All posts by editor

Teens

Should we drug test our teens?

The unprecedented number of young people who have died from drugs has changed some of our perceptions around this issue.

Because funding for drug education was greatly reduced in the first decade of the 21st century,  parents are faced with a problem.  Should we drug test our teens and pre-teens?   

Trust is given and trust is earned; it goes both ways. To start off with a lack of trust is not an enlightened way to parent.  We’ve resisted calls for drug testing in the past, but now it has become an important safety issue.  Drug prevention policies save lives. Continue reading Should we drug test our teens? →

Mental Health, Reviews

The Mental Health Care Dilemma; Is it Really Bad Therapy?   

Good information comes from the recent books covering the issues around mental health care that concern many families.  Patrick Kennedy’s book, Profiles in Mental Health Courage, written with Stephen Fried, traces the lives and mental health care journeys of 10 people and two families, who took charge of the illnesses.  With today’s fight to take the stigma out of seeking “mental health” treatment, this book is very important. 

Kennedy’s nonprofit fights for insurance companies to cover mental health care and addiction.  Meanwhile, we still don’t have enough beds for mental health and addiction treatment in most states! 

Like many of the books on substance use and abuse, these stories feature multiple difficult episodes, denials and deflections. Continue reading The Mental Health Care Dilemma; Is it Really Bad Therapy?    →

Addiction, Reviews, Suicide

Finding A Higher Love: Heather Shares Her Son’s Story

A Higher Love, by Heather Bacchus, is the latest of a number of books by parents who write the story of losing a child because of cannabis.  Despite her intense grief and the unexpected loss of her son, Randy Michael Bacchus III, Heather provides a model for finding hope and love as she shares the story of her loss. The book’s subtitle is  “A Journey through Addiction, Cannabis-Induced Psychosis, Suicide and Redemption.”

Randy was born in November of 1999 and died in July of 2021.  He started using marijuana at age 15. As Heather recounts her story, the reader is tempted to look for clues.  What were the reasons to worry?  Although the parents, Randy and Heather, discovered their son’s pot use and did not shrug it off, they didn’t know how dangerously different today’s marijuana is.  Nor did they understand all the new forms of high-potency marijuana, including dabs and vapes. Continue reading Finding A Higher Love: Heather Shares Her Son’s Story →

Testimonies

Growing Up with Hippie Parents in a Cloud of Smoke

A Child’s Perspective on Hippie Parents and Drug Culture in the Early 70s by Solitaire Miles

Why I’m Sharing This Story Now:

As marijuana legalization sweeps across America I feel compelled to share my story. What I experienced in the early 1970s as a child of hippie parents might seem mild compared to what some children face today because the marijuana of my childhood was far less potent than the high-THC strains now grown, sold, and distributed legally. Emergency rooms regularly treat children for marijuana overdose and severe vomiting episodes – a situation that should alarm us all. I’m writing this because I believe many parents remain undereducated about the real dangers marijuana poses to growing children, both physically and psychologically.

My Early Childhood

I was born in 1967 to hippie parents – who else would name their child Solitaire? For the first few years of my life, I stayed with my grandparents, thank goodness, because my parents were still in their teens, just out of high school, and they were living wildly and were both experimenting with a lot of drugs. I had a guardian angel though, my grandmother Connie was very protective of me, and I lived at her house and was raised there from birth. She taught me many things, how to eat, how to walk, she potty trained me, she taught me to speak… and all of the things that a newborn baby growing up to be a toddler need to learn. My loving grandmother adored me and raised me as if I were her own daughter.

The Change 1971

Sadly, when I was about 4 years old, my grandmother got sick and had to go into the hospital to be treated for epilepsy, so I had to live with my mother and father, which was not fun at all. They weren’t big time criminals, they weren’t evil people, but they were very addicted to drugs and they liked to party a lot. Every night there was alcohol and drugs in the house and lots of their hippie friends listening to music, getting high until the early hours of the morning. It was a very scary and difficult environment for me to be in after having been raised with my grandmother in her quiet Catholic household.

