Letters to the Editor
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how much do I hate American parents?
Good God the self-righteousness of the "we must all follow the LAW and be GOOD SOLDIERS!!!" brigade. "For the CHILDREN!!!" they maintain.
Listen up moms and dads. Anything you did as a kid is okay for your kids to do. Did you live to tell about it? Well then they will too. Did you have sex before you were married? Couple of one-night stands where you can't even remember the person's name? Did you drink at ages 18, 19 and 20? How about 15, 16 and 17? Did you smoke pot, take shrooms, do lines, pop pills? Did you drive over the speed limit with no seat belt on?
Sure, sure you say, but things were "DIFFERENT" then! Some of those things weren't against the law then (and we know you're SO law-abiding--how about on your tax returns? how about those speed limits? Never go a mile over 65 do ya?) The weed was "weaker," cocaine is not as bad as crack, we didn't KNOW about seat belts, blah blah blah.
Fact is, you wanted to do fun things and take risks when you were young and so do young people now. Perhaps they want it even more considering what an utterly shitty world we have made for them.
This 15-year-old makes me puke. Self-righteous prig. Hope he gets a chronic illness which make him unable to hold down any medication given by mouth so that the only thing that helps is smoking the EVIL WEED. That would be justice. Fuck DARE for lying to our kids for decades now. Bunch of police department PROPAGANDA or have we forgotten the distinction between information and LIES?
The only thing this Mom did wrong was somehow fail to instill in her son an understanding of the entirely capricious nature of the law (one minute 18-year-olds can drink the next moment they can't, etc.) As Dickens said, THE LAW IS AN ASS. US law has upheld slavery of blacks and the second-class status of women. The law is VERY OFTEN absolutely WRONG, and it is obviously so with respect to our drug laws.
You can't make nature illegal. Pot is a weed that grows in the wild and is ingested in pure, unadulterated form. Please arrest God for putting this horrible plant on the planet, he is obviously a drug pusher.
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This situation reminds me a litle bit of a sequence from 1984
Anyone recall the Junior Anti-Sex League?
I have a lot of respect for the stories people have told about alcoholic parents. My own parents did not abuse alcohol, although two of my grandparents did, so thankfully, my only experience with alcoholic parents is second-hand. But I have heard and seen enough to know the negative ways many lives have been affected by the drink.
However, the fact that alcohol and cannabis are both drugs does not mean that they are logically interchangeable. Lets review a few attributes of both drugs...
Alcohol causes people to lose their faculties, and substantially depresses brain function. It causes people to black out and experience periods of lost memory. It causes people to lose all sense of social inhibition and say things that should remain unsaid. It encourages violent response to real or imagined provocations. It give its abusers a seeming license to act out on base impulses. And it can do all these things at once, which can compound the ramifications of the individual symptoms.
It is physiologically addictive.
None of the above attributes apply to long-term marijuana use. So many of the characteristics that cause alcohol to be damaging to interpersonal relationships are simply absent in pot. In fact, the greatest pot-related threat to families comes from law-enforcement, by a wide margin.
So to say "alcohol abusing parents are bad, ergo marijuana using parents are bad" is not an accurate or appropriate.
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Missing the point
The substance is unimportant. She could be addicted to lime jell-o, for all it matters.
The issue here is behavior -- of both mother and son. (And father, too, for that matter.)
Mother demonstrates many of the basic signs of an addict: manipulative, defensive to the point of paranoia. That she smokes for years, and *then* gets medical certification suggests that the back pain may well be an excuse. It seems like she'll do anything to preserve her high.
And son has called her on it. Is he being moralistic? A prig, perhaps? A jerk? Of course, he's 15. Look up jerk in the thesaurus: It says "see adolescent."
There must be more here than the LW knows, because as other writers point out, their families had drug-using parents and kids who went through DARE and survived just fine.
Still, the son is forcing a choice: The pot goes, or he goes. And he does have a point, if descriptions of the mother's behavior are accurate.
As a parent, which would you rather keep? And don't think he's necessarily bluffing. Show him the door? He may not walk through it for a year, or two or three. But he will walk through it, and he won't come back. (This is the point where I start going metaphorical; forgive me.)
This family has some big issues going on, and discussions about the propriety of drug use are off the real topic.
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Read the Letter!!!
Unbelievable!
Will people just read the god damn letter instead of projecting whatever life experiences they've had onto the LW and her situation!!
I'm not interested in the Great Marijuana Debate so much as a functioning family unit.
Two points which the maj don't seem to want to touch.
1) PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY
The 15 year old is judgmental. WEll, DOH! He's 15! Teenagers and children have strong (and often wrong) views because they lack the life experience to see the shades of grey that life is composed of. Right? Ok. The problem is what the parental response to this should be. Parents clearly shouldn't allow their children to run their lives, BUT THEY SHOULD PUT OUT THEIR CHILDREN FIRST! This is not a contradition!
EXAMPLE: Parents who divorce sometimes KNOW they are doing the right thing, but their children want them to stay together. Bad parenting is staying together cos your children want you to. But terrible parenting is telling your child to fuck off when they come to you with concerns and even anger. Frustration and anger are legitimate emotions and need examining - regardless of the cause, in fact they may need MORE examination if the cause seems tiny or irrational.
The role of a parent is to try and address the issue behind it. Maybe the 15 yr old is afraid his parents will get arrested, maybe he's tried drugs secretly and had a bad experience, maybe he's afraid the mum will turn out an addict, maybe he feels like he is being forced to cover for her and doesn't like lying, maybe there is another problem going on which he is projecting onto this, maybe (seeing his mum everyday unlike us) he thinks something is wrong with her.
OK - So why can't the mum sit with him and EXPLAIN? Tell him she loves and understands but x,y and z etc etc... I'm sorry the greatest sign that she has problems is when she tells him to MOVE OUT!! RED FLAGS! RED FLAGS! Kicking your 15 yr old out is pretty extreme anyway - does anyone understand the reality of life for most runaways? Which parent does that unless they have to! Even parents of drug addicts who are stealing from them and physically abusing them are loathe to do it.
RE the chronic pain: It is VERY RARE to find a child who enjoys seeing their parent in pain and does not want to relieve it. Children of alcoholics pour glasses out for their parents because they want to see 'mommy feel better'. Abused children protect their parents - out of love. It is so IMPROBABLE that (if properly explained) the boy would turn his back that it really makes me wounder what is going on.
Bringing me to my second point
2)ADDICTION
I'm actually shocked at the level of naivety being displayed on this board. YOU CAN BE ADDICTED TO ANYTHING! Once more for the ones at the back - YOU CAN BE ADDICTED TO ANYTHING!! Food, solitaire, jogging, reading, tv, legal painkillers, ANYTHING!! But it's impossible to be addicted to an illegal drug, right? Jesus wept! Is every pot user prepared to swear on their lives that there has never and will never be someone who uses pot irresponsibly? Or that no person who uses it can EVER do anything selfish or wrong? Or even be a bad communicator? Or a less than WONDERFUL parent? Get a grip - You don't even know every pot smoker in you r town, never mind the whole of America. As far as I know they are people too - some good, some bad and some seriously f***ed up. .
Let's say together - SHE'S NOT YOU. SHE'S NOT YOU. SHE'S NOT YOU.
Do people even hear how unbelievably narcissistic their self-righteousness is...
SHE CAN BE IN THE WRONG BECAUSE... SHE'S NOT YOU.