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Mark smoked his first joint when he was 12, under a bridge in Terrebonne.

He had a lot of problems back then, with his parents’ impending divorce and the bullying at school, but few friends. So when someone wanted to hang out with him, he didn’t really care why. He wanted to be wanted.

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But one joint led to another, then onto harsher drugs, and soon Stoner Mark became Junkie Mark.

He dropped out of school, went in and out of jail — for dealing, and repeatedly trying to break into his mom’s house — before doing a third and hopefully last stint in rehab.

He is one of the 500 teenagers who entered Portage rehab centres in Quebec, Ontario or New Brunswick in the last year — 88 per cent of them addicted to cannabis, among other drugs.

“When you smoke you can either go a good way or a bad way,” says Mark, now 18. “You could become a good stoner and keep going to school or work, or a bad stoner like me, who does everything and fucks everything up … My problem is if I start, I can’t stop.”