Why Vaping Around Babies and Children Is More Dangerous Than Many Parents Realize

At Recovering Hope Treatment Center, family-centered care isn’t a tagline—it’s a lived experience. From onsite trauma-informed daycare to coordinated prenatal care and walking trails where moms and children can reconnect, every part of our model is designed to support healing without separation. Because when a mother heals, a family begins to thrive.

Emerging research is challenging the assumption that cannabis supports long-term trauma recovery. A recent 12-week study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that individuals with both PTSD and cannabis use disorder who achieved sustained abstinence experienced significantly greater reductions in PTSD symptoms than those who continued using. While preliminary, the findings suggest that ongoing cannabis use may slow improvement in key areas like avoidance, negative mood, and hyperarousal. In early recovery, sharing data like this isn’t about coercion—it’s about informed consent, clinical transparency, and helping clients make decisions grounded in evidence rather than assumption.

When public tragedy happens, it does not stay outside the therapy room. In this piece, Carmichael Finn explores what clinical supervisors owe their staff during moments of collective grief—offering practical, ethical guidance for leading with steadiness when both clinicians and clients are impacted at the same time.

Emerging research is challenging the assumption that cannabis supports long-term trauma recovery. A recent 12-week study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that individuals with both PTSD and cannabis use disorder who achieved sustained abstinence experienced significantly greater reductions in PTSD symptoms than those who continued using. While preliminary, the findings suggest that ongoing cannabis use may slow improvement in key areas like avoidance, negative mood, and hyperarousal. In early recovery, sharing data like this isn’t about coercion—it’s about informed consent, clinical transparency, and helping clients make decisions grounded in evidence rather than assumption.

Vaping around babies and children isn’t harmless. In this article, Sadie Broekemeier, MA, LADC, LPCC, explains how secondhand and thirdhand vape exposure can affect children’s health, why developing lungs and brains are especially vulnerable, and what caregivers can do to reduce risk and keep kids safe.By Carmichael Finn, MA, LMFT, LADC, AADCR-MN | Recovering Hope Executive Director

Vaping around babies and children isn’t harmless. In this article, Sadie Broekemeier, MA, LADC, LPCC, explains how secondhand and thirdhand vape exposure can affect children’s health, why developing lungs and brains are especially vulnerable, and what caregivers can do to reduce risk and keep kids safe.By Carmichael Finn, MA, LMFT, LADC, AADCR-MN | Recovering Hope Executive Director

Decades of alcohol use don’t just form habits—they reshape the brain systems that regulate reward, impulse control, and stress. This article translates a complex neuroscience study on alcohol use disorder and the endocannabinoid system into practical, clinician-friendly insight, explaining why motivation alone often fails, why relapse risk rises under stress, and why structure matters more than willpower early in recovery.
By Carmichael Finn, MA, LMFT, LADC, AADCR-MN | Recovering Hope Executive Director

At Recovering Hope, we believe saving lives must always come before ideology. In this piece, Carmichael Finn examines the troubling return of “moral hazard” thinking in overdose prevention—and why discouraging messages like “never use alone” puts people at greater risk, not less. Grounded in evidence, ethics, and real-world clinical experience, this article makes a clear case for harm reduction as an act of care, dignity, and responsibility. It speaks directly to professionals, families, and communities who understand that connection, not stigma, is what keeps people alive long enough to recover.

At Recovering Hope, we believe saving lives must always come before ideology. In this piece, Carmichael Finn examines the troubling return of “moral hazard” thinking in overdose prevention—and why discouraging messages like “never use alone” puts people at greater risk, not less. Grounded in evidence, ethics, and real-world clinical experience, this article makes a clear case for harm reduction as an act of care, dignity, and responsibility. It speaks directly to professionals, families, and communities who understand that connection, not stigma, is what keeps people alive long enough to recover.

In this article, Carmichael McKinley Finn, Executive Director at Recovering Hope, licensed therapist, addiction counselor, and adjunct faculty member, examines the federal government’s decision to designate illicit fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Drawing on frontline clinical and leadership experience, the piece explores why this framing raises deep concerns within behavioral health, how it risks repeating past policy failures, and where it could, if applied with clear guardrails, shift accountability toward the supply chains that profit from addiction rather than the people who need care.