With so many members, I can't recall, this son (easy child). How is he doing in college? What makes him a easy child? Does he have a job? What is he like when interacting with others? Does he live his life as a adult appropriate to his age? I'm asking all of these questions because it might not be that he's turning difficult child if he is really a easy child and living age appropriately, good kid etc. I can see the gut instinct for parents discovering their idea of a easy child child being caught using pot. I can also see it being much more gutteral to a parent to hear about a easy child when they have another adult addict child. Know what I mean?? For your difficult child Ant, having come out of rehab, no recreational drug or alcohol should be in his vocabulary, not even pot which is considered by some as a gateway to a heroin overdose, and by others as a usable recreational substance that can be used casually much like a glass of wine with a friend over dinner doesn't an alcoholic make. Pot is a hotbed subject, and I've found most people with addicts in their lives naturally see pot through a vision point of the gateway it can be come. Or a parent with a pot head adult child who is unmotivated, lazy, spacey so to speak who can't stand them wasting their lives.
I would compare your easy child's life and character first before getting too worried. Like it or not, pot is no longer carrying the stigma that the government put on it when they big war on pot began. Most don't know the thousands and thousands of years pot was used by our ancestors. It's only in this past 40-50 years that it became a big illicit substance that everyone should fear. We hear such outrage at the idea of legal pot, but we don't hear that same outrage at the doctors filling bogus scripts for bogus non existent pain issues, to hand out major amounts of legal heroin in the form of prescription narcotics.
I see pot after reading a ton, watching medical shows and documentaries etc, as no different than alcohol. Take alcohol. We have many more social drinkers who have no addictions and can take or leave alcohol. They enjoy a drink from time to time. They don't NEED it. Their lives are not affected by their random drink here or there. We then hear of others who cannot walk away from alcohol. It is the same with prescription pain medications. Many people who would never spoke pot for pain are conditioned to be okay with prescription pain medications. These aren't people outsiders would suspect could become a junkie. Yet they start taking more than prescribed. Then they run out too soon for a refill so they "borrow" from a friend and then they start buying a few here or there. How many housewives are on talk shows each week discussing their fall into presciption drug addictions? Others take pain medications for the same health issues, and never abuse their medications. They take them as prescribed, and while over time their dependency on the drug would require weaning to avoid withdrawl, they are not addicted.
Pot is in my mind, the same realm as alcohol. It can lead some down a bad path. I have never however met anyone addicted to drugs or alcohol, that felt if they'd never touched pot, they'd never have become addicts. Pot might have been the safest introduction they allowed themselves into the drug world, but something sent them to the pot, and that something moved them past pot, the pot didn't move them past pot, their need for even greater escapes from their own lives leads them deeper into the drug world. The substances are simply a tool in their arsenal of methods to escape whatever they are trying to escape from when they look for a substance to make their worries fade away for a while.
Once a person has addictions to substances and is in recovery, even those so called legal prescription narcotics are on their do not touch list. Pot being illegal in most places gets a rap as a bad bad bad thing. Yet oxycontin for example would be forgiven in many addicts minds because they indeed has physical pain and it was not drug seeking and was legal and condoned. I'd be much worried about a addict in my life getting a script for an injury that gives them a month of pain medications then I would be about a addict in my life that tooted on a joint. I'd STILL not want my loved one smoking that pot when in recovery. It would not be my fear that the pot would be an addiction that would bother me as pot is not addictive in and of itself. It would be the fear that my addict loved one was seeking ANY substance while in recovery, because I'd know that the addictions developed due to a need to escape their own worlds, which would worry me because I'd know my loved one was hurting and looking for relief from themselves via the worst route possible, drugs.