Life With My Parents

My father grew his own marijuana out in the woods somewhere and he sold it to his friends while he was going to college so he wouldn’t need a day a job while going to school. Apparently he grew a lot of it because there was always marijuana in the house. In our living room there was a big wooden box that held all of the marijuana in the baggies and the joint rolling papers. My mother showed me this when I moved in, and she not only showed me how to break up the leaves into baggies but also trained me how to roll joints so that there would always be an availability for customers when they came to our house.

If my parents were busy or weren’t home and I was alone (if you can imagine leaving a four-year-old home alone with a large cache of drugs), I could go and retrieve the drugs and give them to whoever came to the door for them. Often times in the afternoon or the early evening, friends would come over and I would be rolling the joints for them and passing them out to people as I was instructed to do. Everyone thought that it was so quaint and what a little soldier I was. The rooms would fill up with marijuana smoke and I would be encouraged to smoke the marijuana myself because they said it was natural and it was good for kids to keep them calm.

My Coping Methods

The marijuana made me really sick – it made me feel like I wanted to puke and it gave me terrible headaches. After I did my job of rolling the joints and passing out the cigarettes or the baggies to whoever showed up, I would go and hide in my room at about 6:00 at night after dinner. I would stuff a towel or a blanket under the bottom of my door so that their smoke wouldn’t come in, and then I would crack my bedroom window even if it was hard winter so that there would be fresh air in my room and I wouldn’t get one of those nauseating headaches. I would try to read a book until I fell asleep for the rest of the night. It would be hard sometimes to stay asleep because especially on the weekends they would have loud parties with lots of music and 10 or 12 people would show up and they’d hoot and holler and party and do their drugs until dawn.

The Long-Term Impact on My Adult Life

As an adult working in the entertainment business, it has been a challenge for me to try to remain working around clean and sober people. I am clean and sober and I do not drink or use drugs and alcohol, and I’ve never smoked marijuana. There was a time in my early to mid-20s where I did use alcohol, but I stopped that after I developed epilepsy, which is genetic in my family. Alcohol and marijuana both make my seizures worse. A lot of people think that marijuana can make seizures better, but one in four epilepsy patients are actually made worse by it. If you don’t believe me go to the national institute of health and research it, there is a drug called Epidolex created for kids who have Dravet syndrome, a very specific type of epilepsy and marijuana derivatives seem to help these kids but for as many as it helps it makes others worse and the drug has a 25% failure rate.

Working in the entertainment business has been very difficult since legalization, and I find it challenging to perform and work when people use marijuana on stage or in the clubs or restaurants where I would be. I’ve had to stop performing in person at many venues and I only perform in places that. I know for sure there won’t be any drug smoke in the venue and I prefer working in outdoor venues and concerts during the summer.

Secondhand Marijuana Smoke Affects My Health

A lot of people don’t like me or will refuse to work with me because they think I’m a prude or a snob, but if they understood what I went through as a child and that marijuana does negatively affect me, causing me to have migraines and seizures, maybe they would have some sympathy…. although many of them do not, even when I try to explain the simple fact that their marijuana smoke on stage is enough to trigger a seizure – and I would never want to have a seizure on stage in front of an audience. So now I am mostly a recording artist and have to be satisfied with that.

I’m not going to tell anybody what to do with their bodies, but I wish that they could be more respectful with their secondhand smoke because it does affect other people’s bodies and it does affect the health of their children, which are our greatest resource, and if America is going to continue to thrive, we need to raise our children with love, keeping them healthy, and teaching them to respect themselves and not become addicts. I feel sorry for any child that has to live through now what I lived through in 1971 because I know that the quality and the intensity of the drugs are so much stronger than my dad’s homegrown ever was.

Editor’s Note:  Here are some other articles on secondhand smoke:

Secondhand Smoke from Marijuana Worse than Cigarettes

Breathe Cannabis Free Oregon