Letters to the Editor
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Oh please
Medical Weed. In 1% of the cases that claim it in 1% of the places that assert it's not illegal. Come down here to Redneckistan and tell the cops about your medical need. $30,000 in legal bills later you'll wind up with 'only' a drug record.
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What's going on here???
What you teach kids when you openly smoke pot at home is that you're above the law. That you (and by extension they) have the right to decide which laws apply to you and them and which ones don't. That such a decision need not even rise to the level of conscientious objection -- that all you need to have decided is that the prohibited activity is harmless and enjoyable.
Or that you have a "bad back". There are plenty of legal, effective treatments for back trouble and there's not a chance in the world that the completely undisciplined woman described in this letter has even tried, much less, exhausted them before using her back pain to justify what was clearly a prior dependecy on pot.
By the arguments many people are making here, doesn't the kid in this letter now have an absolute right to never wear a seatbelt? To drink all he wants before he's 21? Can a parent buy the kid liquor if he promises to drink "harmlessly" at home?
Why not teach your kids that if there's a law you disagree with, you abide by the law until you get it changed?
Is there anyone out there who thinks there's any value in that lesson?
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"But It's Illegal" Well, so is Fellatio.
To all those folks who think the bottom line is the illegality of using I suggest the following.
In my state, fellatio is also illegal. Now, should I give up fellating or being fellated by whoever I want just because it is illegal? Pfffffffffff....That's just crazy talk.
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Dear Do I Dare -
Cary's letter is all you need to know. I'm chiming in an afterword. I only read thru page 6 of the letters, so I may be repeating.
Back pain can respond to meditation techniques used by Jon Kabat-Zinn. If your friend says, "What! Meditation for MY pain? I need DRUGS!", this I take to be essentially diagnostic of addiction. Doctors refer pain patients who are beyond help from pain meds to Kabat-Zinn. He has books, and local pain clinics may well use his or similar techniques. (But some just deal drugs.)
You and your friend's husband are Al-Anon members. You might want to check it out.
No word from you on the 13 year old son. How's he with all this? The 15 year old carries possible family addiction tell-tale markers of know-it-all stridency and control; and is he doing the laundry? which could be cool, but could be another one of those markers, of boys being, not so much just boys, but parents.
Your nephews are Alateen members. It would likely settle them out a great deal.
It's tough, what you can and can't do in this situation, and her so blinded by desperate love for her doobie; more than for her son; maybe for all of you. Maybe she'll get help, maybe not. Almost because of its denial-seducing seeming benignity, pot addiction is one of the toughest. But by all means express your deep concern for her in this situation.
I didn't pick up addiction as quick as Cary because I didn't hear you talking about lack of contact with your friend; lack of contact when you're with her. Lack of personal, inter-personal, contact; that she's not quite all there, and you sorely miss her. (Potheads, of course, say she's all there; supra-there. Yeah, yeah.) But I ask you, in as kind a way as possible, Are you all there? Is something intruding between you and your own contact-making apparatus? Are you not contacting her lack of contact? Here's this huge potential disruption in your world, specially with someone who is clearly a dear friend, and I hear you upset by the artifacts of this more than the moment-to-moment experience of you and her; which, I assume, used to be rich and now not so much.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a drunk, a recovering drunk, and I'm family and friends with many drunks and addicts. Plenty of lack of contact on my part, early and late. Practice makes, well, better.
Best,
Monty
(More, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")
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What's really going on here
"Why not teach your kids that if there's a law you disagree with, you abide by the law until you get it changed?"
Too bad you weren't around to say that to those poor misguided people sitting in at lunch counters and riding those buses down south a few years ago. You could have saved them a few deaths, some busted heads and a few church bombings. But nothing would have changed.
Teach your children that laws are made by humans and humans are frequently prejudiced, usually acting in their own interests rather than for the greater good of society, and often flat wrong.
The same goes for the "laws" made by behavioral psychologists.
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cut them both some slack...
She's in severe pain and he's being a 15-year-old.
Her substance use may or may not be problematic in and of itself. But she needs to give the kid some respect and let him know that she DOES take his concerns seriously.
