‘Copycat’ edible cannabis harms children, so says Health Canada. They’re warning cannabis consumers to only purchase cannabis that is “legal and regulated’ from “authorized retailers” who provide products in “plain packaging with child-resistant features.” Now, for the non-consumer or occasional consumer, this sounds reasonable. You wouldn’t purchase whiskey in an unlabeled bottle made in someone’s bathtub. And you certainly wouldn’t leave this unmarked bottle around children, where it can be mistaken for iced tea. But for many, cannabis is a […]
The UMC Utrecht Brain Center, in collaboration with various organizations in the Netherlands, will receive about $1.5 million (€1.4 million) from the Dutch government. Bedrocan announced the study on March 20. Previous research shows that CBD reduced seizures in children with specific epilepsy-related syndromes.
U.K.-based Cannabis Health Newsreports that via the government’s or ZonMW’s Good Use of Medicines program, researchers will use the money and launch a four-year research project delving into the effects of high-CBD oil in children living with severe epilepsy.
Researchers will administer whole-plant high-CBD oil, Bedrolite from the Dutch Transvaal pharmacy, which is made using cannabis produced by Bedrocan. Fifty participants will join the trial which is planned to kick off in the summer. The first patients are expected to begin by the end of the year.
Researchers will study if the oil is effective in reducing frequency of seizures. They’ll also monitor other “quality of life markers” such as seizure length, sleep, and alertness. Patients must not have previously used CBD oil for the treatment of epilepsy and/or seizures and must have a minimum of eight seizures or more every four weeks.
“Our research focuses on the individual. Instead of looking at a group, we look at whether the drug is effective per patient,” said lead researcher, Floor Jansen, who is a pediatric neurologist. “We want to investigate whether the number of attacks decreases, but we also pay attention to other important outcomes for a patient. Think of less use of emergency medication against prolonged attacks, a change in alertness or a better night’s sleep.”
Rare, intractable forms of epilepsy have not been studied well enough. Researchers will look at individual cases instead of looking at a group as a whole in order to determine whether the drug is effective for each patient.
Intractable Epilepsy is a charity that raises funding to assist families pay for private cannabis prescriptions. Jo Griffiths, chair of Intractable Epilepsy said she would like to see the U.K. match the €1.4 million for randomized control trials (RCTs) on Bedrocan products.
“Intractable Epilepsy supports families with private medicinal cannabis costs, once it has been prescribed for at least six months,” Griffiths said. “But some families cannot even afford a private consultation. To help every child and young adult with intractable epilepsy access full-extract medicinal cannabis, the government and health providers are saying gold standard RCTs are needed. Therefore, we are calling on the U.K. government to match the Dutch government’s €1.4 million towards trials, and to run an NHS trial using the same oils.”
“The NHS has prescribed the very same oils to two children in the U.K. over the past four years, while others pay privately and some families are looking to the unregulated black market,” she said.
Alongside RCTs, Intractable Epilepsy is seeking an observational study to examine the effects of whole-plant cannabis oils on people who have already found success with the compound.
“Alongside a UK RCT, we would like to see the observational trial recommended by the Health Select Committee in 2019, for those already taking full-extract oils,” she added.
“It would be prudent of the government and the NHS to take part in these trials to build the evidence base that over 50 children have proven over the last four years.”
The study will launch this summer, and the first patients are expected to be treated by the end of 2023.
You could tell me it’s November (it’s actually March), and I’d probably believe you. This is to say that I only just realized that, shit! It’s time to pop seeds once again. I’ve been unsure of doing it, knowing the time commitment that growing requires may not be best combined with the relentless demands of newborn life.
I’ve been on a years-long cannabis-growing journey, otherwise. After many years of merely consuming cannabis, happy to enjoy the fruits of other dedicated peoples’ labor, I decided a while ago that how involved I was in cannabis in my professional life didn’t quite match up with my dedication on a personal level. Sure, I was smoking a lot, which is obviously a commitment in its own right. But could I truly understand how this plant works and manifests without seeing it bloom from seed to smoke? To truly get connected, I knew I had to start growing myself.
