Just Say Know

As prom season looms, one dad shares
his unusual dive into The Drug Talk.

By Ransom W. Stephens

I would have been perfectly happy to lie to my kid if I thought it would’ve worked. Instead, I did one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. All I can say now is that it worked. She graduated from high school magna cum laude and will graduate from college with similar honors next June.

We started talking about drugs when she was a little kid—just like the ads on TV say you should. Still, as she approached high school, I found myself gripping my worry rip cord tighter and tighter.

A month into ninth grade, Heather did something we rarely expect of our teenage children. She broached a conversation. “High school’s kind of weird,” she said. “In middle school there were just freaks, preps and jocks, but in high school the jocks are huge, and there are goth-freaks and stoner-freaks, prep-geeks, band-geeks, drama-geeks and school-geeks.”

I said, “At my high school there were just jocks, stoners and geeks.”

We were walking out to the car, headed for the megacinaplex to see as many movies as we could cram into one Saturday afternoon. 

She fiddled with the CD player as we pulled out of the driveway. I hoped that she’d volunteer an answer to the obvious question. If I had to ask, there was a good chance the conversation would end. 

I waited.

Oh well, risk-reward and all that. I asked. “What category are you?”

“ I’m leaning toward freaky gothic band-geek.”

Before I could digest this, she added, “What were you?”

This is the hard part. I wanted to lie, but if she caught me in a lie, I was afraid she would discard everything I said. The truth was hard, but I told it: “I was a stoner.” 

She said, “I figured.”

Apparently, over the course of her childhood I’d managed to betray my ill-spent youth. I tried to recover. “In ninth grade everything felt out of place, you know? So I started smoking—it was a stupid thing to do.” What I didn’t say was that my ninth grade memories revolve around sex and drugs—desperate pursuit of the former and a deep dive into the latter.

The windshield wipers tried to keep up with the goth metal on Heather’s CD. At a stoplight she said, “So there’s this weird guy at school. He wears sunglasses all the time and a suit jacket.”

“ Sport coat like a new-waver?”

“ Yeah, and he’s always stoned.”

“ What makes you think he’s stoned?” I tried to stay calm. 

“ The way he meanders around the halls at school.”

“ What’s his name?”

“ I call him ‘Stoned ‘70s Guy.’”

“ What’s he like?”

“Well I’ve never actually talked to him. I’m sort of stalking him.”

My daughter was stalking “Stoned ‘70s Guy?” It was going too fast. I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t help it. I yanked my worry rip cord and watched my parental parachute billow up and around us. Frayed around the edges and with no shortage of holes, it looked like the blanket Heather carried around until she was five. I didn’t recognize it until the first few words came out, but once I had begun it, there was no denying what it was: The Drug Talk.

When a parent initiates The Drug Talk, it tends to raise a teen’s defiant ire. It’s a cause-and-effect relationship as reliable as the breeze in your face when you jump off a cliff. Fortunately, we were in the car and she couldn’t get away. I opened with sarcasm: 

“ So are you getting stoned between classes?”

“Not just between,” She replied.

Any reply was good. A reply in the same spirit was a gift. I tossed back: “Burnin’ numbers in back of the classroom?”

“ And shootin’ up.”

At the instant I started to believe she was open to The Drug Talk, the very second I started to relax, she turned and stared out the window. 

“ When I was in high school, drugs were everywhere,” I said. “Just like you’ll have to do, I had to make decisions.”
I paused for a reply, but didn’t expect or get one.

“Like any other decision, you need to know what you’re doing.” I tried not to speak in a boring monotone. “Recreational drug use falls under the category of Stupid Things To Do. About half my stoner friends ended up having serious problems with cocaine.”

I didn’t know if I was screaming into the wind or guiding her to a gentle landing. “I had three rules that kept me out of serious trouble. The first rule? Know what you’re doing. Kind of obvious, but when you’re hanging out with friends and someone’s passing a joint, or a bottle, or a mirror, or sugar cubes—”

“ Sugar cubes?” she said, with more than a trace of contempt.

“Yeah, they used to put LSD on sugar cubes. They probably don’t do it anymore, but that’s the point: Drugs come in many forms. I heard of a guy who put acid on his eyeball.”

“ That’s gross.” 

That I had her attention made it scarier. What if my advice encouraged her to become a junkie? All I wanted was to help my little gothic cherub survive and fulfill a fraction of the potential she’d had at ten when she wanted to be president.

“Doing drugs is stupid, okay? I’m just saying that if you decide to try something, be less stupid than everyone else. The first rule: Never take something you don’t know about. You can learn the effects of drugs at internet medical sites, in magazine articles, and don’t ignore what you’re taught in school. You can confirm the facts in your own research. The second rule is this: Before you ever take something, watch other people on that drug and ask yourself if you really want to be like that. My last rule was to prevent addiction: Pick a number and never do a given drug more than that many times in a year. The point is, just say know—k-n-o-w. Know what you’re doing and go forward with caution.”

“ What if the number I pick is a hundred?”

I swallowed the lump in my throat and said, “I trust your judgment.” It came out shaky. She probably thought I was lying. She was probably right, but all I had to hang on to was the parachute of hope that the parental voice somehow penetrates the teenage skull, despite all contrary evidence. The Partnership for a Drug Free America says it does.


How Honest Should You Be?
For answers to this and other parenting questions, plus tips to help you have the Drug Talk with your own tween or teen, check out our Online Extras this month at SacramentoParent.com.