I'll be the first on the board probably to admit I smoke pot. Am I big smoker? Nope. Hardly at all actually. A few years ago when MS was making my bladder insane, I couldn't pass urine. My bladder would spasm into a tight drum that hurt more than giving birth to a elephant out of a human body. I was in and out of the ER so much it was nuts. I was injected with so many medications to try to relax the bladder and stop this damaging body problem. I was injected and prescribed medications for home with so many different narcotics for the agonizing pain, moving higher up the narcotics potency scale because nothing helped. I had so many bladder and urinary tract infections from this issue that I really some nights wished I would fall asleep and not wake up. I had months I wasn't walking, in bed. Missing my entire life, my childrens lives. Someone I know, a business professional/parent/spouse/achiever, told me they had recreationaly smoked pot ever since college. They told me if I ever wanted to test the whole medical pot thing for relief with my bladder and/or pain, let them know. Well over a month later I was still in this bladder war and honestly could not face another mid night run to the ER. Called my friend who promptly drove over in the middle of the night and brought coffee and a joint. I probably smoked all of 2-3 drags (not big ones either) of this joint and that was it. We visited and were talking and suddenly I had to go to the bathroom. I swear I unloaded months of backed up, toxic, blood streaked urine. My bladder completely relaxed for the first time in months. The relief from just being empty instead of full was intense and overwhelming after months of this! More so, the relief of my bladder, which is a muscle, NOT being spasmed up into a tight ball? I'd have severed a limb at that point in time to rid myself of this nightmare.
Converted? You betcha! I still only ever smoke 2-3 drags. I don't smoke it for the high, although even with the small amount I inhale when needed, I do get a low level high effect. I have not taken bladder medications except for a week or two here or there, since. My major problem with MS is fatigue which I can't fight, it swallows me whole and nothing will help that except medications that make me ill. Yet my other most major symptom is muscle cramping, spasms, and spasticity. All very painful ways my muscles behave and is disabling. Fatigue will hit yet I end up unable to sleep due to the major pain from the muscles. When that happens, I have nothing to lose. Getting lazy from a few drags of pot won't ruin my day or rob me of motivation. I'm already beyond fatigued and falling over on my feet, and my muscles will prevent me at times from even moving from the sofa to my own bed to be more comfortable. So I smoke a couple of "puffs" and within 5-10 minutes? My muscles are relaxing, I can lay in bed without agony, and I sleep the sleep of sleeps. I wake up with rested muscles, fatigue conquered temporarily. Without pot on those nights? I barely sleep and when I am sleeping it is a disturbed sleep. So I am not rested in the morning, just miserable after a horrible night. My muscles will stay clenched all night making it near to impossible to stretch my legs out in the morning. On the mornings after I smoke something before bed? My muscles relax as I fall asleep and stay relaxed and no spastic for a glorious 6-8 hours. I wake rested and can get out of bed on the first try and even though I still am still every single morning regardless, I am not walking bent over at my waist, walking with bent knees and on the side of my foot that won't go flat.
Let me just say, NO medication EVER given me from a doctor, has ever magically relaxed my muscles and let me get a good night sleep. I've had muscle relaxers, anti inflammatories, pain medication, neuropathy medications, you know it, I've had it. I've also had tremors, upset stomache, headaches, developed an ulcer etc from a combination of major strong medications and their side effects. The added bonus on a bad pain night where I smoke before bed? My life long anxiety has always been at its worst at bedtime and through the night. Nights I smoke, my anxiety is non existent.
I'm not at all saying people don't have valid concerns about addicts using pot, or people using pot and eventually moving to harder drugs, or sticking to pot to a level that it becomes their focus and their lives fall to the wayside. The thing is, realistically and scientifically, pot is the chosen tool as might be in others alcohol or sex or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or hard core drugs. The key difference being that pot is not addictive. Someone may feel dependent on it, that is a behavioural condition and not a physiological one. Any person abusing anything, legal or otherwise, needs to find coping skills to prevent that overwhelming desire to escape.
When it comes to pot, one CAN use pot no different than social drinkers might have wine with dinner etc. Meth? No chance! You use it, you get hooked. You don't puke your guts out and sweat and shake and fever with stopping pot.
I still hate to see people caught in a whole "Drug culture" that can accompany hard core pot smokers. Slackers most of them and it is a shame. However, most of us know, even when we don't know it, many highly educated, motivated and ambitious adults, using pot for whatever reason. For me it isn't the high, its the effect on my body that improves my condition. For others it might be that light headed feeling many like from one or two drinks of wine.