In adulthood, I’ve really developed my love for plants, the outdoors, animals, and anything related to nature. While I thrive being surrounded by plants, keeping them alive has been a bit of a struggle for me. Succulents, monsteras, even garden tomatoes—you name it, I’ve killed it. So I was hesitant to wade into my absolute favorite plant on Earth out of sheer respect. Wasting a seed—especially one with “cool” genetics—seemed kind of sacrilege to me. But you never know if you don’t try, I reasoned, and I figured my mild terror and deep reverence for the cannabis plant would keep me in line.
It did. I’ve become a bit of a plant mommy, in addition to now becoming a human mommy, a process that was fraught with similar anxieties and overthinking. I’ll never claim I’m growing any kind of fire, far from it, but I grow purely outdoors (thanks, Southern California!), and the several harvests I’ve now reaped have been totally smokable.
As expected, growing cannabis has deepened my relationship with the plant exponentially: I understand its cycles, how each variable—weather, water, nutrients, pest control, to name just a few—contributes to the quality of the final product (or lack thereof), the rainbow spectrum of genetics and how differently they all manifest, and also, frankly, how easily it grows without any intervention at all (hence the nickname “weed”). It’s informed my reporting, my evaluation of products in the marketplace, and it’s been a mental health balm in times when getting my hands dirty was just what my body and soul needed most. It also gave me immense respect for those who do this on any kind of commercial scale for money. The plant will grow just fine on its own, but it won’t shine without the special touch of expert know-how.
I also view growing as an act of political resistance—yes, even in the age of legalization. It’s still federally illegal to grow, even in states that allow homegrow. In April 2022, I was called to be a witness in a federal cannabis case as an expert on the cannabis plant, something I was comfortable doing thanks to my experiences reporting and growing, and I admitted on the stand as part of my proving my bonafides that I had grown cannabis before.
“You’re aware that a lot of the things you just listed as part of your qualifications, growing weed, for example, is illegal?” the prosecutor asked me while I was on the stand.
“Yes,” I replied.
“What quantity did you grow it in?” she asked.
“Under six plants, per California regulations,” I said.
“And do you also know that, regardless of your personal feelings about them, you still have to follow the federal marijuana laws in this country?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied, while the right side of my face twitched a little bit.
I know enough to know that nobody’s prosecuting federal cannabis cases for homegrowers anymore, so I’d be safe. But I was definitely sweating bullets nonetheless. Federal court will do that to you. Still, it felt like an important moment of defiance. Especially considering many states with adult-use legal cannabis sales and consumption have outlawed homegrow entirely. That’s not just a force of the government, but something lobbied for and enacted specifically by cannabis industry lobbyists and so-called “advocacy” groups, like the New York Medical Cannabis Industry organization and others across the nation, who often represent the interests of monied cannabis corporations.
As for me this year, I’ve decided I’m going to pop some seeds after all and line up a few clones, just in case the aforementioned goes sideways. I’ll do the best I can (my baby is due late May) and allow myself room for distraction while making sure to tag in my husband to help hand water. If my grow fails and I become engulfed by my baby, which is entirely possible, I’ll know it’s just the way things are meant to be for this season and allow myself some grace.
But mostly, I have visions of myself with a baby strapped to my chest, sitting on the earth and slowly trimming leaves under the San Diego sun. It’s an idyllic vision to look forward to (if potentially unrealistic), and it excites me for what’s to come. I’m hoping that in any free moments I can steal, these growing female plants will remind me of the transformation that took place in my own womb and that they’ll offer me a mental salve in the difficult days of early motherhood. That it’s a female plant, a mother plant, whose bloom is healing and beneficial is not lost on me at all. I feel like I have to start the growing process, at least, seeing as I’m about to pop new life myself.
On March 16, the Tennessee Democratic Caucus demanded that five children taken during a traffic stop by law enforcement be returned to their parents immediately.
On February 16, a traffic stop conducted by Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) pulled over Deonte Williams, Bianca Clayborne, and their five children (a four-month-old infant, and kids ages two, three, five and seven), who were all traveling to a funeral. While the stop was originally due to the vehicle having a “dark tint and traveling in the left lane while not actively passing,” five grams of cannabis were found in Williams’s possession.
