Teens Are Our Dealers, Marijuana speech #7

7 ^th speech in this series to the Josephine County Commissioners, July 1, 2009.   

Another finding in A Resolution Regarding Marijuana is:

“WHEREAS cannabis prohibition, combined with laws against dealing to minors, has caused it to be easier for children to obtain marijuana that adults, and adults to commonly buy it from teenagers; …”

We have laws against selling illegal drugs to minors; the penalties are naturally tougher on the adults who sell them than on the minors who buy them or sell them—far tougher.  I was threatened with 20 years for allegedly giving a pot cookie to a minor.

Few adults are willing to sell to minors; many minors are willing to sell to whoever will buy.  This makes certain that our main retail dealers will be either minors or young adults.

I didn’t start smoking pot until I went to college; while I was in high school, I wouldn’t let that kind of stuff near my fine brain.  Then I went to college, and learned that I’d been lied to all my life.  But I never realized that teens were the best source of weed until my own children were in high school, and I found that their friends nearly always had the best weed at the best price.

It’s natural; beyond the disproportionate punishment, teens have the best advertising network, because they talk to each other a lot, and they are less cautious than adults.  As they become adults, they keep their connections and their customers; high school is the recruiting and training ground for most of our street drug dealers.  It’s not that adults recruit kids; kids recruit each other.

On the other hand, look at cigarettes and alcohol, two substances that are freely available to adults and forbidden to children.  There are a lot of problems with this dynamic: it tells teens that they won’t be adults until they use these things, so they want to use them; and they aren’t legally allowed to learn how to drink responsibly by drinking with responsible adults, as they do in Europe.

But, unlike marijuana, these things are harder for teens to obtain than for adults; they have to recruit adults to obtain their alcohol and cigarettes, rather than the reverse.

If the legislature passed the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act, we adults could buy our weed in liquor stores at profit to the state and legal growers, rather than buying it from kids and profiting illicit growers and distributors.  Or we could grow it ourselves, and spend our money on other products and services.  And kids would have almost as tough a time getting pot as they do alcohol and cigarettes.

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener         541-955-9040         rycke@gardener.com