KIDS & POT

(2 of 3)

But after all that is said, the marijuana question remains--and is in some ways a more complicated dilemma than, say, heroin, because the problem is morally, culturally and politically subtler. The young indulging in pot these days are mostly the children of the baby boomers, who, once upon a time in the '60s, took to reefer as their recreational sacrament, their generation's almost universal drug of defiance. Now the boomers, who were raised on episodes of Ozzie and Harriet (and, if anything, identified with David and Ricky), find, to their astonishment, that they themselves have become Ozzie and Harriet: middle-aged! Parents! Conventional! It is a discomfiting transition, as if former members of a Dionysus cult were asked to take up duties as parole officers. The boomers raised hell with authority in the '60s; now some have mixed feelings about exerting that authority themselves--as if it would somehow turn them into their own enemies.

What should the boomers tell their children about marijuana? Should the parents be candid about their own pot use when young? On what authority can the parents persuade their children to avoid pot when the parents have made it to full adulthood more or less seemingly intact, none the worse for their youthful indulgences?

During the '70s, when a certain amount of marijuana burnout from the '60s became evident, pot fell into relative disfavor. But in the past decade, media stories registering disapproval of marijuana have tapered off. It has hardly discredited the substance that Head Boomer Bill Clinton, after stating four years ago that he hadn't inhaled, told an MTV audience that he wishes he could have done so. The President's sneaking snickering line (a kid still putting one over on his parents) suggested the boomers' ambivalence about pot and a kind of time-warping refusal to see it or themselves honestly. A haze of self-cherishing nostalgia confuses them. They want to be their child's friend; they do not wish to be uncool. They may still smoke sometimes and hide it from their kids, as they once hid it from their parents--an amazingly demeaning drama of arrested development.

The case against marijuana remains relatively undramatic. It is true that the new generation of weed is stronger than what the boomers remember; that potency means it takes fewer puffs to get high, thus cutting down on damage to the respiratory system, for example. On the other hand, stronger pot and higher kids lead to more reckless driving and car accidents. It is true that smoking pot is less harmful than heavy drinking and does not threaten one's life, as do addictions to harder drugs. Proselytical pot smokers love to point out that a fatal overdose would require, say, 40 lbs. of grass smoked over a period of, say, 25 min.

Apologies and rationales for marijuana are often ingenious, sometimes fervent, and in their essence, when applied to marijuana use by adolescents, dangerously wrong. The stage of development through which a child passes from ages 12 to 18 is critical. Adolescence is the labor that gives birth to the adult. It is a painful, indispensable process. Adolescence quite precisely requires the pain and difficulty of learning in order to come out well. Among the lessons, of course, are how to love and support others and how to be responsible.