He’d been taking recreational drugs since his teens, so when his own 14-year-old son took a hard anti-drugs line with his friends, one father wondered if his boy was needlessly making life hard for himself

“They’re arseholes who don’t know what’s right or wrong.” So said my 14-year-old son the other day, dismissing his school friends with a characteristically sweeping summary. Until recently, J’s mates were the one good thing about school. He walked there and back with them every day, they all hung out as a gang at break time and ate lunch at “their table”. Every spare moment in uniform was spent together.

Being with his friends was J’s life raft in a school day awash with loathsome lessons. But now it’s become an ordeal, with J repeatedly checking his watch, wishing break time would hurry up and finish. “I used to hate everything about school except for break, but now break is the thing I hate most.”

The reason it’s all changed is that J’s friends have started smoking dope.

The teen drug issue had been closing in on us for a while. A friend’s 14-year-old stepson has recently been expelled from two different schools because of cannabis; while another friend’s 14-year-old was arrested, cautioned and made to attend a drug rehab course when police found a joint in his trouser pocket. Then a few weeks ago, drugs finally landed slap bang in the middle of J’s world. But J’s is not your routine adolescent drug problem. J’s difficulty is that he insisted his friends stop doing drugs – or else.

Throughout his whole education, stretching way back into infancy, J has repeatedly been told by school to say a loud no to big, bad, dangerous, illegal drugs. On top of which, my son has a rather overdeveloped conscience. So, when his friends started smoking dope at the local park, he decided to take a hard line. A very hard line. Not only did he not partake, but he broke off all contact for a while, ignoring his friends’ calls and blocking their numbers. In order to do the right thing, J de-friended his friends. And then he felt miserable. Which was when he got his parents involved.

Where things such as drugs and drinking are concerned, I’m your standard hope-for-the-best parent. The hope being that J will find his own way without me having to get too involved. This is what a lot of parenting boils down to: you give them the big talk, with information and advice, and then off they go, into the world, ready to make their own mistakes, while you cross your fingers, hoping they make it to the other side of adolescence in one piece. But is crossing your fingers really good enough?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Young brains are still developing and there are reasons to be concerned about the potential damaged caused by smoking weed. Photograph: Getty Images/Posed by models

I am from the generation for whom drugs were part of the landscape through our late teens and early 20s, which makes us relatively chilled about them. But because we are more “cool” about drugs than our parents’ generation – for whom they were simply bad, end of discussion – we have tricked ourselves into thinking we have the whole thing sorted. But we haven’t. Not where children are concerned.

The trend in J’s generation is to start trying weed at around 13 or 14 – with its use widespread and frequent. In contrast, I started experimenting with dope and speed from about 16. Now, developmentally, neurologically and emotionally, it is a long way from 13 or 14 to 16, 17 and 18. Young brains are still developing, even into the early 20s and, despite the often alarmist tone of coverage, there are reasons to be concerned about the potential damage caused by regular dope use during these formative years – especially the supercharged variants such as skunk – as well as the possible causal links between dope and schizophrenia.

We all know this. Yet as many of our children reach the mid-teens and start copying the druggy lifestyles of young adults, because we are so “cool” about drugs, we seem unable to acknowledge that there might be a problem.

On the day J blocked his friends for crimes with weed, with the pressure on to come up with my best possible advice, I had this ludicrous idea for 10 seconds or so: why don’t I stop off on my way home from work, find some dope to buy and we can smoke it together? This way we could just get the whole rite of passage thing done and dusted. J often tastes my wine at dinner, always with disgust, and my hunch is that an introduction to grown-up stimulants within the family setting might have its value.

I told him, just be yourself. And if that means you don’t smoke dope, then good – don’t

Of course I didn’t do anything of the sort. If I rolled a joint and smoked it with him, apart from it feeling incredibly wrong, weird and ill-fitting, I’d be breaking the law. Anyway, I do understand that part of the allure of first drugs is the ritual of being a rebellious daredevil with your mates.

For now, though, J doesn’t see it this way and has cut himself off. In an attempt to mitigate this growing social disaster, his mum and I urged J to open up to the ways of pragmatism. Maybe there was a less stringent line to be followed – that we have all got to swim upstream sometimes. Could his response be a bit more nuanced, and Clintonesque, perhaps? Be around the dope, just don’t inhale.

How many parents have to encourage their child to be less good?

The advice did work, for a while. But by being a refusenik, J has taken himself out of a conversation that has radically shifted. Now his mates smoke weed and drink booze on the sly, it is all they want to talk about – with the usual hype and bravado. “It’s never gaming or TV any more,” moans J. “Everything is, ‘Oh, I smoked that weed’. Or, ‘I was so pissed and acting crazy’. Or, ‘Oh, do you want to smoke some weed with me after school?’”

These are hook-ups that J is no longer invited to. He just gets to hear about them the next day at break. Fortunately, he has other friends outside school, but he is concerned that it is only a matter of time before they are also “bodysnatched”. Which would just leave him – the 14-year-old out of sync with the times, who doesn’t want to do something he doesn’t want to do, just because everyone else is doing it.

But, scratch the surface and J’s resistance is really a reluctance to embrace adolescence. Beneath this lurks a more profound resistance to change. J has had quite enough of that already, thank you very much: the deaths of close family members, his parents’ separated, his step mum moved out, cat died … J craves stasis just as his friends are bursting to experiment with new things.

Three years ago, he went to an induction day to prepare for the move up to secondary school. As he walked through the school gate for the first time, J turned to the kid next next to him and said: “Hi, how’s it going?” And the kid said, “Fuck off!”

J realised that he would have to change if he was going to make it at big school. So he downgraded his walk to a slouch, lowered his voice, ditched the sensible rucksack that some year 9s called a jetpack. But he also changed his way of being. He became less open, less euphoric, more taciturn and guarded. He told me he was worried that he was changing the real him – for ever. Recently, he returned to this idea of “passing”, saying he wished he could pretend to be the light, easy-going person who smokes weed and doesn’t care.

What do you say when your son is battling not to go under? Then it came to me. It’s obvious. Don’t try to pass any more, I told him. Just be yourself. And if that means you don’t smoke dope, then good – don’t.

I realised that, actually, I don’t want him to smoke it. Deep down, I think he’s too young. I don’t think drugs are OK for children, I just struggled to admit it at first.

All along, J’s stance on drugs had been clear and finally I had caught up with him. He said he would try dope one day, when he was ready, but not before he’s 16. And I thought, yeah, for now, that’s a pretty good plan.

I’ll still be keeping my fingers crossed though.

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