Your kids, marijuana, and their own life.

well, i basically concur with what most of said. my parents smoked openly around me and my brother all the time, and i can truly say i never noticed. i actually had this conversation with my mom last night; she said i was real cool and quiet about their smoking. the truth is, i really never payed attention to it!
duh duh dum...that is...until our fifth grade experienced a dare program extravaganza. boy oh boy, the beginning of the rest of my life!
why, pot was on the same table as...needles! and crackpipes! and crack (fake crack, of course)! and of course, joints, and the vegetative substance they contain.
then they burned the smell of the herb over the frigging school radiator, *just so we'd be able to identify it if ever threatened* have you ever heard of such a crazy thing? then they played whitney houston's 'didn't we almost have it all' song, and showed a movie about a girl addicted to pot smoking and hiding pitifully behind a tree.
see, people, i remember this although it was years ago. this day fucked me up! i went home and really flipped my shit. all of a sudden, my parents regular actions were PROOF that they were addicts, crackheads, for god sakes! DARE showed me that, for sure, herb was as bad as herion.
which brings me to my next faux pas...in the sixth grade, my dad asked me for my opinion on what was the worst drug. i told him hash! he freaked out. i can't believe i even thought that.
so, after my freakout, i told my parents that i'd call the police if i ever saw them smoking again. isn't that crazy - for years i didn't even bat an eye at it.
my parents were quite nervous around me and stayed kamakazee for the next bunch of years, which was fine with me, because they were so scared of me, that when i was old enough to start 'borrowing' their stash, they were too chicken to say anything.
oh, the power. i never had any understanding of what i was doing. being programed to feel this way, and later, to contradict these feelings so blatantly.
now it's all good and in the open. i asked my mom why they didn't feel the need to level with me either when i was old enough to understand, or, after my 5th grade freakout. she told me that it's because i'm such a big 'yenta' that i'd surely have the whole school knowing that my parents were great big tokers. we wouldn't want that.

so, rounding this story up. my parents were between a rock and a hardplace. not telling their kids straight out left us for confusion and panic upon realization. yet, telling us might have gotten them in trouble. i commend our family dynamic of my parents smoking pot regularly, in a way that made it 'no big deal.'

something funny that i remember from those days was that sunday evening was definitely pot time. it was also chinese food time. for years i likened my parents' smoking to the smell of burnt lo mein. no joke. they'd make us stay home to set the table for dinner. and that darn lo mein was always most fragrant of all!

i will be open with my kids, and explain to them the joys and perils of the herb. i will treat them like i'd wish to be treated; ignorance is no fun. my parents always told me that cigarettes and alcohol were bad bad bad. they suggested pot, knowing that i was a pretty responsible teen.

 

I live in Canada, work in a liquor store and I have never heard of a law allowing parents to give their children booze. Under age drinking is illegal.

On the topic on cannabis...I have always been completely honest with my daughter about this. I have explained the pros and cons, the history of the plant and prohibition. I will probably toke with her when she is older, if she shows interest.

 

You know, I was definitely raised in the counterculture. I'm the oldest kid in my family. (The rough-draft.) There were times when my parents and the adults around me were very open. I think I was older than most people before I even figured out that herb was illegal.


Then, for a while, my mom fluctauated between really open and the Nervous Hippy Parent Party Line: "It's for adults, not kids. Someday you can make your own decision, but not before you're 18."

At a party one of her friends offered me a joint when I was seventeen and said, "Here, kid, do you do this?" I said, "Just a minute. Let me ask (my mom) if I admit it to her friends yet." She said no and sent me upstairs to do it alone. What a dork.

So, then, with my younger brothers, she was WAY more permissive. Now one of them blames his every last personal problem on that. I think that is just bullshit. My mom always used it responsibly. She always told me that it was a sacrament. She never drove a car when she was stoned. She would get stoned and turn up the music and clean the house, for crying out loud. Not a dangerous criminal.

Also, no alcohol in our house. There was rarely any sort of speech about how dumb alcohol is, no prohibition campaign, but it just wasn't around in our house.

