At first glance, it seems like the perfect family tableau, four heads bent diligently over the living room coffee table, parents and children working together in harmony. But we’re not doing a jigsaw, or building property empires in Monopoly. No, we’re assembling something else entirely.
Because the idea of a cosy night in for my family — me, my husband Johnny, 24-year-old daughter Maisie and son Dan, 20 — is to buy a gram of marijuana, roll a joint and get stoned together.
You’re probably shocked. I can hardly believe it myself.
We are the very essence of a respectable family: my daughter is a graduate, my son is studying at a Russell Group university, my husband is a banker and I am a secondary school teacher.
We’re about as far from the stereotype of casual drug takers as can be. And yet, as I’ve come to realise, it’s middle-class families like mine that often have the most accepting attitude towards drugs.
One family from the UK reveals their unconventional family ritual – doing drugs. Stock image used
It wasn’t always that way. I started my teaching career at a grammar school and must have attended a dozen anti-drugs lectures. I know everything there is to know about gangrenous feet from smoking and rotting teeth from crack cocaine. I am the mum who bored their children senseless about pills and binge-drinking during their early teens. But I saved my real venom for marijuana.
‘Seriously, you two,’ I would tell Maisie and Dan as they rolled their eyes at me. ‘It’s dangerous stuff. If you smoke it before 25, when the neural pathways of the brain aren’t properly formed, it can leave you with impaired cognitive abilities. Basically, brain damage.’
‘You don’t need to blind us with science,’ they would assure me. ‘Don’t worry, Mum.’ But I knew from personal experience that what you tell your parents and what you actually do as a teenager can be two very different things.
Back when their father and I met in our early 20s, before we were so respectable, we didn’t just discover each other at those hazy student parties, we also discovered weed.
We put aside such things when he started working and I started teacher-training. Occasionally, in the years since, at a party with friends or on holiday, someone in the group might produce a joint with a ‘Shall we…?’ and we would each have a puff, exchanging a wink in shared nostalgia.
But, back home, those days were behind us. Yet it meant that when, at 16, Dan started to come home on Saturday nights reeking of that same, sweet-sour smell, we knew exactly what was going on. We were just gearing up to have ‘the conversation’ when it seemed to stop. We breathed a sigh of relief.
Then, three months later, on Christmas Eve 2019, Dan and Maisie, then 20, came down from an afternoon in front of Dan’s PlayStation, giddy and giggly. Proclaiming that they were ‘starving’, they proceeded to wolf down festive ham and all the mince pies before falling asleep in front of the telly.
Johnny and I didn’t want to wreck Christmas, so we held our tongues, later discussing it for so long into the night that I forgot to do my Father Christmas routine and put out their stockings.
A few days later, we sat them both down and did a ‘more in sorrow, than in anger’ routine: disappointment that they’d done it, a reminder that it was illegal, with a possible jail term for possession, a threat to ground them if they did it again.
‘But everyone does it, Mum,’ was their defence. Visions of my own mother saying ‘And if everyone told you to jump off a cliff, would you do that too?’ danced around my head. And yet, up to a point, they’re right; more than 16 per cent of young people between 16 and 24 reported using the drug in the year ending June 2022.
Plenty of celebrities — from Rihanna to Miley Cyrus — talk about using cannabis (another name for marijuana) now that it’s legal in California. Social media apps are full of clips of young people smoking weed. As such, walking down even the most middle-class High Street like ours in a well-to-do town in the South East, it’s not unusual to catch a fruity whiff.
Shockingly, my niece’s pregnancy yoga instructor in the suburban heartlands has even advised her to smoke in the early stages of labour, telling her that it is the best muscle relaxant, although this is contrary to official medical advice.
Echoing these increasingly relaxed attitudes, cannabis prosecutions have fallen to a record low, with police accused of decriminalising the drug by stealth in parts of the country.
Home Office data shows the number of people charged for cannabis possession had fallen to just 16 per cent by March 2022. In Surrey, it was 6.4 per cent, less than one in 15. If even law enforcement is largely turning a blind eye to cannabis, is it any surprise many view it much as they would doing 76 mph on the motorway: against the law but not really a crime?
But how, you will ask, did my husband and I get from hauling our teenagers over the coals for their own smoking to joining them only a few short months later?
I blame lockdown, as I do for so many changes in our lifestyles. Johnny was working from home, I was teaching from home, Dan and Maisie were both studying for exams from their bedrooms.
Home Office data shows the number of people charged for cannabis possession had fallen to just 16 per cent by March 2022. Stock image used
The planning of our evenings had become a delicious ritual, a way to beat off the monotony and enjoy each other’s company despite the circumstances. One Friday, I said: ‘Let’s treat ourselves tonight — let’s make cocktails!’
‘Let’s cook steak!’ said Johnny.
‘Let’s watch the new Jack Reacher!’ said Dan.
‘Let’s get high!’ said Maisie.
We laughed. But then Johnny looked at me and said slowly: ‘Well, could we?’ Maisie thought he was asking her, and said: ‘I’ve got some. A little bit. Left over from Christmas. Just enough for one roll.’ Put like that — ‘just enough for one roll’ — it appeared so harmless. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, this last frontier suddenly seemed so low-risk, so unimportant.
Even the adolescent brain damage argument that, even now, I started to babble about, rapidly seemed like a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. ‘Sorry, Mum,’ both children confessed, ‘but we don’t smoke nearly as much as our friends.’
