In my opinion, he is an adult and you have absolutely no place doing this. My son is 31 now and after years of lectures and unsolicited fatherly advice, I finally learned that although they are our children, they are our adults and it is really not our business to get involved in their affairs unless they ask for our support. I will admit that when our son moved back in with us in his early 20s I rode his ass. I constantly lectured him abut what it means to be a real man, and how he had to get a job, and on and on. Even into his 30's I continued to tell him what he needed to do or not to do. Did it help? Absolutely not. It made him resentful that I was constantly judging him and it made me angry that he never listened to my sage fatherly advice. The last straw was the foreclosure on his house. He hadn't paid the mortgage in almost a year. He ignored all the letters from the bank. So I took it upon myself to open all the mail from his bank, read it all, do some research, and talk to some people. The lender was willing to let him walk away free and clear- they would not sue him for the deficiency or any other legal costs associated with foreclosure. All he had to do was contact the bank and surrender the title of the home. Did he follow through? Of course not. When his electricty was shut off and he had lost his job he simply abandoned the house. I got angry at first at his moronic lack of responsibility, but then I had a moment of clarity. Unsolicited advice, help, and judgement was absolutely and totally worthless. In fact I will go so far as to say it causes more harm than good. It causes resentment on both sides and I believe it also can hurt their emotional maturity by not allowing them to grow up and succeed or fail on their own terms.
If your son wants to go off the grid and be a pot farmer in Colorado, he is an adult and that is his right to do so. Simply smile and wish him the best of luck, but be sure to tell him that you won't be financing his dreams. I see nothing wrong with imposing rules on adult children in exchange for financial support, because after all, if they don't like the rules they can always choose to try and make a go of it on their own.
It has been a very interesting experience reading the posts on this site. There is a lot of thought provoking material to read through. One thing that I find very fasciniating to think about is that what or kids do that seems scary or wrong to us seems perfectly normal to them. There is a street culture out there that we know nothing of, people who generally live on the fringes of society have a culture we know nothing of, but when we get glimpses of their worlds from our 9 to 5, 2.5 kid, house with white picket fence world, their world seems foreign, scary, and often downright wrong. For me personally I feel that I am at a point of the detachment journey where I need to learn and practice acceptance. I need to accept who my son IS, not who he was as a little child, and not the dream of what WE wanted for him. He is who he is and will be that way until he decides other wise, not us. Acceptance doesn't mean approval. I don't approve of the way he is living and I refuse to supoort his lifestyle in any fashion, but it is not my place to judge his choices or put him down for not living the way that I believe "normal" people should live. It may sound like I am giving up, and it may sound like a very sad situation (and it is ), but I consider myself to be a realist living in the real world, and this is the reality of the situation. You simply can not control what another person does, even if they are your child. You also can not get an addict to quit. Addiction is a very terrible sickness that unfortunately seems to have less happy endings that sad ones, and while I am no expert, I firmly believe that the only way a person can give up addiction is if they truly want to do it for themselves. As a parent of an adult difficult child I believe that the best we can do is to let them know that we are there for them if they truly want help and want to change their lifestyle, but it is not our place to support their destructive lifestyle or constantly heap judgement upon them.
