LOVING TO GET HIGH SYNDROME

• When you get a call late Saturday night telling you that your son has overdosed and is in the Emergency Room, your DENIAL is confronted.
• When the Principal calls and tells you that your daughter has been suspended for coming to school drunk, your DENIAL is confronted.
• When you wake up in the middle of the night and your car and your kid are gone, your DENIAL is confronted, or at least it should be.

It can be devastating to all of a sudden realize that your kid is in trouble. Why didn’t I figure this out earlier? What else is going on? Will they be OK? Is this just a one time occurrence?  Which one of their friends can I blame this on? We start asking ourselves a thousand questions, all in a way of coming to terms with this new discovery.

Our DENIAL is confronted by something that happens to our kid, something that we can no longer ignore. This confrontation comes from a consequence. It’s a consequence of their alcohol/drug use, of loving to get high. Up ‘til now they have dodged the bullet, avoided being found out success and fully covered their tracks.

For some kids this has been easy, because we have helped them out. We’ve had our head in the sand. We’ve continued to say things like; “Not my kid!” and “Boys will be boys!” or “At least it was only Alcohol!”

This is what we call Denial. We love our kids and don’t want bad things to happen to them, so it’s easy to understand how and why this happens. But we need to put this idea aside and realize that pretending as if this didn’t exist doesn’t help anyone.

Consequences are a sign that things are out-of-control. Loving to get high is starting to catch up on our kid. This doesn’t mean that problems didn’t exist before; it just means that we didn’t see it or that they were able to keep it a secret.

My hope is that the “loving to Get High Syndrome™” and this blog will help parents wake up sooner, rather than later. And to not experience that frightening phone call in the middle of the night or the embarrassing call from the Principal. Before things are out of control, we need to remember that we are in control of how we perceive things. It’s time to take a deep breath and confront the possibility that our kid might love to get high and they are doing everything possible to keep it a secret.

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.