DRUGS RIP FAMILIES APART, OR DO THEY?

Joe is a 49-year-old engineer from Worcester who has a wife, two
teenagers and a mortgage. For those reasons and more, he has neither
the time nor the inclination to dabble with recreational drugs - were
it not for his mother-in-law.

Joe's mother-in-law is in her late 70s. For years she's suffered from
chronic back pain and a loss of appetite from all her medications,
none of which seem to work. One day, she was relating her health woes
to every woman's best confidant - her hairdresser - when the
hairdresser offered a suggestion that shocked her.

"Have you ever tried pot?" she asked.

The mother-in-law had never tried pot, for goodness' sake. Initially
she dismissed the idea, but then she thought for a while and called
her daughter.

"Do you know where I could get some marijuana?" she asked.

So the dutiful daughter called her husband, Joe, who pondered the
request and remembered that he had an engineer friend who still
smoked pot. So he called the friend and explained the situation, and
the friend said he'd drop by with the goods.

"I felt like such a teenager," Joe said. "My friend pulls up and I
run outside with a 20-dollar bill. But he wouldn't take any money."

The friend handed Joe a small plastic bag that contained a few
marijuana buds and a single rolling paper.

"I went back in the house and rolled up a fatty," said Joe. When it
was mentioned that his tone seemed to take on a dreamy quality, he
added, "Hey, I was a product of the '70s. It was just like old times.
Rolling a joint is like riding a bike. I hadn't lost my touch."

So Joe drove to his mother-in-law's house with the joint in his
pocket. His father-in-law didn't approve of the pot plot and pretty
much stormed out of the kitchen, leaving Joe and his mother-in-law alone.

Joe pulled out the joint and the pair looked around for matches or a
lighter, but neither of them smokes. So Joe used the gas stove to
spark up the joint, and his first puff in 25 years.

"She wasn't going to smoke it all by herself," said the chivalrous
son-in-law. They passed the joint back and forth and the tidy kitchen
filled with smoke, but any resemblance to a Cheech & Chong movie was
purely coincidental.

After smoking half of the joint, his mother-in-law broke into a big grin.

"Hey, my back doesn't feel bad anymore," she said.

Joe nodded. Then they started chatting about marijuana and Joe
observed that it's pretty stupid to lock people up over such a benign
substance that's really no big deal and actually does some good for
people who are in pain and before he could finish, his mother-in-law
interrupted.

"I don't feel like talking anymore," she said, not unpleasantly.

Joe shrugged. "It happens," he noted. "I guess I'll go."

After he left, Joe's father-in-law walked into the kitchen and found
his wife relaxing on the kitchen floor, staring at the ceiling. He
helped her up, at which point she headed to the freezer and happily
tucked into a half-gallon of ice cream.

Joe, meanwhile, who used to be nervous that his parents would catch
him smoking pot, found himself sneaking back into his own house so
his kids wouldn't smell the drug on him. He also asked that his full
name not be used, for obvious reasons.

"I don't think it's any big deal," he said with a laugh. "But
paranoia will destroy ya."

Joe and his mother-in-law haven't discussed their adventure with the
wacky weed. He said he doesn't know if she'll ask him for another
joint and isn't sure how she feels about it. But he's happy it happened.

"Smoking pot with my mother-in-law is not what I ever expected I'd be
doing," he said. "But I think it's brought us closer. I give her a
lot of credit for trying something new and going outside the box. I
think she was fearful at first, and I know she was afraid years back
that her own kids were doing drugs. But the fears a parent has for
their children become less when their children become adults."

It also goes to show that, under the right circumstances, even
in-laws can become outlaws.