Here’s the short version: in many ways kid culture is pretty crummy, far worse than it once was. As a result marijuana use is especially perilous (although not for some reasons often cited).
We adults are largely to blame and ought to do something, as an expression of love if nothing else. Counting on the criminal justice system to improve the situation is a bad idea that plainly hasn’t worked (and probably never will). In this context, random drug testing in schools is a caring, promising, important step.
It’s hard not to notice that kid culture has been hijacked, intruded upon —invaded — by adults: by parents (like me), by professionals (like me), by big business and by technology. While this has yielded some positive outcomes (really nice playing fields, sophisticated instruction of all sorts, diminished isolation for members of sexual minorities and less emotional distance between generations) the cost remains surprisingly high.
Much has been written about this.With the loss of purposeless, unsupervised time, children have been deprived of autonomy. As a result they are wobbly, more than ever. As a group children are more frightened, more fragile, less adventurous and less happy. Because children are less able — and less likely — to explore their environment independently, to discover adventure independently, to spontaneously organize games, to wreck games or push themselves beyond what is familiar, or safe, they have too few opportunities to struggle among themselves, within themselves, and with their environment.
And as a result children have too few opportunities to develop an understanding, an appreciation of their strengths and weaknesses, a sense of their own competence and their capacity for resilience. All of this leaves them feeling afraid. And, probably worse, it leaves them feeling afraid of being afraid.
We adults have allowed this to happen. In part because we want to keep our children safe and maybe, a little bit, to fulfill our own unmet fantasies about childhood. Also accessorizing childhood is a big money maker; the commercialization, the digitalization of childhood is hard to resist.
In the midst of this marijuana use is especially inviting and surprisingly — subtly — destructive. It is inviting because its use adheres to the fantasy of stripping adolescence of turmoil, of pain and of uncertainty. It provides adolescent children with a fairly straightforward way to fulfill their parents’ fantasies that they “just be happy.” It is destructive because it diminishes adolescent children’s capacity to experience emotional intensity and urgency. And it thwarts their development.
To understand this it is useful to keep in mind that marijuana use and marijuana itself are not what they once were. As has been widely reported, THC levels were once typically around 2.5 percent. Now THC levels are more than 10 times that amount. During the first half of my career (which started in 1979) many adolescents used marijuana once every couple of weeks or less, which back then was of little concern. Now nearly every adolescent I encounter who uses, uses a lot (three times a week, three times a day and occasionally more).
Currently the use of marijuana during adolescence is strongly correlated with permanently lower IQ scores, substantially decreased lifetime income and substantially increased occurrence of depression, anxiety, psychosis, schizophrenia and depression during adulthood. While nine percent of all individuals who use marijuana become addicted, among adolescents the rate tops 15 percent.
Described in less clinical terms, marijuana’s impact is creepy. While in many ways pleasant, just fun, a structured reliable form of socialization — a privileged kid’s escapade — the negative effects from using marijuana accumulate slowly over an extended period of time. And they take hold so slowly that it is difficult to detect how one is being changed (not unlike the frog who is boiled to death because the rise in water temperature occurs too slowly for him to detect).
So one’s emotional response to beauty, to ugliness, to affection grow increasingly muted as do one’s ambition, drive, longing, impatience, alarm and discomfort. As a result, one’s forward momentum in life is diminished. When we are chemically altered so that who we are and where we are and what we’re doing remain largely acceptable no matter what, we cease to grow, to evolve, as people.
Without discomfort, without dissatisfaction to drive growth, we don’t grow, at least not that much. Because the level of our discontent and discomfort does not justify taking on the uncertainty and pain of trying on something new, a new way of feeling or a new way to think about one’s self in the world.
Marijuana in its current form, as its used currently by high school students, robs them of vitality, a sense of adventure and of emotional depth they don’t fully know they possess. That should be pretty disheartening.
So what’s to be done? Making it illegal, arresting people for possessing marijuana, employing police to investigate its use, prosecuting individuals, placing them on probation — imprisoning some, fining others — seems proven to be a colossal waste of time. And in an instinctive way it’s plainly wrong-headed; it’s a comical idea that making poor decisions should be against the law.
Rather it is time that adults play the role they’re well suited to and inclined to play, one that will provide their children with a sense of relief. It is time that adults focus less on promoting or enhancing the quality of childhood and, instead, share with their children a vision of adulthood that is hopeful and inspiring, one in which one’s ultimate worth is not related to one’s level of comfort but is rooted in something larger, something more important and fundamental.
It is time that adults focus on helping children to grow into decent grown-ups, understanding that change, and struggle, curiosity and fear, intensity and strength, pettiness, love, beauty and ugliness — and self-doubt — can be integrated into a coherent workable personality. It is time that adults resist more forcefully allowing children to seek comfort in chemicals and hiding behind screens.
Random drug screening — drug screening that does not involve the police nor school based sanctions — may provide a means towards that end. It should alert families and the community to the extent of the challenge. And then maybe a conversation will follow, a perspective will develop, costs and benefits can be calculated, a healthcare issue that is simultaneously a social issue will be better appreciated, responded to more fully and better managed.
Through the years, student-athletes have shared that during their season team members cease smoking marijuana because they are subject to testing and don’t want to be excluded or let down their teammates. About 10 years ago Comprehensive Mental Health Services sponsored a public discussion about the use of drugs at Hopewell Valley Central High School. During that discussion, a diverse group of local graduates promoted the use of random drug testing (to diminish the corrosive cultural effects of marijuana use). The graduates promoting random testing had themselves used marijuana in high school and, although successful, were not especially straitlaced.
For me it was something of a revelation; up until then I had never given the idea serious consideration. But I have since and have come to suspect strongly that they were onto something. Hopefully we will discover they were right.
— Jonathan Woods, LCSW has been in practice since 1979. Currently he is the Director of Comprehensive Mental Health Services, (609) 737-7797.
,
