public service announcement - marijuana is stronger today

Around these parts most adults, including therapists who treat adolescents, seem to agree that marijuana is a reasonably benign drug parents shouldn't get too worked up about. I have now heard of at least three different therapists advising parents not to lower the boom when they learned their child was smoking pot.

That has never seemed right to me, possibly because it isn't right:

A: Marijuana has gotten stronger.

B: Marijuana use is causally related to development of schizophrenia in some cases.

C: Marijuana use is associated with lower educational attainment.

D: The younger you begin using it, the more dangerous its effects (and vice versa).

We've been pretty ferocious on the subject of drugs.

We told C, in these words: We have two kids with major brain problems; we don't want another one. [synchronicity alert: C has just this moment come into the room to tell me he's watching a really good show called Weeds. sigh]

Anyway, we told C. that if we found out he was drinking or using drugs, he would be spending his entire adolescence inside our house.

That has worked out pretty well, in part because C. is a fairly easy kid to manage, as kids go, and in part because the other kids in his school all got the same ruling from their own folks, who appear to mean business. C. has one friend whose parents ground him for a year. And that was just for drinking, albeit a whole lot of drinking, according to C.

I realize that some kids are easier to manage than others, but still. As I understand it (no time to fact-check at the moment), the later a person begins using any kind of drug, the better, and we've told this to C on several occasions. When C. was a freshman, I attended a lecture given by a mom whose son died of heroin addiction; her husband, the boy's step-dad, told us that a parent's job is to get his child to age 21 without drinking or using drugs.

Few parents are going to hit that mark, but Ed and I have found that having the mark is extremely helpful.

Now C. is lying on the sofa laughing over some DARE counselor who crashed the DARE van into a tree because he was drunk. Haha!

Actually, that is pretty funny. I'm not a fan of DARE.

I'm a fan of grounding your kid for a year if need be.

sex, drugs, & rock 'n roll

I've been worried about teen drug use lately. The kids around me are now old enough to be drinking and/or using drugs, and some of them are doing so.

So I've been worried.

I've had two interesting conversations in the past week with people who know something about the subject firsthand: a police officer & a pediatrician. I'll post those conversations later on.

Naturally I've been wondering what the story is with Catholic schools seeing as how that's where we're headed in the fall. Ed and I have been assuming that Catholic high schools probably have at least somewhat lower drug use but we have no way of knowing. The world of parochial schools is new to us.

This morning, excavating the stack on my kitchen table, I found Jaye Greene's report on public schools:

Parents reflexively believe that suburban public schools provide children with safer and more wholesome environments than their urban counterparts. This report finds that the comforting outward signs of order and decency in suburban public schools don’t reflect real student behavior. Using hard national data on high school students, this report by Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Jay P. Greene and Senior Research Associate Greg Forster finds that urban and suburban high schools are virtually identical in terms of widespread sexual activity and alcohol use. Additionally, about 40% of 12th graders in both urban and suburban schools have used illegal drugs, and 20% of suburban 12th graders and 13% of urban 12th graders have driven while high on drugs. Both types of students are about equally likely to engage in other delinquent behaviors such as fighting and stealing.

Sex, Drugs, and Delinquency in Urban and Suburban Public Schools
Jay P. Greene & Greg Forster

I'd forgotten that.

My quick skim of Greene's paper incited a brand-new, top o' the morning Google quest for studies of Catholic schools and drugs, et voilà:

Sex, Drugs, and Catholic Schools

"Private religious schools reduce teen sexual activity, arrests, and cocaine use. Contrary to popular belief, private religious schools do not achieve these results by enrolling better-behaved students."

and:

Private religious schools had much lower rates of sexual activity, arrest, and cocaine use. The differences persisted even after family characteristics were taken into account. When the authors controlled for the possibility that parents likely to produce better-behaved children might also be more likely to enroll them in a private religious school, they found that parents were more likely to choose religious private schools for children at greatest risk for problem behavior.

Looks like there's interesting data on subgroups (Catholic schools don't improve the behavior of boys living with single parents, overall, for instance). But for our own particular subgroup (boy, two-parent home), it's all good news.