By Gary Dickson
When I was a child my dad liked to have a cold beer after he had spent a sweltering Kansas Saturday afternoon mowing and trimming the front and back yard.
Occasionally he would tell me that I could have a sip if I wanted to taste it. And, when I did, I only took one small drink knowing that was all my dad would allow me to have. I recently read about a serious problem in the panhandle of Texas where youngsters are frequently consuming alcohol, marijuana and other drugs with the knowledge and actual approval of their parents. Apparently, in many parts of the country a larger number of drinking and drug using parents are raising their children to do the same.
Not far from the Texas panhandle, in Roswell, N.M., a news item from early this year described a situation in which two third-graders were caught red-handed by their principal. They were smoking marijuana in the school restroom. The Chaves County Sheriff”s Lieutenant who responded said that he was aware of past marijuana usage issues at elementary schools in Roswell , but never as low as the third grade.
The element of the story that made the most dramatic impact on me was the comment from one of the boys when he was asked by a deputy how often he smoked marijuana. The boy”s reply was, “I hit it hard a lot.” It is sometimes scary when we encounter young children copying what they have heard adults say, in real life or from television and movies, but usually the copycatting is play only. When I was that age I only ate candy cigarettes with my cousins, while we played like we were older. In the Roswell case, the children were no longer playing like adults. They skipped the playing stage and went directly to acting and talking like adults, even though they were only 7 or 8.
In Amarillo a drug intervention counselor named Patti Morris said, “I”ve seen kids using meth regularly by the time they”re 10 years old.” She went on to say, “Sometimes we”ll deal with kids who have been detained who are reporting drug use as early as six years old.”
Once upon a time I would have been shocked to hear about children using illegal drugs and I probably would have only imagined it could have happened in a big city like New York or Los Angeles. But, today, I am not shocked, just mildly surprised by the young age and the location. Roswell and Amarillo once seemed to be unlikely places for elementary school children drug abuse. But, today no place, regardless of how small or how isolated, appears to escape the drug element.
Generally speaking, the use of illegal drugs doesn”t lead to positive outcomes for even the most mature adults who consume one or more substances. So, it is safe to say that the future of children who are using illegal drugs by the age of 6 will be compromised at best. In some cases, we”re looking at children who will regularly be in trouble with the law and are likely to spend a portion of their life behind bars.
A report from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse states, “For youth aged twelve to seventeen, those who smoked marijuana within the past year were more than twice as likely to cut class, steal, attack people, and destroy property than were those who did not smoke marijuana. The more frequently a youth smoked marijuana, the more likely he or she was to engage in these types of antisocial behavior.”
There is a huge difference between the parent who let a child have one sip of beer a few times and the parent who passes a joint or a snort of meth to their 6-year-old child on a routine basis. This kind of parenting does not bode well for America ”s future.
Gary Dickson is the publisher of the Record-Bee. Call him at 263-5636, ext. 24. E-mail him at gdickson@record-bee.com.