Now, I have known people whose parents buy into all the DARE bullshit who turned into meth addicts. So, don't try to tell me that because parents are honest with their kids about herb, especially if they explain that it's to be used in a responsible way, that their kids are going to turn to hard drugs. That's bullshit. My cousins, whose dad is from Europe where this is often done, drank wine with dinner as teenagers, but they were told that herb is bad. Now they're alcoholics. I don't think that they're alcoholics because they drank wine with dinner. I think you could drink wine with dinner and leave it at that.

The point that I'm trying to make is that I think that if people are going to abuse alcohol or drugs, they're going to do it. The best thing you can do is educate your kids about what really is dangerous and what isn't.

And just as important, educate them about mainstream culture and how brainwashed the cops, the people at school, the neighbors, perhaps, etcetera are. They need to understand that even though in our culture we understand that things are this way, that this is a sacrament and a medicine, and a plant with such vast industrial potential, we also understand that we live in a larger culture that can still throw people in jail for using it.

If you don't level with your kids, and they figure out that you were lying to them, they're not going to trust you.

What if they think, "Well, my parents were wrong about weed. Maybe they're wrong about meth, too."?

Or what if they lose respect for you because you snuck it while you told them it was bad?

I was raised around it and for the longest time now I don't do it. I still think it's just fine. I think maybe it would help my epilepsy.

So, if anyone thinks that they or their siblings abuse hard drugs because their parents only used weed, well, I wanna go on the record as saying I think that's bullshit. We're grown-ups now and we need to take responsibility for our own actions. Some addicts will try to blame their pot-smoking parents for their drug use, others will try to blame their super-uptight parents for driving them to do drugs. It's just a way to avoid taking responsibility.

I also don't condone, by any means, however, parents putting their desire for weed or any other substance before their family's needs. If you are making your family go without something they need so that you can get stoned, well, you suck. You are the reason that some people think weed is bad.

Responsibility is the key, here.

 

it gets even better they want todays Hitlers youth to turn in the parents "dont you just love the goverment"

 

Thats the truf. My boss smokes herb, and he is a very successful businessmen who went from having nothing to being able to put his 3 kids through college, now that is successful!

 

levi, that was an excellent post! thank you!

 

Many parents that had kids born in the 80s that were raised in the the 60s and 70s did and do act cool about it about drugs with theyr kids . But they knew about the drug scene . others had bad experience with drugs themself so they over react and act just like parents of the 60s generation some even worse.

 

'I once had a talk to an ex heroin junkie. his message among other things was, that he probably would have never turned to other drugs, if the education about weed in germany back then, would have been the one of today.


Back then you were told that you can die due to the use of marijuana. And he figured out: you don't. So then one has to try the other things too, maybe you don't die from them.

so today, you're told it's illegal, and that it is basically a lil bit more dangerous than alcohol. (hahaha, but still better then YOU DIE FROM IT),and you're taught that it might lead to worse drugs. In my opinion, alcohol and cigarettes do the same thing. Most people try them before pot, at least here in europe. Alcohol is a lot easier get, even as a minor.

As someone stated before, it is very commom to drink a glass of wine or beer with dinner occasionally. And I don't think there's anything wrong with it, the same way a responsible use of weed is ok.


At home I was always told "DRUGS ARE BAD", with a father who killed a whole bottle of whine for dinner. (By the way he was the one who yelled the most at me, for comming home totally stoned, but I figured that he forgot over time) They scared the hell out of me with some stories, but later I realized that some of the things were really exagerated, noone had ever offered me a shot of heroin or a fake tatoo with lsd on at the age of 10.
So I got really fascinated by weed when I was about 13, that was in the middle of the 90s, when weed became very popular in germany, and you even saw people doing it in public, in the middle of the day. It's not legal, but the laws became a lot less strikt then.
I didn't get a chance to try it before I was 15. Now I'd say, this is a little early, but I was really educated about drugs back then, I barely know more today. I taught myself a lot, since I really was interessted in the subject.
Despite I started at such an early age, I have never been stuck to it.


I don't really know what I will tell my kids. I don't want to encourage them to do anything of that sort, but I also don't want to scare them. Maybe I will use the "smoke with your parent's or don't"-techniqe. This is what my parents were doing with me and alcohol. (Your kids don't get taken away unless they really see that they are really keep-drawn.)