More Montana teens smoking dope than cigarettes


All right!!!!

Well, truth be told, I have mixed feelings about this survey. I’m not wild about teens smoking dope (I know, I’m an old fogey, but it is an intoxicant and causes car wrecks and fucks kids up at school and in life. Sorry, I just don’t think pot is 100 percent benign. I liken it to alcohol. It also will damage your lungs.), but the big difference between pot and tobacco is pot ISN’T PHYSICALLY ADDICTIVE!

So, when, or if, a kid gets tired of dope, most of the time, at least 90 percent of the time, they can just simply walk away from it.

Not so with cigarettes.

According to this survey, done by the 2010 Montana Prevention Needs Assessment, 21.4 percent of 12th graders reported smoking pot, compared to 19.2 percent smoking cigarettes. Part of the reason pot use is up, according to this article, is there is more acceptance from parents toward pot smoking. I guess my attitude is after a kid turns 18, they will experiment, and there is only so much as a parent you can do to stop it. I would want my kid to smoke dope until after they turned 18, however.

Again. Good news? I dunno. The tobacco part is good news; the pot part I’m ambivalent about. What’s interesting is when I was a teenager, it seemed like most kids smoked dope … and almost no one smoked cigarettes (or drank beer). Pot was far and away the drug of choice. I think the teen smoking rate skyrocketed in the 80s and 90s because of Joe Camel. So maybe things are going back to the way they were in the early 1980s.

4 thoughts on “More Montana teens smoking dope than cigarettes”

  1. I saw that in the paper here the other day, Pepe. I have mixed feelings as well – I think that any addiction (and I know some folks who cannot go without lighting up _every_ day) isn’t good. I think it f-ks with your brain (just from what I’ve observed) after years and years of smoking. (not to mention the lungs).

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