Cannabis-derived smoking drug marijuana, once confined to fringe attendees of elderly "hippie" music festivals and 1960s-era "dead heads," has now firmly implanted itself in America's youth culture, as teenagers embrace its "organic" marketing label and retro appeal. But surely this fresh-from-the-plant leafy green fertilizer-intensive drug will confine itself to our nation's rural areas, right? That's where you're wrong, parents—it's already making its way into America's largest city.

An exclusive report from the urban New York Post reveals that New York City teenagers, in a rebellion against the typical teen life spent imbibing the city's cultural treasures like the Metropolitan Museum, are taking inspiration from their suburban and rural counterparts and trying marijuana themselves. The plant, known on the street as "wood" or "heavy," is grown elsewhere by enterprising entrepreneurs, who then ship it into the "concrete jungle" of New York—the last place one would expect to find this agricultural product. Says the Post:

The percentage of city teens who get high on weed jumped to 17.7 percent last year - by far the highest rate during Hizzoner's 10-year tenure, according to a new health survey obtained by The Post. The blunt figure is up from the 12.3 percent who smoked weed in 2005.

(It should be noted that the passage above utilizes colloquial street slang in which "get high" refers to injecting a drug intravenously with a needle, and "weed" refers to marijuana.) How do teenagers raised in such an urban environment gain access to exotic plant species, much less learn that smoking the "seeds" of the marijuana plant wrapped inside a construction paper "blunt" is the key to a hallucinogenic "trip" which often devolves into underage sexual exploration or the reading of particularly salacious comic books? Police are unsure. But it's safe to assume that if marijuana has made its way all the way into "The Big Apple," no child—no matter how musical or creative—is safe from its "skunk"-flavored taste. Is your child's own Big Apple, in other words, hollowed out and stuffed tightly with marijuana stems in typical fashion?

As a nonpartisan news outlet unaffiliated with law enforcement and not participating in any sort of law enforcement "outreach to the media" programs whatsoever, we urge New York City teenagers to email us with tales of their own illegal drug purchasing, including the name and location of the illegal drug dealer in question, and any extant surreptitious recordings of the illegal drug transaction itself. Where, when, and from whom have you purchased illegal "magic plants," teens? Sharing is caring as they say on the street, and not within the law enforcement community, to which we are unconnected.

[NYP. Photo of two edible marijuana "splaffs" via tanjila/ Flickr]