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Sounds like the kid objects to the fact of her smoking, and not any obvious/negative 'pothead' behavior
If the mother were totally - or even partially - tuned out to her family, negligent in her duties to the family (and by duties I mean more than having supper on the table or doing the dishes, I mean providing love and interest and support to family member), or is no longer taking optimal care of herself, then the kid has a legitimate argument to want her to stop. If she were slurring her words, unable to take part in conversation, distant from the entire family, spending too much time 'away' (whether out of the house, or in the house sleeping or zoned out to music) the kid would have a legitimate beef.
But it sounds like the kid freaked out because he found a pipe. Not because his mom is phyiscally, psychically or metaphorically 'gone'. It sounds like his issue is that he doeesn't want her smoking because he believes smoking is wrong.
Let's change the scenario from pot to junk food. Let's say mom eats a lot of junk food and is obese. Would it be OK for him to threaten to move out if she didn't lose weight?
Oh, but pot is *illegal*. Well, mom doesn't agree with that law. She honors it to the extent that she doesn't grow it, sell it, only uses it in the privacy of her home. We're not seeing any evidence of it debilitating her. Did she wander off for a smoke while the oven caught fire and then, unable to put it out, they lost their kitchen? Did her other son nearly drown in the bathtub, unattended? Did she get the crazy idea to paint the ceiling and fall off a ladder while stoned, thus injuring herself? It doesn't sound to me like she has incapacitated herself or the family in any ways that would raise concern about her smoking.
Instead, she smokes, her kid doesn't want her to, and he is trying, through brutal generalship, to make her stop, i.e., make her live the way he thinks she should live because he, unlike her, does not question the laws regarding pot. He isn't old enough yet to wonder why alcohol and tobacco and guns are totally legal despite the enormous burden they place on health care and other social systems. He doesn't know about powerful
tobacco, firearms and alcohol PACs. He just knows what he's been told about pot, it sounds scary, he bought it, and now he doesn't want his mom to do it.
The kid isn't be a jerk. I think he's being loving. He has seen the story of pot as a 'gateway' drug, knows it's illegal, and he's scared his mom is but a step away from heroine or crack or meth, or jail. He wants her to stop because he doesn't want those things to happen to her, or to him - if those things happen to her, it would ruin his high school years for sure. So there's some selfishness here, too. Of course there is. That makes him human, not a uniquely selfish adolescent. We'd all feel this way if someone in our household we couldn't control represented, in our view, a threat to our way of life. We'd want to control them, make them stop the stupid behavior, eliminate the threat to themselves and ourselves.
I think the mom and dad should sit down and talk to the kid frankly about pot use. Why she thinks it's OK in the way she does it, how she'd feel if he did it, what the difference is between a 40 year old smoking and 15-year-old, the issue of pot as a gateway drug, the merits and dangers of pot relative to drinking, smoking, overeating. Maybe they can allay some of the kids fears. More importantly, he will learn that he has a voice in the family, and his voice will be listened to with respect and love and compassion..but that this doesn't always necessarily lead to having his way. He is free to disapprove and free to leave the house due to that disapproval....but he then bears some responsibility for rejecting his mom the way she is. She wouldn't bear all the responsibility for the rift simply because she refused to stop smoking pot, and that's something he needs to understand and accept. We don't always get our way, even when our way seems, to us, to obviously be the right or even the only way.
The discussion should include the questioning of authority and have some examples of when it has been a necessary and great thing. After all, there was at time when laws against women v voting and owning property, laws enforcing segregation and making miscegenation, laws against homosexuals marrying were considered normal, right and good. Luckily, people questioned these. The laws about pot are less of a social issue, but no less a reasonable one to question, especially with alcohol and tobacco being perfectly legal and far more abused, with far greater consequences.
The kid doesn't feel listened to. He also is experiencing some cognitive dissonance - he has been told to respect authority. The government, an ultimate authority to a kid, says drugs arne bad and illegal. The kid respected the authority behind that message, and has found that another authority - his mother - is defying that authority. How confusing. And since the first authority (government) has the power to put the second authority in jail for disobedience, the kid thinks it's reasonable to defer to the more powerful authority. It's time to give him something else to think about - not just ask him to accept his mom's pot smoking, but to give him a broader framework in which to question the how and why of whether he'll accept it or not.