Books
Reefer Madness and the “Toll This Drug Is Taking on Our Children”
The mother of a tween was driving her daughter home one day when she said casually that the girls in her class were great but the boys, well, the boys had lots of problems.
Her mother asked her why?
Although this mother pays close attention to her children and their schools, she was stunned to hear her child provide names, dates they started using and what they started using.
“The first rule of confidences obtained while driving is to stay calm, keep it open-ended and just listen,” the mother said. “Kids will tell you almost anything in a car.”
The mother asked her how she knew. “Who told you?”
Her daughter said, with great patience, “Mom, people know.”
The young mothers adds, “The school clearly does not.”
The mother is now up to date on the latest drugs used in their community, their nick-names and tricks for getting them because her daughter told her. “It scares me, Mom. Something bad can happen to one of my friends because this is bad stuff. I don’t want anything to happen to ____ because she likes this boy who is so far gone.”
This is one fortunate mother. Fortunate she has a child who is open. Fortunate that, despite her stay-cool philosophy when confidences pour forth, she did not react. That would have shut down the information pipeline. Fortunate that she really does know what is going on in her daughter’s class.
“I take nothing for granted. Just because we tell them they can tell us anything, that is no guarantee they will,” said the mother. “Sometimes parents just get lucky. This was one of those times. We were riding along, the timing was right and out this came. I am not a Mother-of-the-Year candidate. I think it is scary to know it was just luck, but it was. ”
Another mother definitely will not be nominated for Mother-of-the-Year based on some strong reactions to a new book she wrote.
She wrote about her child’s addiction.
The book: The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story by Julie Myerson.
Reviewer Dominque Browning does not get into the controversy.
Instead, Browning writes about the most important issue for readers in one simple paragraph in her review—-important for parents and important for society.
…“I am flattened, deadened. I have nothing in my mind except the deep black hole that is the loss of my child,” she writes in “The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story.” Myerson undergoes a crash course in drugs. Her son is smoking skunk, she learns, a strain of cannabis whose THC content is much more potent than garden-variety pot — except that it has become garden variety. I had never heard of skunk either, but a quick search online led me to a souk of seeds for the home farmer, advertising up to a toxic 22 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content in some strains. My shopping cart remained empty as I browsed in disbelief. Even as stronger varieties are being bred and marketed, medical research is linking cannabis use to behavioral and cognitive changes reminiscent of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression and anxiety disorder. And yet we find ourselves arguing about whether pot is addictive or a gateway drug or should be legalized. We are collectively losing our minds. “The Lost Child” is a cry for help and a plea for a clear acknowledgment of the toll this drug is taking on our children.” (Emphasis added)
Source: New York Times Book Review, August 31, 2009
