It’s 2016, a year of the future, a year of new rights and new possibilities—now in some places, a year of legal marijuana!
But it wasn’t always like this. Before medical marijuana was even proposed to congress, this otherwise innocuous weed was demonized and carried with it heavy fines and extensive legal consequences. You couldn’t get a job if you couldn’t pass a drug test, pipes and other paraphernalia could get your car searched, and if you had children, social services could take them away from you if you got caught.
I was one of those kids. My parents were never caught, but the fear was always there. Pot was a reality I lived with every day. Now that it is on the brink of becoming largely legal across the country, I thought it was high time to tell my story of drugs, secrets, and fear.
Haha, “high time.” I’m a pothead’s daughter, folks. Forgive me.
6. It Isn’t All That Uncommon
When I was growing up, there was a time when I thought all my friend’s parents must also smoke. Why? Because my parents got together with their parents, and my parents smoked pot all the time. They weren’t “stoners” in the traditional sense of the word; my parents had jobs, one white collar and one blue, and they did their jobs relatively well. I didn’t know adults that didn’t smoke until I was well into my teenage years, outside of teachers, of course.
My hometown community was very, very small. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. My parents were baby boomers, and all their friends were Deadheads. I know now that some of those “extended family members” were into a lot more heavy shit than just pot—but as a kid, I could only identify what I could see, or smell, rather. Passing the bong or the joint around was like second nature. I didn’t take a hit, but I knew who to pass it to next. All of these people were adults I respected and loved; they also worked and didn’t seem to let their smoking impair their ability to do anything. I developed a very liberal view on pot just like my parents did.
Cheech and Chong one-liners? That was our version of singing “Kumbaya” at Thanksgiving. I knew all the words to the “Alcapulco Gold” song. I could easily identify if someone in a movie was faking a drag. Think you lived a boring existence? Let me tell you, nothing compares to sitting aimlessly, watching the very intricate process of removing seeds and stems with a grater. I was familiar long before I learned how to even grate cheese.
In retrospect, this type of interaction was not the norm. My friends later would admit to me, as adults, that they found out their parents smoked pot and it surprised them. Maybe they went to a party and found bud in their parent’s car. My friends didn’t know how to appropriately grow and trim a pot plant, either—yet another skill I wish I didn’t have back then. My response to them finding out was always a flabbergasted, “You didn’t find out your parents smoked pot until when?” I couldn’t imagine that there were people I knew who simply didn’t realize their parents were potheads until it was actually appropriate for them to know.
Gee, that must’ve felt great.
5. Your Parents Habits Reflect On You
I never thought twice about chiming in when I heard the kids around me saying stupid things about drugs. It was obvious they knew nothing about the realities of it. I will never forget my best friend (who never knew my parents smoked), talking about how she had gotten into some pot that had been “laced with something,” and she hallucinated that a car was a cat and she ran after it. I rolled my eyes at this, explained that she was either lying or wasn’t smoking pot at all, but something more intense. She glared at me for knowing too much and calling her out. But at what age does that become unacceptable?
For me, it was eleven when I started getting accused of being a stoner. As a straight-A student with low self-esteem, I needed as much help getting along with people as anybody, and this addition to my reputation certainly didn’t help. I didn’t know that my behavior didn’t suggest that myparents were smoking— it suggested that I was. My older sister had already been caught with pot and the local kids who smoked; my neighborhood was notorious for drug use. I must have been too close for comfort.
The worst happened when I was in high school. I woke up early one morning to take a shower; in my small town, I had to catch the bus at 6:20 a.m., so it was very dark. I wandered out into the living room to find a flashlight.
But I didn’t find the flashlight—it being a similar diameter, I accidentally dumped over my mother’s bong, which was filled with nasty resin water that spilled all over my leg and my shoes below the table. I ran into the shower to wash it off.
Anyone who has had resin water spill on them might know that it doesn’t come off easily, especially the smell. I came out of the shower, and I could still smell it. I got dressed, and I could still smell it. I had to put on those same nasty shoes and get to the bus. When I got on, a waft of air hit my face that smelled like, you guessed it, resin water. Everyone commented on it around me, though I wasn’t the obvious culprit. That alone was humiliating enough.
