<p>“Along with a minority of others posting here I am bewildered by the draconian tone of many responses. The spectre of jail, mental illness, expulsion, death etc. just seems so completely at odds with my lived experience. I’m curious about what others’ experiences have been.”</p>
<p>My experience is the same as yours and I went to Boulder for college where there were drugs everywhere (and way more dangerous ones than pot.) </p>
<p>When I was in high school in the early 70’s in New York there were very draconian drug laws (the Rockefeller laws) and my parents where so scared I’d get busted just hanging around town with my friends they gave me permission to smoke in the house - and my dad is a lawyer! I must admit once they gave me permission it wasn’t as much fun anymore.</p>
<p>Chalk me up as another person whose experience with pot is nothing like this talk of mental illness, jail, expulsion, death, and so forth. When I was in college and later at least 50% of the people I knew smoked pot, most likely far more. Some still do. None of my close friends, all of whom smoked pot, is mentally ill. </p>
<p>I think this all smacks of reefer madness-like exaggeration. </p>
<p>Certainly, there are possible legal repercussions if caught. Our prisons are full of people who have committed faux drug “crimes.” It is a disgrace, IMHO, and one of the reasons why we incarcerate such a high percentage of citizens. It is crippling to our society to brand so many people felons for so little, and only encourages real crime. Of course, since prisons have been privatized, that’s a growth industry too. :rolleyes: Our nation can afford to incarcerate people, but not to pay for higher education. How stupid can we get.</p>
<p>I’m sorry, this rant is OT to the OP’s problem.</p>
<p>If you own a home, property or assets the repercussions for illegal activities can be financially devastating. The issue is not ‘are they mentally ill, is the law wrong, it’s no different than alcohol’ the issue is what are the legal repercussions for the individuals upon whose domain the illegal activity occurs. </p>
<p>It may not be fair, and we can rant and rave about the unfairness, BUT it is the owner of an asset whose buttocks is on the proverbial legal line. Do you want your kid to put your very middle aged buttocks on the line? (it may be unreasonable to have the law hold an asset owner responsible for the drinking behavior of a minor…but it does)…</p>
<p>If the LAW wants…it can get you…the you being the one with the deep pockets…We all love our kids…but the world is what it is…do you really want them to put your arse on the line?</p>
<p>Have them refrain until college…then it is the Universities problem ;)</p>
<p>I was mislead by some stuff I read awhile back about shrooms. I take it back. It causes a schizophrenia-like psychosis, not the disease itself. But the cannabis is a real concern.</p>
<p>At my daughter’s HS many many kids have been arrested or suspended w/o police involvement for pot and other drug-related stuff. Lead trumpeter didn’t get to play in pit for spring musical because suspended at the time as caught smoking weed on field trip- kind of ruined the music. They have a ‘quick 50’ policy where kids can earn $50 by reporting drug activity. A whole slew of kids lost driver’s license, did community service, served short sentences, got expelled from HS and/or moved to other schools. All this before even 18. </p>
<p>As for death and destruction, I could tell stories all night about people I knew in HS and how they ended up (many dead or brain-damaged, but not all.). Rarely was it just pot, of course. Always other substances as well. And base personality plays a big role. Some people fall into abuse of every substance much more easily than others. One can can also abuse by overexercising, extreme dieting, and so forth to deleterious effect. If the crowd you ran with was all mentally strong healthy folks, probably they stopped at pot and didn’t even overdo that so it sounds bizarre and unreal to imagine it could hurt you.</p>
<p>I don’t think kids are well-served by pooh-poohing the dangers. Much of the danger is of being caught in a legal system whose rules may be perceived to be unjust, but the consequences of the tangle are just the same no matter what you think of the system and it isn’t helpful to start life with that hampering you when it is just as easy to avoid. It isn’t like it’s some great thing that people benefit from, hazy memories of growing up in the '70’s notwithstanding. It’s not good for your lungs, memory or anything else except as an aid to relaxation.</p>
<p>Living in Seattle, where the state is entering marijuana sales & where professionals from the county Sheriff to Rick Steves, are pro legalization for adults, is quite a bit different from living in an area where laws are more punitive.
