William’s View of Cannabis 2007

My parents are quite typically middle class; they are quite different from me, growing up in other parts of the country and amongst a different generation. Cannabis is the anti-Christ in their eyes and the catalyst to blame for my entire mishap of adolescence.

The term ‘cannabis’ itself is heard, by me especially, with disdain by those who enjoy a joint as it is commonly aligned with the ‘reports’ and ‘findings’ which demonise it so regularly in today’s press. Cannabis is something I love; it calms me down and helped me to unwind from stressful weeks at my previous public school. There I was amongst a strong, rebellious fifty-strong section of my year with whom I would drink and smoke socially, not excessively but enough to think ourselves rebellious. I thought nothing of it.

I smoked it through my exams and achieved what I thought a great set of grades, (mostly A’s and B’s). My mother merely told to imagine what I could have achieved if I had worked! My parents had been telling I didn’t work since I joined the school, I’d ask for help from my Dad on a Latin paper and it would always end up in a fight without fail. I became bored with school it wasn’t interesting and I truanted a bit towards the end, something I’d never done.

I don’t feel cannabis is to blame, I feel it’s society’s portrayal of it that frustrates your modern day teenager who is so sick of being stereotyped. I began smoking more, staying at friends’ houses not coming home, my mum is sometimes impossible and constant blame was being shed upon me. Frequently my parents will sit me down and tell me what they think is wrong with me, which is usually considerable. Add to this that my mum is the kind that thinks MSN messenger is ‘disgusting and pornographic’ and when I arrived on my book return day at school wearing irregular trousers, as I had somehow lost my others in a friend’s bedroom she screamed at me in front all my friends. Looking for ways to help your wayward youth? Don’t alienate them and push them away, but if you refuse to make any kind of compromise you are always going to lose.

Update from William on 9 May 2007

As I write this piece now at 19, I’m currently trying to assess my own life and my views on cannabis. I hope for it to serve as a helpful piece of writing for those whose lives are affected (to very various degrees, though more often now to be quite extreme) by cannabis. I know to most who read the website I’m merely just another ‘rich’ kid who lost all ambition through smoking weed and this then stemmed to petty crimes and a broken home.

My previous piece in the Daily Express would back that up as I lay blame at the hands of my parents, and defend smoking as a completely separate entity to my behavioural problems throughout my teens. However it’s not that simple, I believe that the problems of adolescence are inevitable – you simply are not going to be able to avoid them but skunk is a tool of destruction within a generation.

A few years ago it would have been unheard of for me to denounce weed as ‘a tool of destruction’ indeed as it would have many of my friends but the case is far different today. I find it very rare for those in my age group to boast about how many spliffs they have or have needed to smoke, there’s an acute awareness that smoking skunk is an addiction and not a clever thing to do. I have witnessed a very large range of opinions on skunk, from those of all ages, and the older weed smokers become, the warnings to those who are growing up in a new dawn of easily available skunk, cross bred and grown with hydroponics with such intense levels of THC that these ‘pro-smokers’ are waving a white flag. They will desist to be the customers for skunk as they learn through experience (as I have) it’s not possible to function with those levels of THC in your body and the problems and feelings that adolescence normally bring will be enhanced as all drugs affect your mind.

Let alone a drug which can be smoked as easily as a cigarette and is believed by a large demographic to be only about as equally as harmful as that. If by some chance there is a weed smoker reading this I know what you’re thinking. Either your thinking ‘this guy needs to chill out’ and that the things I write of are case specific (to me) or you’re thinking: he’s right but you’re not going to stop the masses smoking weed. At times I still thing along both these paths, anxious not to voice my problems as I believe them to be affecting only me in isolation (at least to the extremity it has).

However I am now a hundred percent certain that what I write is relevant for all those who smoke weed regularly, and for those who love them and find that there lives are being ruined by skunk.  I’m currently trying my hardest to find the reasons that people smoke weed everyday, from the estates to the posh schools. I have experienced most social climates and the role that weed plays within their lives.

