Word: pots
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Among kids who admit they can't control their pot smoking, trouble at home often lurks in the background. Even in Chicago's relatively tranquil North Shore, dysfunction blooms in a thousand ways. Drew, for instance, a thoughtful 16-year-old junior who began getting high in the eighth grade, has had trouble handling marijuana from the start. He claims that his absent father once had a substance-abuse problem. By the ninth grade, he says, "my priorities were totally screwed up. I didn't even buy the books I needed. I was selling pot in the boys' room...
When school was out, Drew gave his demons free rein: he rented a cheap cottage in Wisconsin with some friends and laid into a quarter-pound of pot and lots of booze. "We got sick all over everything--it was definitely my failure self. I was like a dog that had been tied up in front of a steak and then finally let loose." Late last summer, a grandparent interceded to put him in a residential treatment center out of state. A week after his return, he says, he was using again...
...vice into a twisted virtue. Bolstered by a smattering of existentialism, Beat poetry and rock 'n' roll, Drew and plenty of teenagers like him justify what they do as a glorification of immediate pleasure over conventional restraint, a familiar theme from the '60s. For Drew, smoking copious quantities of pot confers membership in the select club of "the failures," people who were dealt a good hand of money, talent and support but who opt for a path of all-but-deliberate self-destruction...
...summer, Michael says, "I realized this wasn't good for me," and he stopped smoking. In what he now describes as a cry for help, he came clean with his parents and told them about the pot, the acid, the mushrooms, everything. "I thought they'd help me, but they were furious," he says. Michael has shelved further attempts to bridge the gap. "It's one thing to punish me and another to alienate me," he says. "Now there's no way I'm going to talk straight with them again. I do, and I'm heading right...
Many parents seem similarly unable to turn their outrage about drug use into a clear and compelling message. When Marta, a willowy junior who sports a nose ring, was caught smoking pot on the street last spring, her mother arrived at the police station in a fury. "She just kept slapping me in the face, left and right," the 17-year-old remembers. But the anger only went so far. "My mom and I didn't tell my dad," Marta says. "He would have gone ballistic, and I would never get my car." Marta figures her mother thinks getting busted...