The Family: Pot and Parents

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"Anyone who tries to say that fewer than half the students in any high school in Southern California have taken pot doesn't know what he's talking about," insists Caldwell Williams, guidance counselor at Los Angeles' University High. Cub scouts in San Francisco discuss the pros and cons of pot with savvy, and in nearby San Rafael a marijuana sale took place right in class before the eyes of the astonished sixth-grade teacher. Nor is the increase in pot use limited to California. When the headmaster of a Colorado boarding school asked students who were using marijuana to admit it, one-third of the school trooped through his office; they are now on a year's probation.

My Father, the Bigot. Despite such evidence, the discovery that their own children are smoking marijuana still leaves most parents incredulous. "Pot is like syph," says a senior at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill. "Parents can't conceive of it until it hits them in the face." When it does hit them, they scarcely know what to do. For, unlike sex and alcohol, drugs played no part in their own rites of passage. Wails one anguished Manhattan mother: "None of us knows anything about it. It's so new." One Detroit moth er turned her daughter in to the police, because "I was scared." All too fre quently, blind rage is the response. One San Francisco father beat his boy for 45 minutes after finding marijuana in the youth's bureau; another, a heavy-drinking millionaire, disinherited his boy. "I'd kill the sonofabitch if I ever found out he was smoking pot," says a Manhattan father. Says his 16-year-old son, who has been using marijuana for a year: "I smoke pot because it makes the world a beautiful place instead of a place filled with narrow-minded bigots like my father."

Hoping to anticipate the problem, some parents try to scare their children with lurid stories about drug addiction and highly pertinent reminders that mere possession of marijuana constitutes a felony. But teen-agers tend to regard the supposedly inevitable progression from pot to heroin as myth, and they scorn the marijuana laws as hypocritical. At the other extreme are a few parents who introduce their children to pot in the home in the same way that countless parents start their children drinking. One San Francisco attorney turns on all three of his children, including his six-year-old. Still other parents respond by taking a kindlier view of early drinking, in hopes that their children will find liquor an acceptable alternative to pot. That ploy often fails, mainly because so many youths are convinced that marijuana is less harmful than "juice."