When I was 16 years old, my step-mom came into my room late one night while I was rummaging around in my sock drawer. She knew exactly what I was doing: trying to sneak back out to my friend's car with a thumbnail's amount of dirt weed to smoke out of a Super Soaker bong we fashioned that afternoon. She grabbed it, relegated me to car washing duties for the rest of the summer, and then called it a night without so much as a viable reason why it would make her so upset.
Fifteen years later, over Thanksgiving dinner, she and my father finally narc'd on each other, revealing what they'd been up to the whole time me and my step-brother were in high school: They'd routinely take our weed to smoke it themselves.
"Your father couldn't stand one night because he was so high," she coyly revealed through tears of wine laughter. "Man that 'kind stuff' was really strong!"
According to a recent poll taken on by Yahoo! and MaristPoll, my step-mother isn't alone in her affinity for weed. As it goes, more and more adults are starting to come clean about past use, and are even comfortable with telling the world they're current users, too.
Based on a survey of 1,122 Americans, Yahoo! and MaristPoll found that the majority (54 percent) of adults who say they use marijuana are parents. Over half!
Of those parents who use weed for either recreational or medicinal purposes, 47 percent say they use it in front of their children, or share it with their kids who are currently adults.
This is an exceptional turn of attitudes than those of the late '90s for the estimated 55 million Americans who now regularly use marijuana.
The survey also found that parents are more frightened of their kids trying cigarettes than they are of them smoking weed. Close to half are fine giving children cannabis as well, so long as it's medically appropriate and beneficial to the kid.
And all it took was millions of dollars in legalization efforts and 28 states to allow cannabis in some form or another to get our parents to finally tell the truth.
[cover photo: DrugPolicy.org]
Leave a Reply