should marijuana be legalized??

Furthermore, the "at least once in a lifetime" statistic is meaningless in terms of determining who actually uses marijuana on more than an occasional basis

Ok, here's my story for whom may be interested.

Monti, I had a similar problem as a child. I was "hyperactive" and couldn't concentrate, except on comic books (which helped to learn to read, and fantasies; I was terrible in math (for understandable reasons). My first 12 years of school were a disaster. I got As and art and music (I was concert master of the junior high school orchestra) but Ds and low Cs in everything else. I never remember doing any homework. And when we were given the Iowa Test, I remember deciding to just mark the answers randomly so that I did not have make the effort (the test failed to measure effort/attitude).
Anyway, there were no concepts of hyperactivity, ADD and ADHD in those days, so they left me alone (truly a case of benign neglect).
As it turned out I couldn't get into a university after high school and so I went to art school and continued my studies of the violin. One day when I was 27 I met an American junior college professor vacationing in Mexico City. He talked me into giving junior college a try. I did and soon ended up with a Ph.D. from a major university--without ritalin.
Expect a lot from your boy, and not much from the "authorities."
I also have two friends who were diagnosed as children with significant degrees of retardation. One ended up being the dean of a college in my university and the other became a well known researcher and provost of a different university.
I admire you advocacy on behalf of your son.
In some cases, however, parents can harm their children when some ideological committment causes them to decline needed and legitimate medical treatment for their children's life threatening disease. It is hard, I guess, to distinguish the good from the less good expressions of resistance.

Montana wrote:

Ok, here's my story for whom may be interested.

Thanks, Montana! I felt a little guilty that I kept bringing you up as an example in explaining why I mistrust governmental drug enforcement. It's good that people heard it from the horse's mouth now.

Montana

That story is very frightening. I am very glad that you managed to escape the facist attitudes of the government.
You probably saved your son from life in hell. ADHD medicine is made from amphetamine among other things. It's addictive and one person I know who's been taking it is more and more like a vegetable each time I see him.

Albert Einstein couldn't talk properly until age thirteen, and he was a bed wetter until his early twenties. What would be the result if someone put him on some sort of medication?

Here in norway we have similar things.

My girfriend has some psychological problems, and one time the psychiatrists decided that she had to be medicated. Well, she refused, knowing full well the harmful effects that these pills have, and as a result she was cut off. No unemployment check, no social welfare, no nothing until she would accept the medicine.

She never did accept, and she is still struggling with her problems, and making progress. I just keep thinking that she'd have an easier job of it if it weren't for the fact that every governmental office tried to cut her off since she refused to cooperate.

I am angry at these pretentious pricks who think they know what helps. I know a few people who've accepted medication, and they all say the same thing. The drugs don't remove the problem. They just lower the perceptional threshold so that the problems go unnoticed. The price to pay is walking around in a constant haze, cut off from feeling and emotion. What a price to pay.

In fact, our fellow member Montana, who I hope still follows this thread, had a rather ugly experience in which the elected government of Massachusetts was pushing a highly potent drug on her son. If she feels like it -- and I hope she does -- maybe she can tell you what happend when she refused to go along with it. I think that you, just as joefromchicago, profess an incredibly naive optimism about the actual people who run the government in a democracy. The two of you must be very optimistic about human nature, judging by your trust in the government preventing and enforcing the consumption of drugs.

I think it's relevant because, while the government says no to marijuana, they're condoning and pushing drugs on children that fall into the same class of drug as cocaine.

I'd certainly rather see my son smoke grass than to be on Ritalin.