That was, until the bus pulled over to transfer all the students because the driver thought there was something wrong with the engine. I was absolutely humiliated. Everyone noticed that the smell didn’t stop. As soon as I got to actual school, a painstaking forty-five minutes from my bus stop, I called my dad and begged him to pick me up. I never told him why I was so upset that I needed him to come get me, but he didn’t argue, and came after my first class.
I never quite got over my paranoia of odor after that day. And school wasn’t the only place I had that problem.
4. Your Social Skills Are Stunted
I was about seven or eight years old when I found out my parents’ habit was illegal. My sister had taken a bottle of oregano from the kitchen cabinet and tried to sell it to a kid at school on the playground. My sister’s teacher found out about it and called my mom in the morning; I will never forget my raging mother’s response to this event, and I will especially never forget my internal monologue: “Okay, so you’re saying this can result in a fifty dollar fine, but they can take us away from you? Then why do you do it?” My sister and I had seen our parents make “trades” with other adults countless times. It really should have been a big wake-up call to my mother that my sister had picked up on this behavior and thought it was acceptable. But that didn’t faze her one bit.
In fact, I really think that’s a big reason why my sister ended up getting into smoking pot by the time she finished middle school. I can hear her internal reasoning now, the same thing she repeated to me when I found out: “If mom and dad can do it, why can’t I? And what’s to stop me from stealing from their personal stash instead of paying for it?” My sister and I learned that if we found little baggies or tins around the house that they were likely pot stashes. I bought my mom a little jewelry box once and her response was, “Oh thank you! A joint box!” I was heartbroken that even when I wanted her to notice something pretty, she still thought about pot.
My story was a little different. I had no interest in smoking pot. I was already being bullied enough and didn’t need to attract any attention to myself. So when my friends came over, I had a strange ritual: the first thing we did was hole up in my bedroom, and didn’t come out until dinnertime. This was because my mother didn’t want my friends to know she smoked, but she also didn’t want to do it in her own bedroom. So I lied to my friends and said that my whole existence was inside my bedroom or sitting at the computer. While we made forts on my bunk bed, my mom sat outside with her bong. This became so routine for my best friend and I that she eventually stopped questioning it. It was a lifesaver when the weather was nice enough to spend time outside in the tree house.
As I got older and my best friend moved away, I had to come up with better excuses. I stopped inviting friends to come to my house because I lived “too far away,” which was true when the bus ride alone was forty-five minutes into the mountains. And you know how your nose will stop smelling soap or perfume after a few minutes? That applies to your home environment, too. I learned that the only thing worse than fresh resin water smell was day-old pot smoke smell, so when I went on sleepovers, my clothing was packed in a kitchen trash bag and a Bounce pad, hoping to not be found out that I was a walking odor monster.
3. It Might (Read: Will) Make You Sick
I was a sick kid. A very, very sick kid. I had sinus infections and ear infections nearly every day of my childhood until I was seventeen. Much of my memory of childhood before the age of eight was spent in hospitals, unable to leave the house, and missing school because of chronic illness. My mother blamed the pets, blamed the dust, blamed my allergies. She blamed the doctors for not finding things, and blamed me for having bad teeth that were destroyed by constant antibiotics. I had to change beds, change sheets, change clothing, alter my diet, and live through an entire year of drinking nothing but soy milk because my medications made me allergic to dairy. I remember a year of eating warm rice sweetened with sugar every day for lunch, and dreading finding ooze coming out of my ears.
She never once considered the possibility that I was always sick because she was always smoking. My father smoked, too, but he also smoked cigarettes, which he diligently smoked outside the house since the day my sister was born. My father never smoked one of his cigarettes inside, and he still doesn’t to this day; my sister and I might get exposed to it while he drove, but that was it.
As an adult, I couldn’t stand being around pot smoke, hers or anyone else’s. To this day I am sensitive to it, and it gives me a headache and a sinus infection if I’m saturated for more than an hour. My sister and I described our mother’s smoking habit as “the incense joint,” because she would light it and walk around the house, not smoking more than a drag or two, just spreading the smoke and the stink wherever she went.
Mark my words: that smoke is not harmless. Research now shows that secondhand marijuana smoke can affect your heart and blood vessels (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hazards-of-secondhand-marijuana-smoke/). Some of these studies even have a disclaimer that “the amount of smoke used in this experiment is likely beyond what would be experienced in a casual setting,” but this neglects the possibility of constant contact. Not everyone “parties” to smoke; it can be your daily way of life. And that way of life is constantly under threat.
