There is a time and place for experimentation: that place is called college

[novapsyche]

Here is a chick who's much too young to be searching for the substances she is.

I'm a big proponent for decriminalization of many if not most drugs, but I also think that one should be a fully functioning adult before entering into the decision to ingest these substances.

If and when I become a parent, I will probably be very strict about the use of tobacco, marijuana and any other drug by my teens. I almost certainly will bring up my own background, the fact that I waited until I was 25--out of high school, out of college--before I smoked up for the first time.

14 is just too young. The brain and body need time to develop normally.

Comments

I Agree

[poetpainter77.livejournal.com]

Sadly, the majority of high school level and eighth grade teenagers smoke pot now. And now more are having sex (there was an article in my school newspaper about the STDs in our school; it's sickening that so many people have gonoreah, hemroids, clymidia and other diseases; HIV was another listed).

I don't exactly have an open dislike of the younger person's use of marijuana...but...I don't feel the majority of people my age are mature or responsible enough to handle what comes after it or the effects of pot itself (there are kids that come into my english and history classes high...every day!!!). It's a known fact that even the littlist things can be just a spark that starts a wild fire (of course, all the people at my school that do pot at a regular basis are in complete denial of anything happening to them). I've heard pot-smoker girls in my history class take an entire period to talk with their friends on what it's like to try mushrooms for the first time. It's kind of sad.

And the most ironic thing is...they've all, for the most part, seen Requiem for a Dream. Did they NOT see Ellen Burstyn in that? Omg...jeeze, heh.

Sorry, I just had to vent.

[fadedpaladin.livejournal.com]

s'part of why I party in the psychedelic trance subculture of rave- it's an older, and usually a bit more mature crew. Don't get me wrong, I've met kids from 12-16 who can handle mdma better than I can, but still, it's both tiring and disturbing...

[lordofgaysantas.livejournal.com]

I agree, since I didn't do anything until I was 18, and even then I just have had a bit of pot once in a blue moon when handed to me at a party. Otherwise, all I do is drink, of which my mother started letting me when I was 16. Because I was allowed to and I didn't have to sneak around and get it, I didn't drink that much alcohol, I just did when it was around at a party. Of course, once I was 18 and running around Europe I began to drink a lot more, but as soon as the parties ended I went back to extended periods of sobriety.

I think the key is allowing your children freedom in other ways - no curfews, being relaxed about alcohol, etc, so they don't feel the need to rebell. It was my friends that had all of that strictness that then rushed into drug use.

The upside to my friends that did do drugs when they were 14, is that by the time they were 16 they nearly overdosed and never touched it again. The kids I knew that lived in strict households that feared drugs until they were 18, got out of the house and became serious drug addicts - often for the rest of their lives. Even though I didn't do drugs when I was younger, and I don't do drugs now - aside from the occasional pot, as I said (oh wait, and there was the few months in the summer when I was 19 in England and everyone was into poppers, which is the equivalent of sniffing glue. Sadly, I was highly amused by this, but got over it within a few weeks. I fear the brain damage I did just from that). But a LOT of hard drugs get offered to me constantly, and I'm not tempted - is because I never had an irrational fear of it, I just knew what they did, saw what drugs did to my friends (my parents tried to keep me away from my friends, but it's good they didn't succeed, because I got to see first-hand what this all does), and to their brains, so that was it for me.

Yeah, this is rambly and I'm too tired to re-read, but there you go. It's a tricky thing. Just like Catholic girls that grow up in repressed households tend to be the ones guaranteed to launch into a life of a _lot_ of random sex. That was another subject that wasn't avoided around me, and I grew up having no notion to rebell - I just wasn't interested in sleeping with people just because it was 'the thing to do.'

Ah, it's because of this and many more reasons, my peers aren't very fond of me. My sister is desperate for approval from her peers, and she's fallen into a life of drugs and sex. She also grew up terrified of drugs, and spent my entire teen years calling me the most foul of names because she knew I hung amongst 'pot-heads'. She turned 18 and fell in love with ecstasy and cocaine. 'Nice'.

[femakita.livejournal.com]

Hemmorhoids are an STD?