Williams was arrested, and Clayborne was cited but not arrested. She was told by THP that she could follow a patrol car back to the Coffee County Justice Center to bail Williams out. Six hours after the traffic stop occurred, Clayborne waited with her five children on a bench inside the criminal justice center, until her kids “were forcibly removed from her side while an officer restrained her from reaching for her crying baby,” she told Tennessee Lookout. During the time she was waiting, the Department of Children’s Service (DCS) obtained an emergency court order to take custody of the kids while she waited for Williams.
According to the DCS petition obtained by Tennessee Lookout, the DCS believed that the children were neglected, and that there was no “less drastic” alternative than taking the kids away.
“It’s just so shocking to the conscience that in 2023 this is happening,” said one of the couple’s attorneys, Jamaal Boykin. “I just have to believe if my clients looked different or had a different background, they would have just been given a citation and told you just keep this stuff away from the kids while you’re in this state and they’d be on their way.”
It’s been over a month since the incident, and the children still have not been returned to the family. Clayborne is currently breastfeeding her youngest child and has seen a drastic reduction in milk supply in the absence of her baby. She’s also suffered from lack of sleep and a panic attack.
The events of this incident have reached state legislators who are now also speaking up about the injustice.
Sen. London Lamar referred to the events as “ridiculous” and “overuse of power.” “DCS, Coffee County, y’all need to do the right thing before the situation gets worse, and we have a nation of people coming to the rescue of this Black family,” Lamar said. “Give them their children back. It’s borderline discrimination, because if this was any other family, as their attorney said, we don’t even think this would be the outcome.”
Sen. Raumesh Akbari also spoke out about keeping families together. “It is outrageous that the state forcefully separated Bianca Clayborne, a breastfeeding mother, and Deonte Williams from their kids and have allowed this to continue for nearly a month,” Akbari said. “The state exercised extreme and flawed judgment in taking their children and it seems they’ve doubled down on this poor decision. No family is perfect, but an imperfection, like a simple marijuana charge, is no excuse for tearing a family apart. The state is supposed to support reunification. If they don’t have a better reason, they must immediately return these five children to their parents.”
When Tennessee Lookout reached out to DCS for a statement, they did not respond for comment. Reaching out to the THP for a request of the traffic stop officers was denied because of an ongoing investigation.
An instant hair follicle test on both Williams and Clayborne was conducted at their first court appearance, which occurred one week after the children were taken by DCS. Tennessee Lookoutspoke with an unnamed Coffee County administrator, who explained that in general, hair follicle tests are “inadmissible” in court because they can potentially result in false positives.
“This is even more reprehensible when the drug test used to justify keeping these children in foster care is known to be ‘inadmissible’ by the county’s own court administrator,” said the couple’s other attorney, Courtney Teasley.
Teasley shared on Twitter how concerned citizens can help. “We’ve received many requests of ppl wanting to help disrupt with their dollars. If you would like to support #DisruptManchester Here is the link to donate: http://Donorbox.org/disruptmanchestmanchester… Thank you all for helping disrupt a system of oppression!” Teasley wrote on Twitter on March 18.
On March 20, Teasley invited all concerned citizens who want to help bring attention to the issue to court watch the ongoing case, and attend a press conference in front of the courthouse in Manchester, Tennessee.
Doris sputtered to her husband, coughing out a huge bluish cloud of Hawaiian X Super Skunk #1 spiked with a touch of Master Kush, which drifted toward what they thought was their locked bedroom door and swirled about the head of their “I can’t sleep” six-year-old. Arthur, an inquisitive, intelligent and, to be honest, somewhat pushy offspring, stared at his parents in disbelief from the foot of the bed, his attention fixed on the gigantic spliff that Mommy was passing to Daddy to “help them sleep.” Unfortunately, Arthur had just attended his first Drug Awareness Day at school, and he had a lot of questions. Luckily, Arthur’s parents had yet to commence the Vulcan Mind Meld, sparing young Arthur many years of future therapy.
“But you said you don’t smoke cigarettes. You said they were bad.”
“That’s right, Arthur, they are bad,” explained Dad. “But this isn’t a cigarette—really.” Doris blanched. “Steve, you’re confusing him.” Arthur’s cute brown eyes narrowed as he gave his parents that intense look he reserved for little league, girls and liars. “I know what it is. It’s a joint! They told us about that at school.”
“Who told you it was a joint?”
