Cannabis & Parenting
By: Sean Moriarty
Most people I know smoke cannabis. Granted, I work in the industry therefore the bulk of the people with whom I associate professionally are growers and people with high tolerances. But beyond that I’m talking about the non-industry people, like friends and family from back home—doctors, lawyers, teachers, chefs. Most of them depend on cannabis to varying degrees in order to manage stress, pain, anxiety, or other conditions and situations and what may come as a surprise to some unfamiliar with cannabis use is that most of those people have kids.
My brother has three kids, all under the age of five. He’s far from a heavy user—maybe a couple hits off the vape pen in the afternoon, a couple 10mg gummies before dinner, and maybe (on particularly stressful days) a joint before bed. While his kids are adorable, they can be complete menaces at bedtime: the twins will start sniping at each other and their little brother will dig in his heels and cry and scream because bedtime is an unholy, unfair decree. It can take a lot of patience to wind them down and read to them after a long day at work, errands, plays, making dinner, when all you want to do is put on Curb Your Enthusiasm and go to bed. When asked point blank if smoking cannabis has inhibited his ability as a father he said, “Eh, not really…I’m a better father with it than I am without it.”
The fizzling away of cannabis prohibition has led (thankfully) to more access and more options for people looking for cannabis therapy. It’s not necessarily that more people have the desire to use cannabis, it’s more so that they can obtain it more easily and they have more intake options. Someone who, say, doesn’t like to smoke (or someone who needs to mask it), now has the option to vape or ingest via tinctures and edibles.
Being able to specialize their own therapy has allowed for more parents to utilize the benefits of cannabis without having to resort to illicit means to obtain a product that would get them high, but was untested and unspecified. They had no idea what kind of flower they were getting, whether indica or sativa, let alone if it was free of pesticides or molds.
“When I had to buy it on the black market, I’d get these super heavy indicas that would put me in like, the stratosphere, then make me feel tired and weighed down, and I mean, it was fine, it was just too much. It’s not like I had a choice.”
I asked him what he does now that he has the luxury of visiting dispensaries. “I typically just look for a sativa or a hybrid that’s high in limonene. I’m all about the terpenes.” Freedom of choice makes it easier to find something more suitable to a person’s individual needs and preferences. My brother smokes at night after the kids go to bed so he can walk out to the garage and smoke a joint or take a few hits off the bowl. During the day he’ll hit the vape a couple of times, if at all—again, something high in limonene—and on particularly stressful days, he’ll secure a couple of 10mg gummies.
I asked him point blank if he had ever done anything careless after taking one too many pulls off the vape. “No,” he replied unequivocally, “It’s really not like that. These kids are all you think about anyways. You sound like Dad.” He’s not wrong, but for the purposes of this article, I had to ask the question. Cannabis is not the “Reefer Madness” menace that many of our parents were conditioned into fearing. Stigmatization translates to ignorance, particularly in regards to cannabis and its effects. Parents who are trying to manage symptoms, for the most part, are simply trying to be better parents, not Cheech and Chong. While physically he is in fairly good health, Tim uses cannabis to manage stress and anxiety. “My patience level is so much higher. Without it your fuse gets a lot shorter.” Essentially, more patience equals more quality time spent with the kids.
One of our customers at the Manchester store came in one day last week, and I noticed the two young children waiting in her car. She told me she was on her way to drop them off at practice, but would happily answer any questions I had next time she was in. Sure enough, she rolled in exactly seven days later, this time sans kids. I asked her why she uses medical cannabis: “I have pretty bad anxiety so I initially got my med card for that…But two years ago I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis so I’ve been using it to manage stomach pain mostly…I’d be miserable without it.”
Do you ever hide it from your kids, I asked. “No. My ten-year-old, she grew up around it. It’s nothing out of the ordinary for her. She was always just indifferent to it. All her uncles grow it anyway. Honestly, it’s just like, always existed for her. She never thought it was bad or something to be ashamed of. She knows it’s Mommy’s medicine. And she knows that when I’m in pain, that my medicine helps. We don’t make a big thing of it.”
She also told me that she didn’t like flower, she only vaped. “I need something that I can hit quickly and that doesn’t smell. I don’t like coughing either. But honestly, it’s mostly because I don’t want to send them to school, you know, reeking. It’s not fair to them.”
Is the stigma falling away? People like my medical customer feel it doesn’t factor into her life. “I gotta be honest, for us it was never really there.”
Leo, a medical marijuana caregiver in the Augusta area, disagrees. “Nah, the stigma is definitely still there, I don’t even tell people what I do anymore. I don’t care if they know I smoke, but growing is a whole different story. They don’t know unless they need to know. All it takes is one, you know, misguided person that will have this perception that you’re keeping your kids hostage in a drug den and call DCF on you. So yeah, I’m very careful.” The bottom line is, though for some it is not a consideration, stigma is very real for parents who are medical cannabis patients as well, not just caregivers.
Some parents have different issues than others. If you’re worried about custody concerns, for example, it’s no surprise that many parents choose to play it safe. Basically, just because the laws have changed doesn’t mean it’s fallen away for everyone. Certain radio personalities will rail against legalization/decriminalization, citing outdated viewpoints so old that they still use rotary phones. You never know who views cannabis as holistic therapy from those who view it as a scourge. We can’t expect everyone to know about the endocannabinoid system, or cannabis’ remarkable record of helping to free people from opioid addiction.