Kids smoking marijuana

Don't do drugs if you don't want your kids to do drugs. Simple!

It really is that simple, Mom. Kids tend to imitate their parents. Is that true? "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," someone said.

Here is my experience with my kids around the subject of marijuana:
One summer evening when the windows were all open I was finishing up in the kitchen when I smelled something different coming from outside. We had just finished supper and it was my turn on dishes so the kids had all gone outdoors. They were mostly young teens at the time.

We lived in the country then, and I was very accustomed to noticing the smells of rural living. The different types of farm animals were recognized by their particular odors; the smell of honeysuckles came early in May; the smell of newly mown hay meant it must be June. This smell coming in through the screen door was different from any of those that I was used to.

How strange an odor, I thought, as I walked to the door and sniffed the air.

Then it suddenly dawned on me: the smell was unmistably marijuana. This was the seventies, and I wasn't born yesterday))). Perhaps a car had driven past with someone smoking a joint, I thought. I stepped out into the evening light. All was quiet except for an early cricket or two testing their signals. The smell of marijuana was stronger. Could it be coming from the barn, I wondered? Where were the kids? I stepped off the porch and walked toward the barn, fifty yards away.

"Hi fellas," I said to my son and his pal who lived down the road. If you, dear reader, know only one thing about farm life you need to know that any type of fire in a country barn is --and always has been absolutely ver boten. This is true in every country in the world. And every child who ever lived on a farm knows this. So when these two farm boys saw me staring at them, caught not only holding a lighted joint in hand, but holding a lighted joint in their hand in the barn, their eyes almost bugged out of their heads and they gasped in unison. One threw the marijuana cigarette onto the dirt floor and ground it out vigorously with his shoe.

"Dad!" my son gurgled,"it's not what you think!" he said. "We were not smoking it. We were just trying it out!"

"John," I said, calmly, to the neighbor boy, you can go home now. He glanced quickly at ST and ran out.

"Let's go," I nodded my head toward the house.

"I didn't ---,"

"Be quiet," I said, now pointing to the kitchen chair. "Sit there." My brain was spinning. What should I do? I knew that this was another crucial point in my son's life. Like the "kids smoking" incident before (see archives) I would have to handle this in a way that would, hopefully, teach him that smoking marijuana was not okay. My thinking was that if he could learn a hard lesson now it might save him from a future of addiction to drugs later.

HERE IS HOW I HANDLED IT

I called the other kids to the kitchen and we all sat down at the table. No doubt they could sense an air of trouble in the room. I nodded toward ST and said, "He has decided that he wants to smoke marijuana, what do you think of that?"

All eyes were big and round.
You could have heard a pin drop!
Nobody moved.

"It's against the law to smoke marijuana, as you know," I began my speech. "ST here, is trying to get into trouble with the Law. But because we are in this particular family, our rule is that when one of us gets into trouble we are all in trouble together. Because not one of us will ever have to be in trouble by ourselves. We'll always stand with each other."

Heads nodded their understanding of our unwritten family "constitution."

"So if ST wants to smoke marijuana, we are all going to smoke marijuana!" I turned and walked out of the silent kitchen and came back right away with a small baggie, my own personal stash.

I sat down and silently rolled a joint. The kids looked at each other in dismay. I lit it and took a little drag.

"So here is the deal," I announced, "from now on it is okay for all of us to smoke marijuana! What do you think of that?"

"I'm not going to," said CL, the oldest.
"Me neither," said SL.
All heads were nodding in agreement with the older sister.

"Oh yes we will," I assured them. "Because if one of us gets in trouble for smoking marijuana we allll get in trouble for it," I repeated. "And here is the deal," I continued. "Any time one of you wants to smoke marijuana, it is going to be okay from now on, --but the deal is that we will all smoke it TOGETHER right here at the kitchen table.

"You can't smoke it with your friends and you can't smoke it away from this kitchen table. And if any one of you ever tells a teacher at school or ANYONE ELSE that I let you smoke marijuana, I will deny it completely. And who do you think they will believe? You or me?

"And furthermore, if anyone ever tells another human person about this deal we have in our family, you will alllll be grounded from everything except going to school, --until you are eighteen years old.

"That means grounded from visiting friends.
"Grounded from movies.
"Grounded from friends coming here.
"Grounded from EVERYTHING FOREVER
"until you are eighteen years old and you move out."

The youngest started to cry.
"Hush that!" I ordered. "ST is in trouble here and we're not going to have him be in trouble alone." She stopped.

I handed the joint toward the first one on my right.

She pulled back. "I don't want it."

"You are going to take a puff on it. We are not going to have ST get into trouble by himself. We are all in this together." I offered it again.

She put it to her lips and gingerly drew in some smoke and instantly coughed it back out.

I handed the joint to the next one. She took it. "I am NOT going to do this," she said.

"You ARE going to do this," I said. "We can't have ONE of us in this family to be in trouble by himself!"

She looked at the joint, then at me, then back at the joint. She took a light puff and blew it out.

The marijuana made its way around the members of the family. When it came back to me I blunted it out in a saucer and went over to the sink and sent it down the disposal.

"That's all," I said to them.

Getting up from the table silently some giving me a look of disgust and they went to their rooms. I never heard another word about it.

Now, fast-forward to 2008.
I do not know if this was the right way to handle the problem, of course. I was secretly praying for a solution to the immediate problem that night.
Right or wrong back then, the fact is that none of my kids has ever gotten into trouble over marijuana.
Of course, I do not know everything they have ever done while they were away from my eyes, but the fact is, --we have no drug addiction in the family. Except for me --later.

But that's another story for another day.

Bottom line
DAD'S ADVICE: Don't do drugs.
xoxo
Dad

There's some pretty good information about kids and drugs at
http://www.talkingwithkids.org/drugs.html