I hope to assist my mother on her work, but I still feel strongly that the progress for stopping the young from exposing themselves to skunk should be from my young people to young people. This goes for all drugs. My mother wishes to single out skunk (as do I) due to silent damage caused by society underestimating the damage it causes. This does not mean to say that focus should be taken off other addicts, more that no one should be left behind.  I think there also needs to be some serious guidance for parents to be able to spot when your child might have a problem, and of course how to limit the damage it does to your child’s life.

I personally believe that as the eldest child and one who had previously found success to be a natural part of life, it was very difficult for my parents to accept me going through difficult but natural changes. My parents were no nonsense about the house rules, and I found myself very distanced because I was becoming naturally rebellious. I used to stay out a lot at other people’s houses, witnessing homes of extraordinary leniency in comparison to mine and coupled with this as I was away from home more and more, the more I began to smoke. When I came home I couldn’t hide my despondency with my parents’ strict adherence to rules and became embarrassed as my friends would take the mickey out of me for having such awkward parents. It wasn’t their fault; they had a game plan that they were going to stick with but I felt less and less a part of anything.

Meanwhile I smoked more marijuana and spent more time away from home.  I hold no blame for anyone for how I am, I’m merely trying to find answers for others in the experiences I have, that’s the only way I believe that I can use negative parts of my thought processes to be advantageous for others. As I try to pin- point my own stages of thinking through the days and months that brought me to where I am, I feel that as you become more distanced from your children the morals that you tried to instil in them are lost as they live for the moment, and long term thinking is non existent and therefore so is all logical thinking. Skunk enhances this feeling tenfold. Sometimes I don’t even know how I’ve survived. I’ve had so many lows that waiting for the next high always seemed to be the only natural thing left to do.

Will’s Story  2 Feb 2009

I’m writing this update on my life for myself, as well as anyone that has come across my ’story’, those who know me or have known me, and importantly for anyone who can relate to what has happened.   

I just read back my previous entry and I smile,  albeit with a heavy heart, as I recognise the angst and frustration in my voice and instantly my memory floods back to deadlocked arguments between myself and my parents. My juvenile but natural attempts to rebel were formed around cannabis, as it was the new thing within the social groups I’d made (within a whole bunch of new things you encounter as a new pupil at a private school a fair distance away from home). Now I look back after having been through a whole new journey since I last wrote.    

It has been so hard for me to look back, as I’ve had to do in the last year or so, and examine my life in order to pinpoint how and why I was continuously taking paths I knew were wrong, but yet found solace their familiarity. It was a similar familiarity that I enjoyed as a child, only then it was in a positive way.You could say I succeeded as a child. I was bright, popular (to my knowledge) and I never had a need really. I got into all the schools my parents and I wanted me to get into, meeting expectations was easy to me and a feeling quickly developed that when things went wrong for me I had no reference as to how to deal with that. It’s sounds arrogant but it’s really not. I’ve found that for me, and perhaps for others, that a fear of failing and the unknown is not helped by smoking skunk. I eventually shied away from what people wanted me to do, teachers, parents, girlfriends. Pretty much everyone apart from myself. I withdrew from society and then eventually from myself.  

During a time when naturally you come to have insecurities as to how people see you and how you’re perceived, the amount I was smoking enhanced these feelings ten fold. I suddenly found myself as an adolescent, awkwardly trying to fit in at home, as well as amongst peers. I was seen as someone to look up to and couldn’t bear to let anyone see me slip. This caused me to disregard everyone and everything eventually, lashing out at those that I blamed for my misery. I felt cold to all and I began to sabotage relationships all around me.  

All drug addicts have patterns I’m sure, I’m sure there are a million books on cycles that they go through from crack addicts to obesity to whatever. However different the story there’s always a template. Being told this only enflamed my rage, I wasn’t a drug addict and sure as hell wasn’t just going to give in to that cliché. I wasn’t like that, I didn’t touch anything else. I couldn’t understand my parents overreaction, they were finding Rizlas in my bedside draw as opposed to injections, tin foil, spoons even alcohol! Surely I thought if I was choosing a road to rebel down then this was the safest  one.

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