“Jack the policeman. He came to our class and showed us a cigarette just like that one!” said Arthur, pointing at the funny-looking “cigarette” with two pointy ends and a big bulge in the middle. “You lied!” he yelled, pointing at his father. Steve looked in desperation at his wife. “Come here, honey,” Doris said softly, as Arthur climbed onto the bed. “Mom and Dad need to talk to you about something.”
Doris and Steve are wrestling with an increasingly common dilemma among parents who smoke pot: just what to tell their young and pre-teen kids about the mighty herb. The nation’s airwaves and cable markets are saturated with carefully crafted, government-sponsored “public service ads” designed to scare, shame, intimidate and coerce kids into not smoking pot. There’s the cheery Investigator, which glamorizes parents who give their kids the third degree, grilling them mercilessly for information about their activities and friends just like, well, cops. In Pick Up, a stoner forgets to pick up his kid brother. Another one, Pool, shows a toddler pushing a raft into a swimming pool, presumably to follow the raft in, while a casual, low-key voiceover intones: “Just tell your parents you weren’t watching her, because you were getting stoned.”
No wonder intelligent parents who want to have a toke or two after a hard day have been looking at various methods of raising kids and having their reefer, too.
Let’s start with something we can all agree on: Kids should not smoke pot. Just as you don’t start the day by handing your six-year-old a tumbler of Jack Daniels and firing up his Camel, parents should not be in the business of getting kids stoned—just ask former Hollywood child-tokers and subsequent rehab-grads Robert Downey Jr. and Drew Barrymore, both of whom were exposed to grass at a tender age by their swinging-’60s parents and the crowds they ran in.
Parents should follow NORML’s (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) guide-lines for responsible marijuana use:
“NORML believes that marijuana smoking is not for kids and should only be used responsibly by adults. As with alcohol consumption, it must never be an excuse for misconduct or other bad behavior. Driving or operating heavy equipment while impaired from marijuana should be prohibited.”
Nonetheless, in the real world, 20 million Americans say they have toked the bone during the past year, and despite findings that reefer reduces sperm count, millions of these proud and unashamed potheads are now raising, or have raised, kids who aren’t one-eyed freaks, Charlie Mansonites or pinheads, thereby refuting the myth that pot causes genetic mutations (at least not the visible kinds, which in America, the land of fleeting images, are the only ones that count). Of course, herb—like alcohol, nicotine and mercury-laden tuna—is another substance that has no place in a woman’s body during pregnancy. However, once the pregnancy is over and the child has finished breast-feeding, many parents return to smoking pot, for all the good reasons: responsible recreation and relaxation.
The New York Times recently reported that in a poll conducted by RoperASW, as many as one in 10 American parents of children under 18—about six million people—said they had smoked herb in the past 12 months. One in 20 parents, or about three million people, said they had smoked in the preceding month. The number of Americans who lit up in the last 15 minutes was unavailable, but considering the reluctance of those still holding jobs, or respected members of highly paid role-model professions—i.e., doctors, lawyers, teachers, talkradio jocks, governors—to admit to being anything other than a pharmaceutical junkie in Ashcroft’s America, one suspects that the number of regular tokers is a lot higher than reported. Life in prison in three-strike states like Texas is less than appealing; then again, it’s not Malaysia, where, if you get caught sucking on a joint, a swift trial is soon followed by death.
But short of that, getting nabbed blowing a doob in front of the children can have grave consequences, chief among them losing your kids.
Frank and Sara are the parents of Jake, a 10-month-old baby who was properly strapped in the back in his car seat when his parents were pulled over by cops in Oregon.
“First of all,” Frank told High Times, “the cop just said, ‘Give me the pot, or we’ll search the car.’ So my wife handed him the baggie! I was flabbergasted.” The cops separated the couple. “There was Good Cop and Psycho Cop. First Psycho Cop wanted to know if there was anyone higher than me. How could there be,” laughed Frank, “since I’d been drinking Scotch, too!” An incorrigible wise-ass, Frank’s flippant comeback—“Pablo Escobar?”—didn’t go over well, either. “Sara was only stoned, but her license had expired, which gave another new wrinkle to the situation. Then I got the Good Cop, while Nut Cop went to work on my wife.”
