AS WE GROW, OUR KIDS GO TO POT

Marijuana is good, compassionate medicine, it's often said.

In hard financial times, pot's a godsend as a homegrown cash crop.

And for social users, it's a gentler, healthier alternative to alcohol.

But lump me with the sourpusses who fear that as we exalt marijuana
and make its cultivation and sale as common as that of tomatoes, we
contribute to a burgeoning calamity for our kids.

These days, for children to grow up with a marijuana garden in the
extra bedroom and second-hand pot smoke in the air is like having a
grain-alcohol still out back. Much of today's pot is hugely more
potent than that grown even a decade ago.

And it can be far more damaging to a young person's ambitions and
prospects for a productive life, due to the numbing effect of THC on
the brain's novelty center.

News headline: The National Institutes for Health find that marijuana
use among teens continues to increase, most dramatically among eighth graders.

"The high rates of marijuana use during the teen and preteen years,
when the brain continues to develop, place our young people at
particular risk," said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse.

She said children "exposed to marijuana before age 17 are more likely
not just to become dependent on marijuana, but are more likely to
become dependent on a wide variety of drugs."

Hereabouts it's sacrilege, I know, to suggest that marijuana is
anything less than a beneficent herb that should made legal.

Legal or not, we ought to talk more critically about how our
decisions and actions regarding pot affect kids hurt most by the
delusion that it's not terribly dangerous to them.

HEALING BLUES: Mark Herczog, the Rincon Valley man slain at home last
year, ran a security-alarm business. And he made music.

Herczog, whose mentally ill son is jailed on suspicion of the
killing, played the blues guitar, evidently very well.

Friends who'd performed with him will play Sunday at a benefit for a
trust for his daughter, Savannah, 17.

The concert starts at 3 p.m. at the Druid's Hall in Santa Rosa.
Tickets are through BrownPaperTickets.com.

Roy Blumenfeld, who drummed with The Blues Project and Seatrain, will
play. Saxophonist Tucki Bailey and singer Teresa Tudury will, too.

SURFING GOAT II: For years it charmed drivers on Pocket Canyon Road,
between Forestville and Guerneville, to see a goat survey the world
from atop the surfboard that master John Hadley placed up a tree in
his front yard.

The drive's been less fun since Shiva died in 2010.

But look. There's another goat on the board, a tiny thing named Bella.

John said she doesn't hang out on the surfboard for hours, like Shiva
did, but she will scamper up onto it.

Bella rides in the car with John and there's a YouTube video of them
paddle-boarding the Russian River.