Reefer Madness? Marijuana, increased potency is the gateway to a debate on addiction and treatment.
“It was as if she woke up one day, and decades of her life had disappeared. Joyce, 52 and a writer in Manhattan, started smoking pot when she was 15, and for years it was a pleasant escape, a calming protective cloud. Then it became an obsession, something she needed to get through the day. She found herself hiding her addiction from her family, friends and co-workers.”
I just bought a book that describes in the most vivid way, loving to get high. It is Rolling Away: My Agony with Ecstasy, by Lynn Marie Smith.
Lynn describes her first experience with ecstasy:
“We were all silently looking at one another, waiting for someone to make the first move. I went to take a drink of my beer and as the coldness trickled down my throat, I was suddenly underneath a waterfall. A beautiful air passed through my entire body. My eyes slowly closed and I was in slow motion.” P. 29
Parents, I want you to hear this message now.
The loving to get high syndrome needs our attention. There is something going on in the lives of our kids that we need to look at. If we ignore the signs and symptoms, it will morph into something more difficult to deal with, chemical dependency.
The hear and now that I’m using is actually a play on the words for here and now, which is a popular way to talk about where and how we should live our lives. The benefit of living in the here and now is that we are not going to be gripped by our past or overwhelmed with the future.
I ran into a friend today who asked me how the “inbetweeners” are doing? I said, “what are you talking about?” She said, “you know, the kids who love to get high but are not yet chemically dependent.”
Inbetweeners! What a great visual.
My Random House Dictionary calls between “an intervening space and time.” This space and time can be between the ages of 10 and 20, or between the end of elementary school and college. But more importantly it is the space and time between getting high for the first time and the discovery of loving to get high. Inbetweeners fall some place between experimentation and dependency.
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