Ex-tokers wrestle with telling kids not to smoke

Hypocritical oaths
Among nonsmokers and midnight tokers alike, there seems to be a consensus that prohibition sparks the flame of interest: Tell a teenager “absolutely not” and you raise curiosity. Mix that in with a little natural teenage rebellion and you might as well light the bong for your kid.

“If my daughter ever asked me, I think I’d be honest with her about my smoking. … Otherwise, she’d never believe me, and I think there’s a trust issue there,” admits Paul, a father of an 8- and 11-year-old from Connecticut who asked that his last name be withheld. However, he adds, “I probably wouldn’t tell her how much!”

But telling the truth can corner parents. Struggling to reconcile their own experiences with feelings of hypocrisy, they may have the good-hearted notion to build a rapport of candor and trust by revealing their own experiences. At the same time, they worry it could come back to haunt them.

Eighteen-year-old Max, who lives in Pennsylvania, acknowledges that kids will sometimes hold up a mirror in self-defense. His parents told him years ago that they had tried pot (“Not surprising for my dad, with the music he listened to,” Max jabs), though even when he was busted, he never used it against them, as some of his pot-smoking peers have.

“I can see a lot of kids turning it back around on their parents,” he says. “Most kids when they get caught might say, ‘You smoked pot — it’s alright if I do it.’ They think they should follow their parents’ example.”

Now headed to his freshman year at college, Max says he looks forward to falling in with a new group of people who share his interests but don’t light up.

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Marsha Rosenbaum is confident that a parent’s measured confession is worth the risk. Rosenbaum, who runs the drug-awareness project Safety First and is director of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance, believes that when your child throws your own history back at you, it’s time for a “reality-based” conversation.

“My argument is if you tell kids what are basically lies, they find out for themselves anyway,” says Rosenbaum. “They’ve observed people, including their own parents usually, who have used pot and didn’t get addicted and didn’t go on to harder drugs.”

She suggests parents prepare for that conversation by doing some research so they can sit down with their kids and address questions such as “What are these drugs about? What do they actually do to the brain, to the body, to your perception? What do we know about the long- and short-range implications of using them?”

Hash it out 7 tips for parents Try these guidelines for talking to kids about smoking pot.

Armed with this information, parents may be better able to make a case for their kids to avoid toking up, or at least postpone experimenting.

Abigail Anderson, a 16-year-old from Washington, says the topic was never an uncomfortable one with her parents because they freely shared their experiences. Both parents told her they had tried smoking when they were older — her dad in his 30s, her stepmother in her 20s — and that they enjoyed it so long as they were with the right friends and never lost control. The message Abigail took away was that pot is best enjoyed by mature people and in small doses.

For now, she figures, she can wait. “Right now I’m not interested,” says Abigail. “If I did smoke, I think I’d probably do it in college.”

MAD Magazine may have said it best when one of its issues quipped, “Teenagers are people who act like babies if they’re not treated like adults.”

Given the source, you can be forgiven for missing the wisdom in it — especially if you were high at the time.

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Rich Maloof has been published extensively on the topics of health, technology and music. He has written for MSN Health & Fitness, CNN, Billboard and Yahoo!, among others.

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