It’s more innocuous than alcohol or tobacco (& incidentally, smoking it is about the most wasteful way to partake), but minors should not be using anything their health provider & their parents are not aware of.</p>
<p>I want to reiterate that I am not focusing on the pot. I am focusing on the fact that the OP has an adult (or close to it) that has disregarded what he has been told about this in terms of violating house rules in house. That’s the issue here. Clearly, he does not give a crap about what these rules are. I know a lot of folks who choose to run amok in a lot of things, but they are not going to fly in the face of an agreement they make and bring contraband into the home, for example. It’s one thing to decide to take the risks on some things as a personal decision, but to know that anyone, not just parents, but anyone does not want the stuff or an activity in a sanctuary, the person’s home, and to agree that this will not happen again with mental health counselors involved, and then do just do it again, is a major flag to me. This is not a casual, don’t do this again, spoken in passing, mind you. The OP has had this addressed with a third party mental health counselor and the agreement was clear that the son was not to bring this contraband into the house. And he did. So much for his word. </p>
<p>Again, yes, they say they’ll do it and they won’t all of the time. But this is for an illegal substance, and a big deal was made of this. It’s not like saying you won’t throw your clothes on the floor and you find his sock on the floor. I am looking at the character of a person who has totally disregarded something that a parent has said he does not want in the house, something that is illegal and does have some inherent risk to the parent and I don’t care how small it is, it is there. Plus the parent has found this important enough with other factors to bring a counselor on board. This really does not bode well to me.</p>
<p>So what do you do when your kid just lies to you, breaks his word, and doesn’t care about house rules even when it involves illegal things like pot, brings them into YOUR house even after it is crystal clear that not only is it not to come there, but a third party is brought into the picture who witnesses the demand/request and the agreement? That’s the problem. Forget the argument about the pitfalls of pot It’s the type of person this kid is and how much the parents can now take stock in ANYTHING he says.</p>
<p>I hear the kid saying he is an adult or close to it- he is pulling up his end in all other ways, by the parents own admission, he is going to be living away from home for the next four years, maybe coming home summers, maybe not and he doesn’t understand what the big deal is.
Adults disregard rules & laws that seem arbritary to them all the time.
I am curious about the lengths that he did or did not do to conceal it however.</p>
<p>It could indeed be true that this young person feels no need to follow his parents’ house rules on anything and is flagrantly lying about many aspects of his life.</p>
<p>It is also possible that this young person, who has issues with anxiety and depression, experimented with marijuana – as a large number of young people do – and discovered that not only did it provide a pleasant high, it also helped with his symptoms. </p>
<p>If what this kid is doing is self-medicating, I can see how he might behave in one way with regard to marijuana and in another way with regard to other parts of his life. It might not make sense to generalize his violation of family rules (and the law) with regard to marijuana to other types of behavior.</p>
<p>I’m with cptofthehouse. It’s not about marijuana, it’s not about whether the kid is depressed or is going to be rebellious or whatever. It’s about whose house this is. My house, my rules. You want other rules, pay for your own house. I let you off once with a warning and you essentially put it in my face.</p>
<p>For that reason, to make it clear that this is not about marijuana per se, I would impose a punishment that might seem unrelated. For example, if the kid has the use of a car paid for by the parents for recreation–not anymore this summer.</p>
<p>Excuse me? I tell my son not to do something, he tells me he won’t do it again, and he goes ahead and does it anyway. Punishing him in that case makes my home a prison?</p>
<p>I agree with Dietz199. The reasonableness of the law regarding pot wouldn’t be my concern in the moment. Instead I’d be upset about my child’s disrespect of his parents as well as the fact that my husband and I could sustain a financial loss that could negatively impact the entire family for decades to come. In the short run, I would insist that no illegal activities take place on my property and would have to address that problem first. Once that was understood, I’d want to do whatever I could to find out what, if any, issues my child had and how best to help him. But if I don’t deal with the illegal substances in my home first, I may lose the wherewithal to help my child.</p>
<p>Where do you draw the line Lergnom? With what the item is? Say you don’t want cigarette smoking in your house, and you smell it because your kid who knows the house rules is disregarding therm? What if that were a gun (legally obtained and regsitered) in the bag when you have a no gun rule? What if your kid has some folks over when you are gone that are not so savory since his filters are not yet so well developed, and your rule was you wanted to meet them first? What if that were cocaine or some other harder drug? What if it were just a bottle of vodka or beer, but you had made it clear that underage drinking is not allowed, and then you hear that it’s going on in your own house with your son as a host? You want to start making gradations as to what you let go by when it’s potentially dangerous stuff? </p>