“It freaked me out,” recalled Sara. “The first thing he said is that they can take our son away for this. Then the cop gave me his card and said I had three days to rat out whoever sold us the pot. But we talked to the ACLU, who told us they were full of shit.”
“We never smoke in the car anymore, ” Frank added ruefully. “We shouldn’t have been smoking and driving in the first place.”
Both the US and Canadian governments use draconian drug laws to hassle groups and individuals who refuse to toe the antipot line, claiming that marijuana use—not to mention political activism—creates unfit parents. Divorced parents have used the marijuana laws to smite their mates, especially in nasty custody battles. Debra Cannistrad, a medical-cannabis user living in the San Joaquin Valley of California, was threatened by an ex-spouse for custody of her 12-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son, two days after holding a vigil for a jailed cannabis researcher. Fortunately for Debra, the father—a deadbeat dad—outpoints Debra for parental malfeasance, but nonetheless, the use of a joint as a loaded gun is an indication of the emergence of a snitch society, a la the late Soviet Union.
Other situations are even more bizarre. A couple in Washington State lost their daughter immediately after birth when hospital workers, without their knowledge or consent, tested both the mother and her newborn girl for cannabis. When both tested positive, doctors blamed minor medical problems with the baby on her mother’s cannabis use and accused her of endangering the child’s life. The baby was isolated and the mother not allowed to breast-feed her. The child was returned to the couple in a week, but they were first made to sign a contract with 13 conditions, including urine-testing, mental-health evaluations and agreeing to allow state inspectors to enter their home anytime they damned well pleased. So much for the Fourth Amendment. Once again, this woman obviously should not have been toking up during any stage of her pregnancy—but does that justify the extreme measures the hospital took?
As kids get older, the dilemma for parents who smoke pot gets even more problematic.
Even in a city as sophisticated and progressive as New York, there is a wide divergence in attitudes and styles among the city’s parents regarding their kids and pot, which one suspects mirrors the nation’s attitude as well.
Tahisa, an urban planner, and her husband are raising a 14-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl in New York’s most fashionably transgressive neighborhood, the East Village. She’s a pioneer, having lived in the EV more than 20 years, arriving long before the neighborhood’s recent resurgence and ultra-gentrification. Many of the tenement apartments, abandoned and trashed in the 1980s, now go for $2,500 a month, and uptown hipsters who once came to Avenue B for cocaine and heroin today travel downtown for gourmet coffee shops, expensive punk jewelry and haute cuisine. It’s now a prime residential neighborhood, attracting middle-class parents with children; its playgrounds and community gardens are packed with kids.
“I smoked when my kids were small, so they always saw us smoking, and all our friends smoke. So we never had to tell them that we smoke; they saw us smoke,” said Tahisa. When their kids started school, they started getting the standard anti-drug diatribes. Tahisa told them it was propaganda. “We told them pot was really good, that birds eat it, and that tobacco is much worse for you. Our biggest concerns were tobacco and glue-sniffing.”
Part of Tahisa’s agenda was to demystify pot. “We didn’t want to make pot seem so deviant that our kids would be attracted to it. We didn’t want to sneak around. If we were going to do this, we shouldn’t have to hide it. If they saw it as just a normal thing, we thought they would probably decide not to do it.”
Amy, a close friend of Tahisa’s, is medical researcher, and with her husband Ron, a media consultant, they have taken a similar tack with their 12-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter. “Pot is so much a part of our lifestyle, the kids take it for granted.” Amy, her husband and their friends have smoked weed for more than 30 years and have no intention of stopping. “When our kids have friends over—especially ones who we don’t know—we go into the bathroom, or up on the roof, to get high. And we certainly don’t buy pot with them around, say if a dealer comes to our home. But after all, this is the East Village.”
At a certain age, when Amy felt her kids were ready, she told them that she and Ron weren’t smoking cigarettes. “Then we went on to say that what we do is okay, but it’s against the law,” said Amy, “and we could go to jail for it if certain people found out.”
You don’t want to see Mommy and Daddy in an orange jumpsuit in chains behind bars, do you? That’s pretty effective. Amy and Ron also explained that not every law is good or just and that what they were doing wasn’t wrong; that some drugs, like medicines, are good, and other drugs, like heroin, cocaine, nicotine, PCP, glue, Ecstasy and acid, are very, very bad. “When they started school,” said Amy, “we told them never to mention that we smoke anything at all. And it’s surprising how well they understand.”