2. You Live In Constant Fear
When was the last time a police officer came to your door? Scratch that.
When was the last time a police officer came to your door, and you panicked, looked around the living room to make sure your mother’s bong was hidden behind the living room stove, and made sure the windows were open so the smell would dissipate?
We didn’t have a lot of visits in my neighborhood, but when we did, my heart would stop. When my mother got pulled over once for not having current registration stickers on her plates, we rolled the windows down and coasted for almost a mile before we finally “found a place to pull over”. It was common practice for my mother to smoke in the car, and one time a friend’s father asked if my mom smoked because he swore he’d seen her. I said no, because she didn’t smoke cigarettes, but remember—we lived in a really small town. If you’re seen on the road with a joint in your hand, and you drive the only green Subaru on that side of the highway, you’re hard to miss. He kept asking me about it, and I kept denying. I didn’t go back to that friend’s house again while he was there.
One time another friend came over, and my parent’s paraphernalia was out. I hurried to cover it up with a blanket—and then my friend started asking questions. He was particularly whiny, to be fair, but he got worse, and worse, and worse. He wouldn’t let it go. He even started crying and demanded that I tell him what I did in the other room. I couldn’t tell him the so-called “Family Secret,” so I had to make like The Grinch and come up with a quick lie. I ended up telling him that my dad rolled his own cigarettes and I wanted him to stop, so I was covering up the canister of tobacco. My friend dropped the subject and never asked about it again, but I learned never to invite that kid over.
You see, when your whole existence at home is wrapped around a “Family Secret,” that’s a form of child abuse. It’s unfair to ask your kids to keep your nasty habits for you. The fact that my mother wouldn’t smoke in her own room and did nothing to hide it only put me in danger. I had friends who had moved through the foster care system, and it was a living hell. Many of them were abused and raped by foster parents—a fate I did not want. So even if I was unhappy at home and knew my parents were doing something illegal, I kept my mouth shut because that home was better than the alternative. Which made going to school at a place where drug dog searches were an annual event that much more terrifying.
In retrospect, it was a miracle they never got caught by anyone who cared. But that never stopped the fear, which I carried with me until pot was legalized in Colorado in 2012.
1. We Have A Love/Hate Relationship with Legalization
You would think that kids who grow up in a place where pot is an omnipresent reality would be all for legalization. And we are, to a degree. I am more than happy that fewer kids live in fear that their parents will be taken away because they enjoy smoking marijuana, or eating marijuana, or growing marijuana. But I will never forget the bong water incident, or packing my clothing in plastic bags, or being sick for most of my life.
Because of these things, I am less able to be supportive of adult friends wanting to smoke. I have known how to roll a joint properly since I was nine, but I have never done so for myself. I am incredibly judgmental of people who spend $60 at the local “Community Wellness Center” for a medical marijuana card in California, just so they can freely smoke and not worry about their drug test for work. Because now, as an adult with Multiple Sclerosis, I feel like these people are cheating the people who need it somehow.
After pot became legal in Colorado, many people were unaware what this actually meant. Instead of the cheap, backwoods, home-grown stuff my parents were used to, they could get ahold of strains that were much more potent. Edibles became available, all with little research or regard to what the differences in smoking and eating marijuana mean for the human body and brain. My mother has always struggled with depression and Borderline Personality Disorder—I know I’ve said a lot of nasty things in this article about her habits, but the truth of it is, my sister and I often believe that we would have been killed a long time ago if it wasn’t for her constant pot mellowing her out. But when edibles and stronger strains became available, my mother developed psychosis and experienced a personality change. To this day, we cannot have a real conversation, and I fear she has developed even more serious cognitive problems as a result of this ever-present little weed.
Still think marijuana is harmless? I wish.
This article is not meant to sway you one way or another in favor of marijuana legalization or not; quite the contrary. I know just as many people who grew up in similar situations and are avid marijuana users that have no qualms about their upbringing. Like I said earlier, so many people I grew up around held steady jobs and were intelligent, hard-working folks who you might not suspect. I think everyone has a right to whatever substance suits their needs, within reason. But I wanted to bring awareness to those of us affected by those choices, and give a voice to people who may still be living in fear.
Be well, everyone. And may you never spill bong water on your shoes.
Comments