78-01-B7

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Pot

Transcript On last November 21st I read an article by a mother about her teenage son and his experience with marijuana. She told of her first awareness of a change taking place--a change in the personality of her son and of his admission he was smoking pot. One phrase she used in describing this change was that she watched his "eyes growing dimmer." Her story had a happy ending. He stood before her one day, his eyes no longer dim and told her he had quit because he finally realized what the weed was doing to him. Her story ended with the statement that she looked at her son and, "knew he had become a man". On December 3rd, the Los Angles TIMES printed a page of letters it had received in response to this story. I couldn't believe the viciousness and outrage of the writers. One accused the mother of practicing "parental fascism". Most of them carried on about one generation forcing its standards on another and made it plain that in their view she was some kind of monster for disapproving of marijuana. Then, on December 17, in the same editorial section there appeared a response to the letters by a local teacher named Patrick Kennedy. He wrote, "I could not in good conscience sit back and not reply to those opinions about marijuana use and teenagers." He told of the experience--sometimes exhilarating, sometimes heart breaking--of being close to 200 teenagers, seeing their struggles with the problems of growing up. Speaking of them as a generation "needing and unconsciously seeking moral guidance and structure," he asked, "if parents are not responsible to provide a moral atmosphere, stressing the values they find important, who is responsible?" Answering his own question he said, "this is not parental fascism--it is parental commitment to the most sacred of all tasks: to see that the young get a good start with healthy roots and a straight growth in the proper directions". He called it a responsibility that is being avoided by too many of us and that our society is paying the price. He asked the letter writers if they had ever been closely involved with bright young teenagers: "Have they seen those bright eyes slowly become dimmer, the once quick minds less attentive? Have they experienced the slow growth of paranoia in the eyes of these students; the inability to look you in the eye any longer with that innocent look of trust and friendship?" Telling of the heartbreak in seeing th.at happen he said of pot. "It poisons the mind in the sense that when a problem arises in the life of a teenage pot smoker he or she doesn't solve the problem. It's too easy to avoid it by getting high. So they reach adulthood without ever facing or overcoming adversity." Any parents who find their sons and daughters in the classes of Patrick Kennedy should be very happy. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.		Details Batch Number 78-01-B7 Production Date 01/09/1978 Book/Page RPtV-255 Audio Youtube? No
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