my son is smoking pot

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Originally Posted by gugi

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?

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IIRC you disagreed with my contention that there has been a moral decline in this country over the past 50+ years. I didn't read your graphs. There are lies, damn lies, and than there are statistics (Mark Twain) ..... I don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. How old are you ?

Did you live in the USA in the 1950s when we pledged alliegance to the flag, and said the Lord's Prayer at the beginning of the school day ? If not keep your statistics. I know what the culture was here because I lived in it, and haven't forgotten it. I've observed what it has become.

Give me a graph on the number of children born out of wedlock over the past 50 years, decade by decade. The number of people in drug treatment programs by decade, and in prisons. The number of people cohabiting rather than being married. I won't even get into the "sexual preference' thing, gotta be PC. I could go on .......... BTW, where the hell have you been since 4-5 ? I knew the retort was coming ......... you didn't disappoint me so I took the bait. :)

Back on topic.

I do not believe you can stop your son from doing much of anything unless he wants too (insert reason here, there are many to choose from).

Not know the age here it is hard to advise. If he lives in my home he lives by my rules, period, no gray area. If he is under age or an adult I would seek professional advice. If he is out of the nest you can only share your disappointment and displeasure and tell them you love them. I believe co-dependency and enabling are worse than the addiction.

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Originally Posted by JimmyHAD

Did you live in the USA in the 1950s when we pledged alliegance to the flag, and said the Lord's Prayer at the beginning of the school day ? If not keep your statistics. I know what the culture was here because I lived in it, and haven't forgotten it. I've observed what it has become.

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Then again, in the 50s it was also not a problem to beat your wife, and to openly discriminate against blacks, Indians, women, and other 'inferior' people. I mean, I wouldn't exactly hold the 50s as the paragon of morality. At least, the people who cohabitate, or have a gay relationship, or have a child out of wedlock are not hurting others with impunity.

I think a man and a woman living together unmarried is less of a morality issue than them being married and it being socially acceptable when he is beating her.

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Originally Posted by JimmyHAD

IIRC you disagreed with my contention that there has been a moral decline in this country over the past 50+ years. I didn't read your graphs.

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No, I disagreed with your causation of declining morals with increased drug use in children.

I wasn't even born in 1950, so I only know what is recorded in the history. That's pre-civil rights and I could say that the societal norms of treating black people and women as second rate people of the 50s is not compensated at all by reciting a prayer in school.
Last time I looked in the Bible Jesus seemed to me more concerned with treating the social outcasts like people who God loves than with things like mandated prayer or condemnation of cohabitation, children out of wedlock, and substance abuse. I however am not an expert, and clearly there is a big majority of religious people who understand it differently.

Here's the graph on children born to unmarried women:
Attachment 197906

If you measure by that the morals are steadily declining all the way until Barrack Hussein Obama became president and then the decline stopped.

For marriages the only ready graph from CDC was until 1976
Attachment 197907

Interesting that there is a peak both in marriages and divorce rates right after WW2 but the 60s are characterized by noticeably higher increase in the marriages than in the divorces. So by that measurement the morals were in decline through the 50s and got back on track in the 60s.

I know that the days of my childhood when I had no responsibilities may seem better than the days of my children when I have to provide for them, but that doesn't mean the society used to be better then than it is now.

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Originally Posted by Bruno

Then again, in the 50s it was also not a problem to beat your wife, and to openly discriminate against blacks, Indians, women, and other 'inferior' people. I mean, I wouldn't exactly hold the 50s as the paragon of morality. At least, the people who cohabitate, or have a gay relationship, or have a child out of wedlock are not hurting others with impunity.

I think a man and a woman living together unmarried is less of a morality issue than them being married and it being socially acceptable when he is beating her.

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Those are not universally true for the entire United States.

By the way, in the region that I live in (the northeast), none of those things were acceptable. Neither culturally nor legally. There certainly were racist people (and there still are), there certainly were people who beat their spouses, and there certainly were people who said nasty things to others. There were plenty of children out of wedlock, though usually nobody was proud of it, and there was a lot less killing of babies as a form of lazy birth control.

