AS A MUM GIVES CANNABIS TO HER CHILDREN, GOD SAVE US FROM THESE DOPEY
LIBERAL PARENTS

What kind of madness made gentle-faced teaching assistant Nicola
Cooper provide her children with cannabis?

This week, she was ordered by a judge to do 200 hours' community work
after police found UKP200 worth of cannabis resin in her Suffolk
home, where she was supplying it to her teenage son and daughter so
they wouldn't have to visit street dealers.

Did Nicola Cooper have any idea how very stupid she was being?

Smoking cannabis more than doubles your risk of psychotic illnesses
such as schizophrenia.

Immense damage can be done to the growing brains of children when
they smoke the high strength cannabis available today.

In their defence, Nicola Cooper and her husband called themselves
'liberal parents'.

Liberal with what - danger? Surely it is better to be liberal with
security, good sense and love, than liberal with drugs.

The word liberal today seems to excuse all manner of pernicious behaviour.

It is defined as meaning 'abundant, ample, giving freely, generous,
open minded, not strict or rigorous'.

But sometimes it is not a good idea to be open-minded.

No one is open-minded about paedophilia.

And if the scientific evidence stacks up and shows, as it does, that
cannabis can devastate young lives, why should anyone be open-minded
about that?

However 'liberal' your views, it is not worth the risk.

As for the argument that she bought the children drugs so they didn't
get mixed up with dangerous dealers, it simply does not stand up.

On the same basis, you could give your child a gun to prevent them
getting mixed up with gun dealers.

But no sane parent would give their children guns. I confess that I
used to have relaxed views about cannabis, thinking it not a lot
worse than alcohol.

But I don't now. Cannabis destroys lives much faster than alcohol.

I have seen friends of my children virtually wiped out by cannabis in
a couple of years.

One clever child I know is only just getting herself back on track
after years of cannabis abuse.

She has wasted three years of her life and reached rock bottom. She
has taken her family to hell and back.

Now she is getting better but it will take years before her
selfesteem recovers.

Nicola Cooper, who is 43, said she herself had used cannabis 'on and
off' since she was 18 and she probably not only supplied her children
with the drug but also smoked it with them.

If so, it would have been deeply misguided.

A child's sanity is more valuable to any parent than a few convivial
evenings smoking cannabis with them - a few evenings making yourself
feel young and cool, at their expense.

The point is that, apart from the damage cannabis can inflict,
children do not want their parents to be cool.

They want parents who, while showing love and friendship, also
support them and guide them - and tell them in no uncertain terms
when behaviour is unacceptable because it places them in danger.

Bob Dylan proclaimed in the Sixties: "Come mother and fathers
throughout the land. And don't criticise what you can't understand."

But too many of today's parents have taken him too literally - now we
probably try to understand too much, and are too forgiving, not rigid enough.

No parent should be so cool that they become their children's
personal drug dealer, opening up the doors to danger when they should
be warning you against the dangers of drugs.

Children are natural mimics; they often reflect your life, if not
immediately, then in later years.

The wealth of evidence about the dangers of cannabis cannot be
ignored. Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford
University, has studied the effect of cannabis on the brain.

It can leave users with permanent damage to their ability to reason, she says.

"Three or four cannabis cigarettes a day are equivalent to 20 or more
tobacco cigarettes, regarding damage to the lining of the bronchus,
while the concentration of carcinogens in cannabis smoke is actually
higher than in cigarettes," she adds.

Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity Sane,
has commented on the surge in mental health hospital admissions due
to cannabis.

Apart from the extreme physical dangers - the dangers of madness and
mental illness - cannabis can destroy children's ability to study.

If you want your child to hand in work late, to skip school, to get
up later and later, to fail exams, then, sure, encourage them to
smoke cannabis, give them the idea that a quick hit is the way to
happiness rather than hard work.

Go ahead, foist your liberal post-Sixties ideals on the poor dears -
but it might well wreck their lives.

And if any child has a tendency to addiction, letting them smoke
cannabis can encourage this.

Of course, cigarettes and alcohol are bad, too, but do you really
want to add to the number of addictions, particularly a really
dangerous one like this?

Do not believe those who claim it is not addictive. Once you're
hooked, the drug is always there, tapping its fingers, waiting for you.

And who can the addicted child look to for advice?

Certainly not the parent who encouraged the addiction in the first place.

Good parents have to retain the respect of their children. Good
parents don't smoke joints with them, and think it's wise to avoid
being drunk or over-amorous in front of them (Alan Bennett wrote
that: "Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come
to a grinding halt at their conception").

Even dancing over-enthusiastically can cause grimaces of horror.

Children want their parents to be slightly dull.

Nigella Lawson once said, very soundly, that when a mother has
children she should want to be the frame round them, and no longer the picture.

And this means that parents should not brazenly flout the law in
front of their children.

The judge spoke of Nicola Cooper's 'sheer arrogance' in acting as if
the law did not apply to her.

It is one thing to have some person of your own age break the law and
lead you astray.

At least you can then turn away from them and abandon their company.

However, when your own parents break the law and encourage your
complicity by giving you drugs, who is then left for you to turn to?
The relationship between parents and their children is the basic
building block for society. Without it, we're done for.

We need our parents to provide us with stability, authority, a sense
of right and wrong, a respect for the law, a code of conduct, and in
doing so give us an emotional strength.

Parents should be a bit boring.

Someone once said that listening to parents' advice was like watching
commercials.

You know what's coming, you've heard it all before, but you listen anyway.

Once you let children glimpse that maybe you are no better than they
are, you risk losing their respect.

If you are not a figure of authority, then when you really need to
save your children you won't have power.

It will have been eroded.

When they are taking the car out when they're drunk, they won't want
to hear your blandishments.

There's a Chinese proverb which says: "Parents who are afraid to put
their foot down usually have children who step on their toes."

We have all seen children who seem lost and confused because they
have not been given boundaries.

They have been allowed to do whatever they like.

They grow up rude, swearing.

They grow up without certainties because they don't respect anyone.

That is dangerous enough. How much worse to offer children the means
to wreck their health, their family and their future.