CANNABIS AND TEENAGERS – WHY TOUGH LOVE WORKS

We asked our eldest son to leave our home permanently when he was 18. We knew that he would have taken us all down with him had we not done so. I have been accused of many things for throwing out my son, and also for going public with our family’s story. The main criticisms from others have been that it is my parenting that is to blame for my son’s drug use – I’m callous and cold-hearted, especially for choosing to ‘wash the family laundry’ in public. So often, though, family laundry does not get washed at all. It festers in unlit corners becoming rank and stiff, poisoning the air in the household, and yet actively ignored. When this happens the individual gets no support in dealing with the issues that are causing pain. They are alone with it.

William began using skunk cannabis at school. He was 14. Once a highly academic, sporty, handsome young boy, within a year he had changed into someone who lied, cheated, and stole in order to fund his lifestyle. This included daily cannabis use. By the age of 16 he had become a stranger, and his behaviour over the next 3 years became increasingly difficult to deal with. As a family, we were in desperate straits.

Unable to find support for our son, or our family, I began writing a diary which I published on a website I set up (www.talkingaboutcannabis.com), in the hope that it might be of comfort to other families, who I knew must be suffering like we were. This was a hidden problem on which I wanted to shed light. After extracts of the diaries were published in the national press in March 2007, I received hundreds of emails from families. Most said simply that our story was also theirs. A parental action group was formed shortly after.

Parents who wrote to me reported feeling they are to blame, just like we did at the start. They are ashamed, alone and deeply wounded that they cannot protect their cannabis-using children. They struggle to find a solution when they can see their children becoming more and more disturbed. Behaviour often escalates into aggression, and even violence. Children become demotivated and lacking in ambition. Schoolwork drops away, grades fall, the slippery slope to dropping out begin. So what should parents do?

Exclusion is a last resort, of course, but it is sometimes the only way forward for parents whose child has chosen a pathway of drugs, and it is also a reflection of our parental responsibility towards the family unit as a whole.

Our attempts to make our son see sense and quit cannabis were met with a shrug. He would say that we were out of date, Government wouldn’t have downgraded the stuff it weren’t safe to smoke. We had been undermined by the highest jurisdiction. We began to give up on our eldest son, and focus on our other two children who were being innocently drawn into a nightmare not of their own making, which was seriously threatening their emotional stability. We woke up to the fact that William was dominating our every waking moment, as we tried to ‘save’ him. We told that if Will wanted to do drugs it was up to him, but if he did he would be doing so alone.

So we let him go, stepping back from him completely, with no contact, when he was 19. It was over a year before we saw him again. For all of us it is hard to believe that this could have happened. Certainly the intensity of love that I felt for him as a child contained no warnings that one day we might part in such a desperate way. Other adult family members found it hard to understand why we asked our son to leave. My mother-in-law told us that it is every child’s birthright to live at home. Not if they are intent on destroying it we told her. Anything else is collusion, which is unhealthy for everyone involved.

We stuck to what we knew was right for all of us. We were giving our son a chance to take responsibility for his own life. This way we felt that he could address his behaviour, and his future options. But our main thoughts were to protect the whole family unit. We made it plain to Will that there was one of him and four of us, we were making a choice just as he was choosing to continue on a road to his own private hell. The strain on families when there is a member using drugs is often intolerable. Marriages fail, siblings become destabilised and miserable.

Parents report feeling fearful that their drug-using offspring would not cope alone, that you have to be there for them to support them. Fine, but what about the addict’s responsibility in all this? Repeated bailing out only feeds the addict’s sense of their lack of personal worth, rather than empowering them.

Our son returned to live with us in July last year, after spending two years in the wilderness. He stopped using drugs – giving up by himself taking one day at a time, he says. I dare to believe that he has amassed enough wisdom whilst alone to now be able to embrace this new part of his journey. He has told me that it is up to him now to prove himself. As his mother, I’d love to make things right for him, to do it all for him so he doesn’t mess up again. But that is impossible, and I understand that. He has recently moved into a shared flat, and has a job, and we are all keeping our fingers crossed.

(‘The Cannabis Diaries’ by Debra Bell, with an Appendix by Dr Zerrin Atakan, is published by Hammersmith Press 2010)

© Debra Bell 2010

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