Pubdate: Sat, 04 Dec 2004 Source: Globe and Mail (Canada) Copyright: 2004, The Globe and Mail Company Contact: http://www.globeandmail.ca/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168 Author: Calvin White Note: Calvin White is a writer, poet and high-school counsellor in Armstrong B.C. Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mjcn.htm (Cannabis - Canada) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth) 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. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin