Weed(s) Growing Up Around TV

Here’s a statistic that won’t surprise you: Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug among American youth. Why? It’s cheaper and more readily available than most drugs and often carries very light legal penalties.

It’s also TV's substance of choice.

One in five American teens smokes pot. And you don't have to be a mental gymnast to arrive at the conclusion that television is partly to blame. If you haven’t been watching, you should know that the drug has been cropping up all over the small screen lately. While you haven’t been watching, there’s a good chance your teens have been.

A Mother Looks Back
For Amy, now a 29-year-old mother of three, a youthful flirtation with pot served as a gateway to harder drugs. “I was in high school,” she told Plugged In Online. “It started there and led to speed, LSD, lithium. It all became very casual after a while and didn’t have that sort of negative stigma attached to it.”

While the theory that the drug acts as a gateway to other forms of abuse isn’t a new one, that theory is quickly nearing fact. The reality is simple: Kids who don’t abuse marijuana are overwhelmingly more likely to steer clear of other drugs. “If we can get a child to 20 without using marijuana, there is a 98 percent chance that the child will never become addicted to any drug,” said White House Deputy Drug Czar Scott Burns of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. “While it may come across as an overemphasis on marijuana, you don’t wake up when you’re 25 and say, ‘I want to slam meth!’”

Seems easy enough. Teach kids marijuana is bad and you’ll save them from a path littered with countless other dangers. But sheltering teens from the pressure to smoke pot is getting harder. Between 1999 and 2001, 56 percent of teens being treated for marijuana dependence began using the drug by age 14; 26 percent had started by age 12.

Who’s Teaching Our Teens?
Amy's attraction to cannabis was largely the result of peer pressure. And the way friends treat marijuana still plays a huge role in determining individual behavior. But teens need only turn on the TV to get that “other” message that pot is cool. “In general, youth are very led by their peers, and television becomes like a peer to them,” Amy said. “We allow things to come into our homes through TV that we would never allow people to come into our house and do. The more we see things on TV, represented in someone else’s life, the more it starts to seem like it’s OK—like it’s normal.”

If prime time is becoming a measure of normalcy, indeed we are in trouble. There, we see kids getting high in their parents’ basement (on That ’70s Show). We see suburban mothers dealing pot to finance their posh lifestyle (on Showtime’s latest, Weeds). Most of all, we see Hollywood making a joke out of marijuana use. And when we begin to laugh, slowly, acceptance begins to creep in. “These are trendsetting shows,” said Steve Dnistrian of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. “They affect behavior and attitudes, particularly teens. When glamorization of drugs has climbed, changes in teen attitudes followed.”

The notion that public opinion, particularly among teens, can be swayed by television is a far-reaching one. Great Britain recently banned companies from promoting alcohol in advertisements deemed “sexual.” Why? Because regulators are seeking to curb binge drinking among youth, and the first logical step is to eliminate its glamorization in commercials.

But in America, with teen prescription drug abuse at an all-time high (it’s tripled in the last 10 years), we find entertainment producers pushing harder than ever to paint an alluring picture of the drug most responsible for getting kids in the door. And teens who take that first step are eight times more likely to use cocaine, 15 times more likely to use heroin and five times more likely to need treatment for dependence on any drug.

That forces Amy, who hasn’t used drugs since her late teens, to rule out the majority of what TV has to offer. “Parents sometimes let things slide because they’re enjoying it,” she said. “A lot of it is being disciplined yourself—for your children’s sake. We need to realize that if they’re watching this kind of thing all the time, they’re getting more input from television than they are from us.”