I’m not sure I believed it even then, but Johnny swung the vote: ‘Listen, if they’re smoking it with us, we know when they’re doing it; we can control it.’ I did rather agree with him, and our decision to allow them alcohol in moderation from the age of 14 at home had meant they never seemed to do the same binge-drinking as their peers.
I did, though, feel the usual tug of guilt that comes with making a controversial parental decision. Where was the manual for this?
That first puff, taking the joint proffered to me by Dan, seemed surreal. This was my baby boy, just 17 years old. I’d taught him how to tie his shoelaces and here he was, teaching me how to inhale better.
As I passed it on to Maisie, she looked to me as if seeking permission. I was their mum, supposed to stop them doing this sort of thing, but now here I was, not just letting them smoke in our living room but, madder still, joining in with them.
Later, we all got the giggles, probably as much from nervous hysteria as the effects of the drug. The next day, Johnny and I looked at each other, a little shamefaced. ‘Did I talk rubbish?’ he asked me. ‘Was I really asleep on the sofa by ten o’clock?’ I asked him.
Listen, if they’re smoking it with us, we can control when they’re doing it
I realised we were more ashamed of not being cool in front of our kids than we were about smoking with them in the first place. Did this make it even worse?
‘Don’t worry,’ said Maisie, ‘You weren’t too embarrassing.’
Initially, I put it down to a Mental Lockdown Moment. Everything seemed topsy-turvy — and us smoking drugs was just another element of that. Over the strange months that followed, as the UK dipped in and out of different levels of restrictions, we began to smoke cannabis every time we were all together on a Friday night, as a special end-of-week treat.
The deliveries arrived in a brown paper bag at a suitable distance down the driveway, as if we’d done nothing more than order a takeaway. Except, rather than a curry, our bag contained a film canister with a gram of weed in it, for £40.
I stumped up the cash; otherwise we would have been taking free drugs from our kids. Even I had my limits. It was a time of hilarity for us all, dancing along to music, playing silly parlour games, laughing at the telly. There was also, to be honest, a lot of crashing out on sofas and failing to clear up at the end of an evening, so Saturday mornings became a little grim.
But overall, I have to admit these evenings, louche and decadent as they were, were also great fun. And it turns out that marijuana is marvellous for menopausal stiffness. All lingering doubts had gone; smoking had become our family’s new norm.
So even when life went fully back to normal, we didn’t. Whenever the children are home — which works out to be only a few Fridays across the university holidays — Johnny is now the one to suggest making a call to Lewis, Maisie’s friendly neighbourhood dealer.
These days, dealers like Lewis cater to many customers of our income bracket, whether it be cocaine for dinner party guests or magic mushrooms for the weekend. We’re not tempted — Class B grass is more than enough for us — but research has shown that middle-class people consume more alcohol and illegal drugs than those living below the poverty line.
One time, while I was off getting his cash from the ATM, Johnny and Dan asked Lewis in, so he wasn’t seen loitering on the doorstep. After a couple of minutes of friendly chatter with the well-spoken young bloke about his day job in an art gallery, Johnny said: ‘You can take off your motorbike helmet now, you know, if you don’t mind us seeing your face.’
Later, Johnny confessed to me that this was the first time in months that he’d actually thought about it being illegal.
The one line we have held is that we are still parents, not our children’s stoner mates. Despite what you may think of me, my job remains that of being a mother. I insist we have no more than two joints between the four of us on these Friday nights.
In my role of not-very-bad cop, I confess that I too often forget that it is against the law. Until, that is, I talk to friends about it. Almost unanimously, they are thunderstruck — even the ones who take drugs themselves. ‘You smoke dope with your children?’ they say, incredulously. ‘Have you lost your minds? What sort of an example are you setting?’
For a moment, I am crestfallen, paralysed by doubt and guilt that what we are doing is all wrong, that everyone else is getting this right. But then I remember the cosy conspiratorial chatter of the week before, when we quizzed Maisie and Dan about which of our friends’ children did drugs.
The very friends who are so horrified don’t know that their own little darlings were off their heads on ketamine at a festival the week before, that they smoke weed out of their attic window at home and that one of them was in a drugs bust in a park a year ago and only escaped by shinning over a fence. ‘He’s a nutter,’ says Dan darkly. ‘His mum and dad have no idea.’
Once, we invited the dealer in so he wasn’t seen loitering on our doorstep
But there is no room for smugness about this. Do we have any idea? I worry Dan may think smoking marijuana is too ‘normal’ for him to be concerned about any long-term effects. But I think I believe him when he says he now has the habit of keeping it to one ‘party night’ a week.
I also know that Maisie has given up smoking almost entirely because, in her words: ‘For one thing I got used to you paying for it, and for another I need to get serious now.’ Clearly, she’s not brain-damaged.
Ironically, it’s my husband, now nearly 60, who seems to have developed the most problematic relationship with cannabis; he’s still not brave enough to call Lewis himself, but is the first to suggest it if the kids are home. I have pangs of unease — shouldn’t we be more grown-up by now? Should I put my foot down?
But then he winks at me as he passes me a Dan-Maisie-Johnny special and for a moment it’s easy to forget that we could both lose our jobs in a heartbeat and face a possible jail sentence. More and more ‘ordinary people’ — people just like you and I it seems — are forgetting this every day.
Becca Robinson is a pseudonym. All names have been changed
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