LOVING TO GET HIGH SYNDROME

Reefer Madness? Marijuana, increased potency is the gateway to a debate on addiction and treatment.

“It was as if she woke up one day, and decades of her life had disappeared. Joyce, 52 and a writer in Manhattan, started smoking pot when she was 15, and for years it was a pleasant escape, a calming protective cloud. Then it became an obsession, something she needed to get through the day. She found herself hiding her addiction from her family, friends and co-workers.”

Loving to get high can happen to people of any age, from all walks of life and on any chemical. Your kids may tell you that pot is not addictive. Well it is. With the higher potency of THC, the chance of addiction and the need for treatment is on the rise, according to a 2004 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

It’s time for us as parents to look at pot from a new perspective. The pot that our kid’s parents and grandparents used, (that sounds weird) can’t be compared in “addict-ability” or “Loving to Get High-Ability” to the  pot today’s kids are using!

It’s time to to talk.

I just bought a book that describes in the most vivid way, loving to get high.  It is Rolling Away: My Agony with Ecstasy, by Lynn Marie Smith.

Lynn describes her first experience with ecstasy:

“We were all silently looking at one another, waiting for someone to make the first move. I went to take a drink of my beer and as the coldness trickled down my throat, I was suddenly underneath a waterfall. A beautiful air passed through my entire body. My eyes slowly closed and I was in slow motion.” P. 29

“No words could describe this feeling, no worries, no anxieties, I was surrounded by love. I felt every breath that came in and out of my body, every breeze that passed was a part of me.” p.31

“The rain was kissing my body over and over. I was pure and innocent. I was pink sunset, ice-cream sundae, curtain call, rainbow, waterfall, and roller-coaster ride all rolled into one. All alone yet connected, I had just stumbled into the center of the universe and found the hidden treasure. The prize at the bottom of the cereal box was all mine.” P.33

“When I was five or six years old I asked my mom what heaven was. She told me that it was a beautiful place where all of life’s questions were answered. I now knew what she was talking about. For once I was speechless, free of questions, and full of answers. One pill and my whole life changed.” P.33

For Lynn Marie this was a spiritual, life changing experience; it was heaven. She felt pure and innocent. One pill changed her whole life.

If this was your child and that was their experience you’d both be in trouble. The power and attraction of this experience is mind-blowing. How do we compete with this big of a production? Or, can we? The answer to this question may lie in the remaining chapters of the book.

By page 48 Lynn Marie was saying, “I was all alone, crying, shaking, and thinking that this was never going to end.” Loving to get high is severely compromised by consequences. The proverbial “honeymoon” is over and the love that there was, is now only a memory.

It’s our job as parents to let this “loving to get high relationship” die, let the consequences and pure misery kill it. So the next time you are tempted to fix a problem, pay for a ticket, bail them out of jail, remember that what you are resurrecting, is their love affair with getting high.

Parents, I want you to hear this message now.

 The loving to get high syndrome needs our attention. There is something going on in the lives of our kids that we need to look at. If we ignore the signs and symptoms, it will morph into something more difficult to deal with, chemical dependency.

 The hear and now that I’m using is actually a play on the words for here and now, which is a popular way to talk about where and how we should live our lives. The benefit of living in the here and now is that we are not going to be gripped by our past or overwhelmed with the future.

 When our kids are bummed about life it is usually because of stress about the past and fears and worries about their future. With the use of a MAC (Mood Altering Chemical) a young person can experience a swing from bummed to bliss. This is a way for them to return to the benefits of the here and now.

Because of this, here and now becomes a significant part of the loving to get high syndrome.

 As parents, we are probably very accustomed to accepting a life filled with worry and regret. This is just a part of our job description. But because our kid’s job is to have fun and not settle into this kind of rut, they are usually a little more creative in how they deal with this stress and worry.

 They find that they can get back to here and now by getting high. Under the influence of a MAC all of the stress of the past and the worry about the future disappears. This feeling of relief is powerful. It’s the feeling of being alive without a care in the world.

 Having consequences from getting high is also a part of the here and now. But for our kids it is a very unpleasant something that they want to avoid. It is an instant reminder that getting high is not all fun and games. This is, however, one of the most important life lessons a young person can learn (if we let them).

 All too often we swing in and fix the situation or rescue them from the pain. We take away the lesson that they would gain from this particular consequence. The more these lessons disappear, the more they will conclude that getting high is just plain fun without any real down side.  As you can see, this will perpetuate the loving to get high syndrome.

 Parents, this can actually be your message to your son or daughter, “Hear this message now!  There are consequences to getting high.”

I ran into a friend today who asked me how the “inbetweeners” are doing? I said, “what are you talking about?” She said, “you know, the kids who love to get high but are not yet chemically dependent.”

Inbetweeners! What a great visual.

My Random House Dictionary calls between “an intervening space and time.” This space and time can be between the ages of 10 and 20, or between the end of elementary school and college. But more importantly it is the space and time between getting high for the first time and the discovery of loving to get high. Inbetweeners fall some place between experimentation and dependency.

As parents we need to ask ourselves, “What direction is my kid’s life going in?” For the Inbetweeners they are unfortunately, heading in the direction of Chemical Dependency.