<p>Anything important enough that an outisde third party is brought in and bears witness to an agreement: NO POT, NO ILLEGAL DRUGS in my house, for example, is just disregarded that quickly after it is on the table, when the kids is out of there in a month, I think it’s a problem here. To me it’s a serousl breach of manners and respect, bad character when you do something outright illegal against someone’s explicit demand, not request, but demand, it’s not done in their home. As I said earlier, it’s not like we’re talking about a stray sock thrown on the floor. This thing is an “in your face” reaction to some reasonable rules. </p>
<p>And it’s really big breach of any kind of respect when you bring something illegal into somoene’s house. Regardless of how small the chances of a dire event from it, you are deliberately doing something to endanger someone else whose hospitatliy you are getting. That’s really rank, IMO. And when you’ve been told that the person doesn’t want that risk, it’s even worse that you ignore this. That the parents went and got counseling and this was an issue brought up, escalates it even more. </p>
<p>People who act that way in someone else’s house are acting like criminals not like a family member.</p>
<p>This is a whole other situation, but someone in our community is having the issue of her son having borrowed the car without asking. The rule was he was to ask, after a few incidents when he did not. Well, he did it again and this time he got into a major accident with a whole lot of consequences. His thing is that he could have had the accident at a time when he used the car when he asked. That he didn’t ask, that this is, strictly speaking, stealing someone’s car has not gottent through to his thick 19 year old head. But this also happened after the parents would chide, scold, talk about not doing this after repeated such incidents, instead understanding that their child was going to disregard this house rule and probably a number of others as well. He would agree, and then do it again. He’d just take the consequences each time, But now, the parents have some dire, expensive ones and realize that they have a nasty brat on their hands, who is ugly facedly sitting there with his stance of “so what, stuff happens, and that I didn’t ask for permission had nothing to do with this”. </p>
<p>It’s not the accident but the attitude and the fact that such people do not care about the parents or others enough to follow certain rules that I think are inherent in being a good person. When you use other’s resources, they are permitted to define the risks they want to take in letting you have those privileges. It’s THEIR boundaries, you are breaking. That’s really the point here. </p>
<p>Not a good person, IMO, and that’s the issue here.</p>
<p>My oldest knows we have an absolute rule about drugs in the house. I had a beer with him Sunday night, so life is not so Draconian. If we find drugs, he is kicked out and he has the tools to survive on his own. I have seen too many families dragged down and pulled apart by the drug use of one child. We have two more at home to worry about.</p>
<p>I live about 20 miles from PK4, and, like her, am a big fan of medicinal uses. Though neither I nor the wife were ever recreational users, I’m not really all that opposed to it. It’s just not allowed in my house.</p>
<p>For teenage boys, it can be a key to socializing with a group of risk-accepting girls. </p>
<p>To the OP: is your son, by chance, active on Reddit? There seems to be a permissive and persuasive group of advocates on there, which is where most of the male honors students seem to have formed their opinions. Peer group and all that.</p>
<p>Well, it has been interesting reading the varied responses.</p>
<p>While I can see the opinion that S flagrantly disobeyed our rule about bringing it into the house, I can also put myself in an 18 yo’s head and see that in his mind it is not a big deal. He respects all our other rules, still asks permission to go out every single time, and is generally a very easy kid to have around. I am trying to separate out the situation of bringing it into the house from the bigger issue of how to handle things if he is self-medicating.</p>
<p>Remember that teens think they are invincible and know everything. He believes the stuff he reads and hears that pot is no big deal and should be legal. Regardless, as we have told him, it is currently ILLEGAL so his opinion is irrelevant.</p>
<p>I do not think he is on Reddit. For being a smart kid, he is not always savvy about covering his tracks. He doesn’t appear to delete the computer history. And I stumbled upon the pot the first time in moving a book bag before putting some laundry down - it had a jar in it that I was thinking was a bottle. The second time, I saw the same bag in the corner and I confess, I did pick it up to check. But nothing was hidden away or locked up. (Well, I haven’t tossed his room so who knows! ) I don’t know why he was so cavalier about leaving things not squirreled away.</p>
<p>No, because he disregarded the rules that he agreed to and put his parents at risk.</p>
<p>It’s called integrity. You said you were going to/not going to do something, and then did the opposite.</p>
<p>That’s a lack of integrity - indicative of a character issue…COULD mean you’re a bad person, in any case, certainly someone not to be trusted and someone who has little regard for others.</p>
<p>Edited - not saying this is the case with the OPs son. They’ll have to explore that themselves. Just saying that disregarding agreed to rules about what not to bring in my house is different than a little white lie.</p>
) I don’t know why he was so cavalier about leaving things not squirreled away.</p>