09 September 2006

Old Hippies Ask: What's The Matter With Kids Today?

Fred Gardner, PR flack for the "medical" marijuana industry, worries about new data showing that pot use is declining among teenagers, and that nowadays kids are waiting until they're older (17.4 years on average) to try the drug. The only good news Gardner finds is that marijuana use is continuing to increase among over-50s, and when it comes down to it, they've got more money to spend on dope anyway.

Gardner theorizes that "the increasingly prevalent image of marijuana as medicine encourages older people to use it while making it less appealing to kids." I don't suppose it's more a case of modern teenagers finding their pothead parents and grandparents deeply, deeply embarrassing?

Update: Apparently Fred Gardner is not the only one who feels this way. My normally very sensible friend David - he's a professional philosopher, after all - shares this concern. He reckons senior citizens need to "fill up [their] retirement days somehow," and trots out the same argument that Gardner frequently makes, that teenagers are better off on pot than on Prozac. Not a very good argument, I'd suggest, considering the emerging evidence of a link between marijuana use and depression, the condition for which Prozac is most frequently prescribed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, we don;t need pot. Just lots of ketamine.

Anonymous said...
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