everybody, Martha McCallum here, and this is the untold story.

And it's an untold story that I think about quite a bit, actually, when I see the stories that we tell you and report on

about young men committing horrific crimes, shootings across the country, even into the early

40s, you know, this age group probably from like 21 to 44, and whether or not there is a connection between the anxiety and loneliness and gaming

and pot nexus that may be driving some of what we're seeing because I know if you're like me,

you feel that covering a story about a mass shooting every few days doesn't make any

sense. There's something going on out there, and the more we peel back the layers and try to get

under who these lost young men are in America and get to the heart of it, it's going to keep going and going and going, is

my estimation, based on the intensity of these stories that we've covered a lot.

So it really caught my eye today when one of our finest reporters, Alexis McCannum, was taking on this story.

The link between the rise in marijuana use and big

problems for America's adolescence in 2025. So Alexis, thank you so much for joining us today.

You do such a great job covering your beat and crime stories and anti-Semitism at Columbia

and the Butler story in Pennsylvania. So you're one of our best young reporters and we're just, it's great to have you on today. So thank you for joining me. Thanks for having. So this is the story that you're digging in today. Tell us what you've learned. Well, so I think what you mentioned, when you talk about all these horrible things that have happened, we're talking about all these different shootings across the country and you start to peel back the layers. You kind of, according to some researchers, they might find a possible link because we're talking about extreme amounts of marijuana use with some of these recent gunmen. So you look at what happened in Minneapolis just the other week. I mean, that was only back in August. It's like the time flies. You think about what happened at that. At the Catholic Church. Yeah, the Catholic Church. These little kids are in there. The transgender gunman opens fire. And then, you know, everyone wants to know, well, what happened? What went wrong? Right. And so you dig into these people's past. And there was something specifically that stuck out to investigators. It was that Robin Westman said, in his own words, that gender, because he

had transitioned and weed really effed up his head. So he said it himself and he said he had

started using. He worked at a marijuana shop in Minneapolis up until just a few weeks before police

say he opened fire. So I think that's why investigators now with all this recent violence are

looking at how does the brain, you know, how is it impacted negatively by using marijuana? And it impacts, you know, the part of the brain that's also when they look at dementia and memory and things like that. It's the same area and the motivation. And so we talk about how people, you know, that smoke all that pot all the time. They don't go out. They don't talk to people

and they do use those video games. So that's kind of the link that we were looking into. And

researchers, as we were saying, mentioned that, you know, marijuana now is a lot different than

what it used to be. Like in the 90s, the early 2000s, it's a lot stronger. Yeah, it's a great

point. And obviously, you have to look at the different circumstances with these shooters.

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