At least in my area, until probably the 1960s or so, if people had children they couldn't afford, the kids were "farmed out", or sent to live with someone who had a farm but who wasn't able to have children or whose children died. My dad grew up on a farm and they couldn't afford the number of kids they had, so one was sent to live with a childless family in the burbs. You could say they chanced putting her in harms way, but she would tell you the opposite - that the harm came going back to the farm where there wasn't as much love and attention.

If you believe everyone was bigoted, you're seeing too much TV or too much selective history. I still recall my grandmother (and we didn't live that far from the mason dixon line, Gettysburg in fact) talking about black transient workers. She uses different terms than we would these days, but she said "If a dark man came to the door, I asked him if he wanted fed, and then asked him if he'd like me to check to see if Luther had any work for him" (my grandfather had a large farm, and you used a lot of day and transient labor back then because there wasn't easy money if you didn't work). She did the same thing for white men or any man who showed up on her doorstep hungry (which wasn't uncommon). This was back in the 1940s.

I don't think anybody is claiming things are binary e.g. either everyone has abortion or children out of wedlock or everyone is a racist.

I understand that even those who see moral decline all around us wold agree that there are still plenty of people who live by the book, the argument I understand is that it's fewer and fewer of them.

But societal norms are matter of statistics - when a lot of people think cohabitation or divorce is ok, or that black people actually got it pretty good during the slavery years then those views are more acceptable.
I think that the evolution of societal norms is pretty well established - racism used to be far more acceptable than it is today and 'adultery' is far more acceptable than it used to be. Views on alcohol/opiates/narcotics/etc have even more complex development, after all US had a prohibition from 1920 until 1933.
Gallup has numbers on the view on abortion only since 1973 and there doesn't appear to be any dramatic change or trend.

One common theory for the spike in divorces in 1946 is that those who wanted to get divorced during the war may not have had the opportunity plus being apart for years has strained many marriages during the war. I.e. it's not a particularly bad year for moral living, just clearing a backlog from the war as well as the effect of the war itself.
Similarly the increase in divorce in the 70s tends to be attributed primarily on all states switching to allowing 'no-fault' divorces. Prior to that a divorce is an adversarial lawsuit where one party is trying to show the other is causing them big harm, while the other party defends themselves. Afterwards people could divorce simply because they do not want to be married anymore. I don't see how forcing people to be married despite them not wanting to is a good thing, so the low divorce rates before 1980 seems pretty much artificial - you have marriages in name only. I don't think people choose to divorce on a whim anymore than they decide to marry on a whim, and I'm uncomfortable categorizing divorced people as moral failures.

I think morality is a complex issue yet particularly prone to oversimplification which is not helpful.

Divorce can be a good thing,was for me 40 yrs ago:) Back on topic,your son will grow out of this phase.

Every person is different with substance abuse. Some 'outgrow it', some 'beat it', some never have a problem.

Even if he's not 'abusing' the marijuana, it's still illegal and that presents a problem in itself.
Since you know a lot more about your son than any of us you're the one who has to decide how to address it in a way most likely to be productive, but the experiences of others here could help you to figure out different options as well as we can offer support for whatever it's worth.

I've never had this particular issue and haven't had any close friends with it either, so I can't really offer much. I even had to learn to 'like' alcohol despite my father being essentially a high functioning alcoholic and heavy or at least moderate drinking was not only acceptable but expected from me by many in my family and friends as I was growing up. I enjoy a lot more the taste of drinks than the intoxicating effect, so I tend to drink fairly reasonably.

Attachment 197953

This survey is of particular interest. It covers 15 million students entering college across the US. The study itself carries between 44-50 years of validity and reliability depending on the reporter.

The common expectation of "college" is one of relative freedom to imbibe when living away from parents. It is one of the myths of college that the institutions have tried to control. With the annual stories of a student drinking themselves to death, their liability is on the line. It seems that the problems of both alcohol and nicotine are showing steady declines.

This study allows a chance to identify both high school trends, e.g. how many students had a problem coming into college, and how the colleges maybe developing environments that do educate kids to the dangers. 15 million kids with at least that many peers to influence is a fairly strong social force.