Word: marijuana
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What should the boomers tell their children about marijuana? Should the parents be candid about their own pot use when young? On what authority can the parents persuade their children to avoid pot when the parents have made it to full adulthood more or less seemingly intact, none the worse for their youthful indulgences...
During the '70s, when a certain amount of marijuana burnout from the '60s became evident, pot fell into relative disfavor. But in the past decade, media stories registering disapproval of marijuana have tapered off. It has hardly discredited the substance that Head Boomer Bill Clinton, after stating four years ago that he hadn't inhaled, told an MTV audience that he wishes he could have done so. The President's sneaking snickering line (a kid still putting one over on his parents) suggested the boomers' ambivalence about pot and a kind of time-warping refusal to see it or themselves...
...case against marijuana remains relatively undramatic. It is true that the new generation of weed is stronger than what the boomers remember; that potency means it takes fewer puffs to get high, thus cutting down on damage to the respiratory system, for example. On the other hand, stronger pot and higher kids lead to more reckless driving and car accidents. It is true that smoking pot is less harmful than heavy drinking and does not threaten one's life, as do addictions to harder drugs. Proselytical pot smokers love to point out that a fatal overdose would require...
Apologies and rationales for marijuana are often ingenious, sometimes fervent, and in their essence, when applied to marijuana use by adolescents, dangerously wrong. The stage of development through which a child passes from ages 12 to 18 is critical. Adolescence is the labor that gives birth to the adult. It is a painful, indispensable process. Adolescence quite precisely requires the pain and difficulty of learning in order to come out well. Among the lessons, of course, are how to love and support others and how to be responsible...
When people are stoned on marijuana, they tend to focus on one thing at a time: the food, the music, the dog. Conversation deteriorates. More important, says Steve Sussman, a drug-abuse researcher and associate professor at U.S.C., "you don't learn how to cope with real life. You don't learn how to experience life in real terms, to feel bad normally. Let's say you smoked marijuana heavily from age 16 to 26, then stopped. The way you process life events emotionally after that may be more like a 16-year-old." Could it be that the famous...