This medical tack is similar to the one used in a forthcoming 2005 children’s book, Just a Plant (justaplant.com) by Ricardo Cortes, an educator and Webmaster of the art-and-culture website magicpropagandamill.com. The book tells the story of a little girl who discovers her parents smoking marijuana. Cortes then follows the efforts of the family to rationally explain to their daughter just what pot is and what it does.
“She goes to a farm, and the farmer talks to her about how it grows, how it has seeds and how it’s used for a lot of different things,” says Cortes. “People use corn for eating, people use marijuana for making canvas, paper, etc. Then there’s a medicinal aspect: How does it affect the body? In the story, she goes to a doctor to find out about it. He tells her patients use it as a medicine; there are many plants used as medicine. The doctor also explains that because it’s a medicine, it’s not something for children.”
Cortes takes care in the book to explain that there are things adults can do that kids can’t: driving a car, having a glass of wine, drinking coffee. Then he deals skillfully with the illegality of pot. “At that point in the story, the child is like, I learned everything there is to know about pot, and it sounds beautiful.’ But if you just stop there, that’s dangerous, because now the little girl goes to school and says, ‘Yeah, my mom smokes pot!”’
In the story, the girl then stumbles upon some kids smoking a joint and tells them she knows what they’re smoking. Then the cops roll up for the last lesson of the story: It’s illegal. Cortes brings in the history of Prohibition and tries to portray the cops as good guys, to an extent, by stressing that there are laws they don’t like enforcing. “The cop says that this is how our country works,” Cortes explains, “and if you want to change a law, there are certain ways to go about it.”
But as Tahisa found, as children get older, social institutions intervene to make changes in a parent’s pot policy. “We stopped smoking for awhile because we could see our kids were being pressured at school. They gave a citywide questionnaire to the kids. We kept our son home from school that day because he told us about it, and it was really like: Rat out your parents and rat out your friends. We didn’t want to put him on the spot by making him have to lie, so we stopped smoking.”
But old habits die hard for parents who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s. “My husband still doesn’t smoke pot, but I started again. Because, in the words of Louis Armstrong, it relaxes me,” Tahisa said with a smile.
Other parents take an entirely opposite approach to herb and kids; one of hide and deny. Dennis and his wife Dee are raising twin girls, now 13 years old. Both girls are very bright and go to top-tier public schools on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
“I don’t tell them. That’s it,” Dennis laughed, then became serious. “There’re two ways to deal with it. One is how I deal with it when I want to get stoned, which is to go into the bathroom, open the window and lock the door. That kind of works, although one time we were out on Fire Island and I had smoked a joint in the bathroom, and my daughter goes in right afterwards and says, ‘Dad, that incense you burned really stinks!’ She was 11 or 12—they don’t know anything.”
Dennis fears that his daughter will be at a rock concert and somebody will be smoking a joint near her, and, says Dennis, “Her friends will say, ‘Oh, it’s pot!’ And she’s going to say, ‘Oh, no it’s not, it’s incense!’ And she’s going to look like an idiot and figure out that I lied.” Dennis has also gone to extremes to conceal his THC jones by concocting marijuana butter. “The feeling was that smoking is bad for you, so I’ll try a different way of doing this. I thought that if I could get this down, I wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom to smoke. I’d go to the refrigerator!” Dennis cooked up a butter recipe he found in High Times, but the project backfired. “We ate the butter, went to a party, had a great time, got really, really stoned—like we were tripping—and then we went out to dinner by ourselves. And we were both super-paranoid, terrified, and we stayed stoned for the next two days.”
The problem with the hide-and-deny method is, what do you tell your children when they inevitably ask? Do you tell them the truth? “They hear in school that marijuana sucks,” says Dennis. “We were on a long drive, and one of my daughters asked my wife if she ever smoked pot. And I’m thinking, ‘What is she going to say? It’s never come out that direct.’ And she said no. Then I’m thinking, ‘What am I gonna say? Yeah?’ Then my daughter said, ‘Dad, and you?’ And I said no, and she said, ‘Good.’ I think it’s a scary thing to be asked, because of what they see on TV and what it means, like breaking the law. They’re brainwashed. And I don’t want them smoking pot, you know? When they’re in college, they can smoke pot. I don’t think they should be smoking pot in junior high school or high school—even if I did!”
