Parents worry as pot pushed

As she watched yesterday’s televised coverage of marijuana’s legalization in Massachusetts, a new emotion consumed her, one even more corrosive than the sense of impending doom that’s been her companion for too many years.

“I feel abandoned by society,” she explained. “You can no longer count on this state to reinforce parental concerns. That ‘village’ that once helped us raise our kids is now telling them, ‘Go for it!’

“Am I too uptight? Oh, I’ve heard that. It’s true, I do worry, but that’s what mothers do. I am sick about what’s happening to my son and so angry at those who say it’s no big deal. The most precious things I have are my kids and when someone hurts them it’s a very big deal to me.”

Her only son is now 22 and in her eyes he’s been hurting for a long, long time, even if he doesn’t yet see it that way.

“He used to be such an easy kid to get along with,” she remembers. “We were very close but that relationship has been so affected by the changes we have seen in him.

“He was 14 the first time I got a whiff of what he’d been smoking. That’s when we began to notice he was becoming a different kid, seemingly losing all of his ambition.”

She and her husband managed to enroll him in a prestigious parochial school, then sent him off to a small New England college where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree. Out of sight meant temporarily out of mind, offering a brief reprieve from the daily foreboding she’d been experiencing, but then he returned home last spring and she’s been living with a heart-wrenching dread ever since.

“He took an entry level job in a field totally unrelated to what he studied and he just doesn’t seem to care about anything except getting high.”

It’s little wonder yesterday’s effusive coverage, the most fawning TV spectacle since duck boats carried the Sox through downtown Boston, bothered her so much.

“If you listen to our leaders,” she said, “we’re talking about a wonder drug that cures this and takes care of that, and if someone like me objects it’s because we’re ignorant or hateful or both.

“I don’t think I’m either. I’m just a mother who hates what this stuff is doing to her son. Instead of Massachusetts warning kids how mind-altering it can be, it’s telling them, ‘Don’t worry; it’s OK. Do what you want.’

“And you wonder why I’m mad?”