I am completely honest with doctors that I choose to use pot for medicinal purposes. I don't recall the last pain script or muscle relaxant I received. Ditto anxiety medications. And I'm not smoking often. Not daily, often not even weekly. That may change to more frequent as my condition progresses over the rest of my lifetime, given I'm young and MS will be with me for decades. There might come a time it doesn't do for my body what it does now, in which case it will be of no use to me and won't be a part of my war cabinet when my body carps out on me. Until then, legal or not legal, this is a plant well used by many cultures for thousands of years. There has always until now been a place in our societies for it. People aren't dying using pot. Perhaps in the war on drugs that targets pot users harsher than they target meth addicts, they may get hurt in process of arrest or because to use pot they end up sucked into the vast drug underworld. But more than the street pot dealers and the huge drug culture out there (that is hardly focused on pot, it is just one of many drugs in that world and not the most popular), there is a LARGE part of our population, the ones people say "Oh my goodness, I'd never have suspected", using pot. I don't get the "want" to be high, but I also as I get older am less inclined to the way even one glass of wine makes me feel. But I can't judge someone who drinks a few drinks at a social gathering any more than I can judge a person who ocassionally uses a bit of pot for the same goals as the person socially drinking. In terms of medical pot, well we have medical laws for pot here and therefore regulation for it. But doctors won't sign patients who clearly meet the strict government criteria. So effectively we are allowed by law, but you are forced to go to a dealer to buy it illegally because the legal avenues are NOT there for Canadians to get their forms filled in. Medical pot laws don't work, for this very reason. Only be regulating something like pot like alcohol, are people going to have access for medical reasons. Sure that would mean those with no medical reason would access it, but we have people who use a shot of brandy for bad nerves or red wine for a heart condition. And we have people who just like a little glow from a drink after a long day. We have laws to protect regulations for alcohol to do our best to help people make good decisions about its use. But ultimately the percentage that use that access to abuse alcohol doesn't stop others from having a use for it that IS socially acceptable and even at times medicinal.
I can't believe I've ranted so much lol. I guess I just wanted to say that I get your worry. Especially in terms of your difficult child/addict child. I just wanted to say to not give up mentally on your easy child if his life is not something that screams addict at you, simply because you found out a college age kidlet smoked pot. Sometimes it really is a social equal to just having one drink, and doesn't have to mean abuse. There are more factors to this particular "drug", and I do hope that your easy child is nothing to worry about with this. I'd worry far more as well if he was attending those college keg parties where kids are turning up with alcohol poisoning in dorms across the country, Know what I mean??
Again, apologies for my rant. Didn't mean to get so into the conversation lol. I guess right now I just get tired of pretending I think pot is ALWAYS a evil thing to be feared when I know that it is not always that way. Given your easy child's status AS a easy child, I felt like maybe offering a different perspective. I would prefer my kids never touch pot, except I would be supportive if they used it for true medical reasons as I've explained I have. I've had a huge discussion, very open, with my difficult child about pot and alcohol etc. He can't stand alcohol for his own reasons and doubt that will change. He was honest that he'd smoked pot and hated it too, done sitting around a room with a bunch of teens smoking enough to space them right out etc. He hated the feeling of the "high". He can't see smoking just a "bit" either, if there is no high, why use it? So he doesn't like being high, no point to smoke except to get high. But he does understand that smoking not enough to be high but enough to correct painful medical things would be something he would do. The only benefit he found of his pot experiments actually was his familial essential tremors calmed, and he didn't shake and could tie his shoes and use a knife again. To him the benefit of that isn't worth the ick factor he gets smoking pot so he doesn't use it to treat his tremors. But he now can understand the benefit to MY body and that I don't smoke enough for a "high" but if it is enough to get me a bit light headed, the benefits outweigh the brief "buzz". When taking hard care pain medications? I was a zombie. Far more high than a months amount of pot I smoke combined to smoke all at once.
