This all sounds very familiar. My son stopped smoking weed four years ago at the age of 22. He stopped dead after a brush with the police. It was partly fear of going to prison and partly a realisation somewhere in his foggy mind that the drugs were damaging him. It has not been easy.

The first few weeks he was in a state of terrible agitation and had terrifying panic attacks. Fortunately we have a wonderful GP who gave him a weeks worth of sleeping pills so that he could get some rest. It was like having a baby again. He would cry and hate me to leave him alone. He hasn’t smoked any weed since (I really believe him)and now he doesn’t drink either but it has been terribly hard for him and he has had two minor break-downs since then with a recurrence of panic attacks.

The scary thing is that he is only now beginning to cope with what he has done and the huge hole he made in his own life.  We (his father and I) are trying to help him re-build from the bottom. He has to re-establish everything. His sense of who he is and who is family are. He is just discovering that we didn’t abandon him – he left us. He doesn’t always believe it. Every now and again he slithers back into that self- pitying state that you describe so well in which we are the villains and he is just misunderstood. But most of the time now he realises that we love him and that he has to find a way to live with himself and us.

He has to fight a sense of total despair that threatens to engulf him but at least now he is back with us emotionally and we can talk. It is such a relief to discover that the child I loved is still in there and reachable. I still don’t know why this happened to him. He had a lot of friends who also smoked but they all seemed to keep hold of reality and find a way of living their lives at the same time. They moved on while he got stuck somewhere in early adolescence. I have asked him what I could have done differently. He says I shouldn’t have given him money but I don’t think that would have helped. I thought he would do what your son did and turn to crime. I would rather pay for it than have him go to prison because I always felt that prison would kill him. Either way we can’t re-live those precious years – we can only try and help him move on and re-build.

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