Written by Christopher Meyer | 5:19 pm on September 20, 2011
Tell your children you use cannabis. It’s for their own good.
Negative portrayals of cannabis users in the media are so common there is great potential for the children of medical marijuana patients to misunderstand cannabis’ medical use.
Parents who choose to use marijuana as a medical treatment face stereotypes not only from their peers, but their children are exposed to many of the negative stigmas that our society attributes to cannabis and its culture.
Opponents of medical marijuana worry that the presence and frequent discussion of cannabis desensitizes youngsters to cannabis use, but maybe that’s exactly what it should do.
Parents who openly discuss cannabis provide knowledge that demystifies the substance making youth less likely to treat it as rebellious.
Wine is served with meals to teens in many countries, with the notable difference of not encouraging the youths to get drunk. Rather they become accustomed to imbibing moderate amounts of alcohol and gain an awareness of how it effects them.
As a result, binge drinking is less common in Europe and drunkenness is treated as dishonorable rather than amusing.
I say this not to encourage parents to give marijuana to their teenagers, but rather to show how demystifying the taboo in the adolescent mind provides invaluable common sense otherwise lost to exaggerated myths that only inflate curiosity.
It is in our nature to resist being told what to do without good reason. If a good reason isn’t apparent, teenagers may seek to find one. “Why do my parents treat this substance like poison when I see my friends using it and having fun with few consequences? I’ll have to find out for myself.”
We ought to learn a valuable lesson from the failure of prohibitionist attitudes: Making cannabis illegal did not remove it from our culture. It pushed it underground where money is funneled to criminal organizations who care little about safety and who traffic in more dangerous drugs.
Illegality motivates secrecy that is not beneficial to an open dialogue about the effects of a type medicine that is incredibly beneficial, but is easily misunderstood because of the ways it is treated culturally.
It behooves parents to dispel these stereotypes so their children have truthful knowledge to guide themselves.
By educating your children about cannabis and its medical use, you give them the ability to make an informed rational choice rather than one based on myth and drug war propaganda.
You tell me, which is better?
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