Letters to the Editor
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-- rosedawn_scott
By the way, I absolutely support the availability of medical marijuana. If anything the abuse/misuse of certificates allowing its use enrages me more, because it threatens the ability of those for whom marijuana has been shown to be genuinely helpful to get the drug.
It's a bit like heroin, which is used as a painkiller in Europe, especially for burns and cancer and in hospices. In the US this very useful drug remains illegal, in part because of the abuse issues.
Most drugs have side-effects -- marijuana has some noted ones. When you have MS, glaucoma, aids, cancer (and the appetite and drug problems associated with it), the side-effects are a reasonable price to pay for the benefits that marijuana provides.
However, on its face this Mother is not taking the marijuana for back pain, for which it would do little good -- rather she wangled a medical marijuana certificate, the same way some people wangle a handicapped sticker for their car, while being healthy, leading to suspicious looks at anyone who can walk and has one.
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Kids Come First!
It's as simple as that. Her 15 year old son is old and smart enough (and obviously loves his mom enough) to sense that there is a problem here. I don't think it's a matter of him being judgemental, paranoid (although being in possesion of pot is against the law, folks), or resenting the extra responsibilities he's taking on in the house. It's more of the fact that he's losing his mom (Carey nailed that by the way). I am an adult child of an alcoholic; by the time I was 18 I was so fed up with Dad's drinking that I didn't speak to him for a year. I stopped taking his calls and refused to see him because it felt like he was telling me to "fuck off" for years. That what parents do when they choose a substance over their children, and that is what this mom is doing to her son! The delusion of her pot use being different from alcohol is ridiculous. If you smoke pot EVERY DAY you have a problem, just like drinking EVERY DAY is a problem. Teenagers know the difference. Do you guys honestly think this kid wants to run the house? Hell no! He just wants to be a kid, and that's difficult when your mom is too busy getting high to be there for you. To quote Carey again, he wants his mom back. Regarding the pain issue, I'm sure Junior sees through that as well. If she was just toking for pain management it wouldn't be an issue. However, when Mom is smoking so much that he feels that he's taking a back seat to a plant, that can't be ignored. Those of you calling the son a "narc" have forgotten the reality of children being a priority.
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Exactly right
This could turn into the same type of immature, annoying self-righteousness one occasionally sees in a precocious child lecturing adults on why they shouldn't smoke cigarettes.
I know just what you mean, Samlor. I was one of those immature, annoying teenagers. I begged my mom to quit, in a fit of self-absorbed narcissism. My mother, quite appropriately, ignored me. What did I know? She continued smoking happily until the day she got lung cancer. You can imagine how chagrined I was at my ill-conceived self-righteousness then! While I was caring for her, my father, also a chain smoker, went to the hospital with emphysema. He had to be put on a respirator. The doctors gave him a 20% chance of survival. Nothing like shuttling between two dying parents to teach a teenager not to be so self-centered! I watched my mother waste away and die in that hospital bed. My father somehow survived, although physically disabled, for several years, until he too finally succumbed to his illness.
So let me tell you, samlor, I'll stop being immature, annoying and self-righteous when you give me my parents back. Deal?
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It's only pot
I've been a pothead for over 40 years. I also was a daytime stay at home dad who had a large hand in raised three wonderful, well adjusted, productive young adults... all while openly smoking (and growing) pot around the home.
It's the hysterical insanity of the DARE program that is to blame for this mess. They have no one to blame but their own easily debunked by experience horror stories.
My children were raised in a household that honored thinking for yourself and were thus immunized against the foolishly misguided scare tactics of the DARE program. They wore the shirts as an ironic statement, having learned from an early age that just because some nominal authority figure claims something to be so, doesn't necessarily mean that it is.
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Respecting your elders
Something else:
This whole letter is about a child not coming to grips with the idea that they don't get a say in the lives of their parents.
LW doesn't tell us how this works, exactly, but my experience has always been that couples have a system! The mother may be doing something for her husband that gets her off the hook for not having a job and getting high most of the time. Maybe he's hard to deal with. Maybe he likes her being high and goofy. It might be a lot of things, but every couple has a system and those rules were set up long before Jr. arrives on the scene.
I was furious at my parents when I was 15 because they seemed distant from each other, and not in love. But they had a system, and as I got older, I realized that both of them put a pretty high premium on independence. And high premiums always come with trade offs.
There comes a moment in every kid's life when they realize that their parents have gotten together out of something less like love and more like commerce. They've worked out a deal, and sometimes deal-making isn't all beautiful or even healthy. But the relationship between a couple *does* trump the relationship between a child and a parent.
So when I hear most of you criticizing the mother, I think you don't know your place. If the father is OK with her behavior, then the son should fall in line. He has to learn to respect how hard it is to craft a long term relationship, and how it compromises people who have the best intentions. Love requires compromise, and not always in the nice sense of the word.
I'm not religious in the slightest, but I still believe in respecting your parents. They have a system, and the system produced you. You have an obligation to make your own system, and to make improvements. Junior is going to have a nice, strong sense of how substance abuse can subtly limit a person's life. As he grows up, he should learn to be thankful for his parents, warts and all.