my son is smoking pot

I hope this will help as most of what can be said,has been said. I have two boys,25 and 20,the 25 year old is smoking a lot less than he did than when he was twenty, and the twenty year old is in collage getting good grades and smoking more grass than I would like, but I remember when I was that age and A. nothing I say will stop them B. I think he will grow out of it as the other one did, and C. I was more worried about other things and told them both a long time ago that if I ever found out that the put something up their noses I would in no uncertain terms kill whomever gave it to them, and they could visit me in prison for the rest of my life,...and they really believed me, and I have to say I haven't had any problems with them. They don't even drink, so just be honest with him and tell him to get it out of his system and become a man, like most of the rest of us have.

Caffeine was mentioned because it is not regulated by the FDA, so anyone can buy it online in bulk powdered form. Many people have died because they overdose so easily on it. One kid for example, took like 50 red bulls worth of caffeine and died almost instantly. No one has ever died from the consumption of pot... There are so many things in life that can hurt us, removing choice is oppressive and will not create a better way of life.

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Originally Posted by Grizzley1

I hope this will help as most of what can be said,has been said. I have two boys,25 and 20,the 25 year old is smoking a lot less than he did than when he was twenty, and the twenty year old is in collage getting good grades and smoking more grass than I would like, but I remember when I was that age and A. nothing I say will stop them B. I think he will grow out of it as the other one did, and C. I was more worried about other things and told them both a long time ago that if I ever found out that the put something up their noses I would in no uncertain terms kill whomever gave it to them, and they could visit me in prison for the rest of my life,...and they really believed me, and I have to say I haven't had any problems with them. They don't even drink, so just be honest with him and tell him to get it out of his system and become a man, like most of the rest of us have.

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Your belief that by smoking pot makes someone less of a man is quite disturbing.

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Originally Posted by JimmyHAD

Perhaps a matter of perspective. I think that there are those that agree with your view, and others, generally from an older generation perhaps, that agree with mine.

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How so? The data in the graphs shows declining use of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. I don't understand how less use can be described as more use by a change of 'perspective'.

May be you think the data is completely wrong, but that's something very different and I still don't see why older people would be less willing to believe the data than young people. I mean, according to the government the population of USA is increasing; do older people tend to believe it's instead decreasing?

I think the data start is chosen to make it look as favorable as possible. If you started it in the 1930s or 1950s, it would look like a long trend of higher drug use.

The other change to then vs. now is that it's becoming more mainstream for pot and less so for excessive drinking. An alcoholic who couldn't work would've been viewed in the same frame as a drug user in the 1950s. A drug user now is considered to be relatively OK as long as it's recreational, but recreational alcoholics are seen as a threat to kill someone on the roads.

It's not quite as simple as that chart makes it out to be.

Again, I'm agnostic on all of it. I don't know why, I kind of see myself and my opinions as a bystander view of society because I don't drink much and don't do any drugs more as a money of matter and productivity than anything else.

I'm pretty sure the start of the graphs corresponds to the start of data collection, i.e. surveying students on these topics. I thought that's the most consistent and reliable data with well defined methodology and so any correlation of 'societal moral decline' with increased drug use should be pretty clear. And the claim is not only for strong correlation but for causation - less parenting and children being more influenced by the 'changed society norms' means that this particular data would be even more correlated than for any other groups or the general population.

The NIH also publishes data on alcohol consumption that starts earlier - different methodology and all.
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It may be that the data was started for pot smoking because that's the start of when it was becoming done in public by more than just the literary and free living crowd.

But I think if you asked many people who grew up in the 1950s or earlier when the moral decline of society started, they'd say in the 1960s. Apparently alcohol consumption went up following that, too, but the chart exaggerates it a little bit by having the y axis start at 1.

As I said, the data for children is from a government survey program - I don't know the details of the politics of why it was started then and not earlier or later but it's comprehensive and consistent and that's very important if we're looking for these correlations.

The 'moral decline' seems to be presented as something that's been going on steadily from the 1960 and getting worse and worse. But in the various data for alcohol/tobacco/drugs consumption we see peak and then decline. The only way you can get correlation is if the morals got worse in the 60s/70s and then got back to good in the 80s. You know - the Democratic presidents destroy America and the Republican fix it - narrative (of course Nixon and G.W.Bush are more like Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton than like Eisenhower, Reagan, and G.H.Bush). Now, that's a really good correlation with the data.

Living in the US, I don't know that the moral decline associated with drugs is seen as getting worse. You may see news articles that say that, but I've never heard the general sentiment of such. I think if you asked most folks, they'd suggest that more drugs were done in the 1960s and 1970s than are done now.

Split from the drugs, the decline in information presented in literature and media, and the reduction of the number of people with a religious identity is probably a separate thing from the drugs themselves. Mainstream items like legalization of pot in colorado and washington probably strike some people as decline, but those of us more agnostic wouldn't couple it directly to drugs.

I don't know, I guess I missed the beginning of this conversation. I don't know how many hard drugs were done in the 1960s and 1970s, but I would have guessed that the 1980s would've been the peak of hard drugs, as well as the peak of alcohol consumption, and that for as long as I can remember, cigarette consumption has been on the decline (I can only remember back to the early 1980s).

Well this tangent started in post 14 which I understood to suggest a causation between much worse moral norms in today's society and the use of drugs by children.

Of course, I'm younger than Jimmy and interact with a far more younger people than he does, plus they are representative of the 'best-and-the-brightest' not of the general population, but because of the bubble I live in I try to derive generalizations from representative data instead of from my personal experience.