Found out my son Drank and Smoked Pot!
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| Sun, 07-29-2007 - 12:39pm |
I really need some advice on here. My son is 15. My son's half brother told his dad that my son took a beer out of the ice box when they were camping and drank it. In the same discussion my son also told his little brother that he had smoked pot before. He said he 'tried' pot before. The little brother was afraid that if he told on his big brother that his big brother would hate him forever. His dad promised him he would not tell my son he told me. But....his dad told me. And now I dont have a clue as to handle this. My first thought it is beat the crap out of my son! My next thought is to talk to him about this....ask him about it. But my sons dad has asked me not to let it be know that it was the little brother that told. Dads thoughts are if we let my son know that his little brother 'ratted' him out we will never get anymore info like this again. The little brther is so afraid right now that he will never be friends with his big brother again.
But here is the thing....I just can not do nothing...I need to deal with this some how.
PS...I little history about this....My son just got back in contact with his dad over 14 years. This is the first year to have spent any time with his little brother. His little brother adores my son and he is really worried that he will get mad at him if my son knows where I got all this info.

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You make some really good points Janet.
> > But now at age 51 I know plenty < <
Ah, yes, at 51, we *do* know plenty, but as we all ALSO know, we *must* recognize the wisdom of the all-knowing and life-experience-rich teenagers that are in our midst.
LOL- snerk???
If I do find my kids have tried it, no I won't condemn them, I know people make mistakes, but they better not try it again and do it on a regular basis. I actually don't know what I would do if I had a kid that talks like you. That would be a very tough thing and very unlikely since they both are drug free, alcohol free and smoke free and proud of it.
Kristie
Like I said if I found out my kids had smoked I wouldn't condemn them, but I just don't think it is a good thing to be high all the time. I also don't agree with drinking so don't play that card.
I have done some reading lately though and must say that I do think that marajuana should be legal for medicinal purposes. Some of the things I have found out recently have really reinforced that belief in me. But I am still against smoking just for a high.
It's just who I am and I'm not changing that and I know you won't change what you think or do either. So I think we need to call a truce and agree to disagree.
Kristie
Todd,
If you have been reading these forums for a while, you know that I have been working with teens and young adults for lots of years. What you might not know is that I was a 1970's hippie. I got out of the Air Force and right into hippiedom. I was a regular pot smoker. I never missed a day's work. I was stoned every night. It was a lot of fun. There were a couple of down sides though that eventually convinced me that it wasn't quite the tea I thought it was. I had always been and still am a very active type. I am a doer. I always have projects and stuff I am working on. I realized at some point, that all I was doing was going to work and then partying. I can remember when I finally had this revelation. It was the end of summer. I was living in a resort community on the end of Long Island, N.Y. (West Hampton Beach). I had all these things that I was going to do that summer. Here it was Labor Day and my catamaran never got into the water, I never built the dune buggy, I hadn't even taken off the winter storm windows and replaced them with the screen windows. I found that I was very happily treading water.
What finally convinced me that pot was bad news for me was what was happening to my lungs. I had quite smoking cigarettes many years before. I had smoked them from 10 – 21 years old and stopped because I couldn't breathe very well and was coughing all the time. Between 21 and 29, when I started smoking pot, I had no breathing problems at all. It didn't take long before I my lungs were back to being a wreck. I am sure that that happened because there are a lot of tars and burnt particles that are being inhaled and with smoking pot, I was inhaling them way, way deeper than I ever did with cigarettes.
You are quite right in saying that pot never physically killed anyone. If you include driving while stoned, there are very good stats that show lots of accidents including fatal ones. There are real good studies of the difference in both concentration and reaction time between smoking even a small amount of pot and none at all. I believe that I already posted links to these studies earlier in this thread. I am sure that you can easily find them by using Google if you want.
You copped to having less short term memory. That, too, is backed up by studies. It is probably an O.K. trade off for the euphoria experience, as long as one's job or schoolwork is not dependent on remembering things, like for a test.
You are also correct about it not being physically addictive. The problem is that physical addiction is never the problem even with drugs that are actually physically addictive. Two to three weeks in a detox will end all physical addictions, yet most people leave detox and fairly quickly go back to using. It is the psychological needs that the drug is fixing that is the real addiction. In my years of assisting kid, I have found that marijuana was one of the hardest drugs for those who really wanted to stop, to successfully leave alone. There are a couple of reasons. The first is that because it never brings folks to their knees like harder drugs almost always do. Second, the part that would like to keep on smoking can always point to how wonderful the experience was and how it didn't do any harm.
If you do not think that it is psychologically addictive for you, you might like to do a little experiment with yourself just to make sure:
For a period of a month, abstain from all mind-altering substances; drugs, alcohol, poppers, all of them, while you carry on your life as usual. Go to work or to school, your first dates, your cocktail parties, do all the sex-type things you normally do, go dancing and any regular socializing that you usually do. The only thing that will be different is that you will be doing everything without alcohol and/or drugs.
If your use of drugs and/or alcohol was strictly a recreational want and not a need or dependence, then you will have found no difference in your stress or tension level when you did all those activities drug and alcohol free. If you experienced increased stress the tension, it is a sign that, for the activities where the increases where noticed, you have been relying on those substances to get you through. The more stress and tension noticed, the more you were relying on them and the greater the risk of becoming dependent on them. This gives you a way to decide for yourself what level of usage is right for you. I am not saying "don't use", just keep your eyes open to what is going on and then make your decisions.
If you could not stay alcohol and drug free for the entire length of the test period, you either are, or are about to be in serious trouble. Incidentally, if you are actually someone who is using mind-altering substances addictively and has been denying to yourself that fact, your mind will come up with all sorts of good reasons why it is O.K. to stop this test prematurely or, maybe even why there is no need to even take it in the first place. So, for the purposes of this test, there is no valid reason to start using your mind-altering goodies again before the entire period you committed to before the test started, is over. If you will not even consider taking the abstinence test, you might already be in deep water.
I never tell folks not to use pot. It wouldn't do any good because everyone needs to make those choices for themselves. People never change for very long just because someone else wants them to. People only change when to not change will cause them to lose something they do not want to lose. I can report, though, that for those teens that decided to stop using pot, there lives dramatically changed, just as mine did. They started getting to do the things they always dreamed about instead of endlessly, happily dreaming about things they were not doing.
Jason
My website: http://TheParentsCoach.com
My parents blog: http://blog.TheParentsCoach.com &nbs
Interesting thoughts Jason, and right on as usual.
I especially find the story of summer at West Hampton interesting... Pot may not be physically addictive, but it definitely can be psychologically addictive.
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