That brainwashing is orchestrated straight from the top, at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). ONDCP reports directly to the president, and it serves as a kind of amorphous umbrella organization for all of the precisely calibrated “campaigns” that “target” parents and young people with misleading and disingenuous public-service advertisements. ONDCP coordinates overall drug policy, along with the efforts of other government/business coalitions such as the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, to keep America scared of marijuana with recent media campaigns like Parents: The Anti-Drug and My Anti-Drug, specifically directed at kids. ONDCP’s Ad Gallery features such gems as Wallet, in which a young teen takes us down to the basement to meet his wasted, long-haired, glassy-eyed older brother, who looks more like a dope addict than a pothead, and who “never did anything at all.”
From the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, the creators of Parents: The Anti-Drug (theantidrug.com), comes Slam, a truly vicious commercial teeming with violence and anger, in which a father and his teenage daughter yell and scream with vein-popping animus (“I hate you!”), slamming the door repeatedly in each other’s faces, after Dad covertly searches his daughter’s room and finds—horror of horrors—a bag of pot! Once again, so much for the Fourth Amendment, at least if you’re under 18. By the way, the daughter in the spot looks well over the age of consent. The commercial condones this kind of despotic, foaming-at-the-mouth behavior with an ambiguous admonition to parents at the end: “Afraid of a few slammed doors? Get over it. Because to help your kid with their problem, first you have to get over yours.” Let’s look at this statement: At first it seems to imply that the parents should get rid of their explosive anger, but actually it justifies this oppressive approach. The problem parents have to get over is their reluctance to get violent and hysterical. Obviously compromise, conflict resolution and reasoned argument are for sissies.
The National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign also sponsors My Anti-Drug (freevibe.com), which brings us, in Spanish, Dummies, featuring the famed crash-test dummies (which used to promote seat belts) toking it up and getting into a devastating accident in a lab dedicated to making accidents happen. You don’t have to speak Spanish to figure out La Causa. Ads also come in Cambodian, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. Dummies mines the same vein of malleable truth and outright mendacity as the spot with the poor Hispanic kid mourning the loss of a friend in a traffic accident and blaming it on pot. What the ad fails to mention is that accidents involving pot usually also involve alcohol. Liquor is metabolized by the body in hours, leaving pot—which can stay in the fatty tissues for months—to take the blame.
And, of course, the ad that has generated the most controversy is the 2002 Super Bowl Sunday spot that equated blowing a J with supporting international terrorism. (“Where do terrorists get their money? If you buy drugs, it might come from you.”) Presumably Osama bin Laden gets a cut from every nickel-bag sold in America. Quaffing down a sixpack is way cool, because it’s legal. Filling up your SUV with expensive gasoline from those good friends of the Bush family (and our valiant ally in the war on terrorism), the House of Saud, is also no problemo—save when the dough goes to support Muslim madrassas throughout the world where children learn that Jews are pigs and monkeys, the United States is the Great Satan, and the lust for death is far more powerful than the lust for life. Think of it as No Terrorist Left Behind.
It’s swell for Budweiser to spend 50 G’s a second to keep people drinking beer—that’s free enterprise. It is quite another thing for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy to spend over $1.6 million each for two 30-second ads during the Super Bowl, the biggest media market in the United States, to blast government propaganda down the throats of 130 million people. Since 1997, over a five-year period, approximately $1 billion has been allocated to paid media—your tax dollars at work, on behalf of ad agencies and TV networks. And most studies have shown that these scare tactics increase, rather then lessen, a kid’s curiosity about illegal substances. The moronic This Is Your Brain on Drugs campaign, which likened the Stoner’s cerebrum to an egg in a frying pan, became one of the most parodied and ridiculed advertisements of its day.
Maybe it’s time to allow parents who smoke pot to raise their children their own way, exercising responsibility and good judgment, and with the guidance, honesty and intuition that only a parent can bring to their children’s lives. Take the billions being squandered on frightening our kids and freaking out their parents, and turn it over to libraries, colleges and our sorely underfunded public schools—or return it to the taxpayers as a rebate, so the citizens of America can finally afford some decent herb.
