ARE WE HELPING OUR KIDS GO TO POT?

Now is a good time for us to take a serious look at teens and
marijuana. Just recently, a Canadian Addiction Survey showed a
doubling in marijuana use over the past 10 years. As well, we're on
the brink of reforming our marijuana laws. Adults in all their zealous
rationality may be able to forget about those dependent on them for
wise decisions. As a counsellor who has worked with teens for 30
years, I can't.

In every school in Canada, the use of drugs and alcohol is a concern.
Administrators and counsellors rack their brains over how to both
educate their students and instill preventive strategies. It has
always been a losing battle. Most teenagers love to party. And "party"
means to be under the influence of one substance or another.

In many B.C. schools (including mine), the number of suspensions for
marijuana has soared. The move to decriminalize has been translated by
kids to mean that marijuana is not so bad after all. Decades after
Cheech and Chong, there is now an official Marijuana Party in British
Columbia, and our just-retired prime minister, Jean Chretien, has
joked that maybe he should try it. The kids aren't mistaken. We've
made the message clear. Smoking dope is no big deal.

This really puts schools in a bind. The demonizing approach of "Reefer
Madness" long ago shifted -- marijuana became a gateway that would
lead to harder drugs. Police and addiction speakers still lead
seminars, drug-sniffing dogs are routinely brought into schools, even
surveillance vans are used to catch unwary tokers.

But what is the point?

Students caught using receive a suspension. School officials wag their
fingers, parents express consternation and the kid walks out not
swayed one iota. For every kid getting high, there is an adult doing
the same. Parents, celebrities, star athletes, teachers themselves.
The kids know this.

That there is medical evidence of marijuana's harmful effects doesn't
matter. Lots of things are potentially harmful -- bungee jumping,
eating trans fats, driving on an icy road and having unprotected sex,
and yet people routinely ignore those risks. Marijuana is far from the
top of any list of dangers, and it seems to result in comparable pleasure.

I have heard a student say that without getting stoned on a regular
basis, he wouldn't like himself. Another insists that it helps him to
relax and allows him to come to school and function in class. Many
others feel that it holds depression at bay. Everyone agrees that it
feels good. How then to address the situation?

Should schools care? Considering that pot smoking is easily masked
compared with the giveaway of alcohol on the breath or noticeably
impaired behaviour, and that within most schools a certain percentage
of stoned kids go undetected every day, maybe we should just relax and
go with the flow. If it has been going on since the sixties, and it
might be going on beneath our noses every day anyway, maybe it doesn't
matter. Certainly, many administrators and counsellors wonder who the
joke is really on.

Yet if schools simply relax and let nature take its course, what will
the outcome be? Marijuana is a major industry in B.C. In at least one
community, snug in the Kootenays region, the pot harvest means lots of
jobs -- picking, cutting, bundling. It's an open secret. Indeed, every
summer evening the streets waft with the sweet smell of high times. If
there are no restraints imposed, no censure voiced, why wouldn't every
town in the country follow suit?

The latest statistics suggest that almost a half of older teens have
smoked marijuana in the past year. What if the majority of kids begin
to do it on a regular basis during school hours? A lot of contentment
in the desks?

The unfortunate reality is that the teenage body is a developing one,
so too the teenage mind. Training oneself to rely on an induced sense
of well-being and an induced sense of self at this stage is not
healthy. Kids need to be nurtured; their personalities and psyches
need healthy cultivating. The gap in maturity between Grade 8 and
Grade 12 is huge. And the gap between Grade 12 and a 30-year-old is
too.

The stresses in our lives today are massive and complex. That's why
teen suicide rates are so high. Although some adults may claim to know
themselves, for teenagers that's impossible. They are in a state of
flux. Their world is in a state of flux. Research on marijuana use
indicates clearly that there are adverse physiological consequences,
but there is little research on teenaged subjects. Teenage brain
chemistry is relatively delicate. And more and more kids are taking
their first tokes in Grade 7 -- at the age of 12.

Getting high is like checking out of the day's offerings. A kid who
regularly gets high is neither learning nor experiencing what that day
offers. Perseverance, motivation, self-confidence, acuity of analysis,
discernment of complexity and depth of interaction are all diminished
when a kid is stoned. These are vital aspects of development.

A stoned kid is not there, not present. Thus, when a kid uses
marijuana at school, significant gaps are created. It's like a
television show being interrupted by power outages.

Is this what we want for our children? Not to mention the lung damage.
Whenever we change a law, dismissively use the words "it's only pot,"
or laugh about someone being stoned, we need to reflect on the message
it sends to our kids.

Parents and our communities need to team up with our schools to
wrestle with how to respond. Fully developed adults may be prepared
and capable of frequent marijuana use. Our kids are not. Somehow,
marijuana smoking by kids needs to be recognized and understood as far
more dangerous than we might want to believe.