A chorus of experts are growing concerned about the prevalence of candy-flavored cannabis products and other flavors that appeal to children in states with legal cannabis.
Part of the uproar was spurred when a New York official showed a watermelon-flavored cannabis edible product to the local media amid the state’s first days of adult-use cannabis sales, taking place earlier this month.
The Associated Pressreports that pressure is mounting to address the way cannabis products allegedly target children, with several individuals chiming in with expertise in epidemiology and tobacco control research.
“We should learn from the nicotine space, and I certainly would advocate that we should place similar concern on cannabis products in terms of their appealability to youth,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University.
“If you go through a cannabis dispensary right now,” she said, “it’s almost absurd how youth oriented a lot of the packaging and the products are.”
New York’s adult-use cannabis market recently kicked off. The state’s adult-use law bans marketing and advertising that is designed in any way that appeals to children or other minors.
But the state’s Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) has not yet established defined rules on labeling, packaging, and advertising. What would a ban look like? Some concepts would ban images of food, candy, soda, drinks, cookies, or cereal on packaging. OCM officials believe these images could appeal to minors.
“Consumers need to be aware—parents need to be aware—if they see products that look like other products that are commonly marketed to kids, that’s an illicit market product,” said Lyla Hunt, OCM’s deputy director of public health and campaigns.
But when OCM Chief Chris Alexander showed a watermelon-flavored edible product to the media at New York’s first licensed adult-use cannabis store, people’s heads were rolling.
Per New York law, minors caught in possession of cannabis face a civil penalty of a maximum of $50. Licensed cannabis retailers who are caught selling to minors face fines and the potential loss of their licenses, but no jail time.
“When you’re talking about strawberry-cheesecake, or mango, or cookies-and-cream flavors, it’s very difficult to argue that those are for older adults,” said Dr. Pamela Ling, the director for the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California in San Francisco.
“Folks who consider themselves to be more like cannabis aficionados,” she said, “would say that smoking a flavored cannabis product is like putting ketchup on your steak.”
Haven’t We Heard this Before?
“Won’t somebody please think of the children?” Helen Lovejoy said on The Simpsons. Most adults store cannabis products in a place that’s out of reach from children and teenagers.
Similar bans on flavored tobacco products have taken place in numerous states over the last few years. The same hysteria has made its way into the cannabis industry.
California’s ban on flavored tobacco products took effect just weeks ago. The state’s particular ban went further to ban menthol cigarettes.
In Massachusetts in 2019, members of the state’s House of Representatives voted to prohibit the sale of flavored tobacco and vape products. And that’s not all. The vaping products that remain legal will be subject to a whopping 75 excise tax.
Cigarette use has fallen out of favor among teens, but the use of e-cigarettes and vapes has risen. The new focus on regulation is falling upon cannabis products.
Another Halloween requires another debunking of cannabis Halloween myths. Particularly the myth that people are handing out cannabis edibles to your children. British Columbia‘s Minister of Public Safety, Mike Farnworth, told parents to look out for legal and illegal edible products. Even though legal products are capped at 10mg and come in child-resistant packaging, Farnworth said, “legal cannabis products can still be attractive to children.” How? Legal cannabis involves rigid packaging and labelling rules to ensure children and young people […]
Can you overdose from THC? It depends on what you mean by overdose. Usually, the term implies taking too much of a substance to the point of death. But in common parlance, talking about overdosing on THC could mean simply taking too much. And that is subjective for every individual. A connoisseur may smoke multiple joints daily, perhaps eating a 100+ mg cookie before bed. Other consumers, on the other hand, may prefer a single bowl. And maybe only on […]
Governor Dan McKee signed Rhode Island’s legalization of cannabis into law on May 25, 2022. Although, the State has had medical cannabis since 2006. The new law allows residents over 21 years old to possess and consume cannabis recreationally. Accordingly, some medical regulations are updated, including how to administer medical cannabis to children. Rhode Island […]
Let’s just get it out of the way, times they are a’changing and parenting is like trying to build IKEA furniture without the instructions. How do you have one of the hardest conversations with your kids ever – without lying or being a hypocrite?
