A Grandfather Looks Back on 40 Years of Happy Pot Smoking

By George Rohrbacher, NORML. Posted June 15, 2008.

It was the fall of 1969, about six weeks after Woodstock, my senior year at the University of Denver. I had just moved into an apartment two blocks off campus. Tuesday, my first day in the new apartment, I'd borrowed a frying pan from the next-door neighbor, a young woman, tall and shapely with long honey-brown hair. She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. I'd stood out on her porch for several minutes with the borrowed frying pan in hand, stunned.

The next day, on Wednesday evening, I looked up to see someone knocking on my un-curtained living room window -- a short guy with wild eyes and a goatee. There was a big, big smile on his face. He held up a nice fat joint pinched between his thumb and forefinger. With the other forefinger he pointed next door. My gorgeous new next-door neighbor had sent him. She wanted to meet me! Did I go? Hell yes!! No one need ask me twice after such inducements.

Minutes later, in her apartment, we fired up that doobie. We had an unbelievably fun time together. Ann, my new neighbor, was not only good looking, but she was smart, interesting, and friendly, too -- as beautiful on the inside as she was on the outside. To my eyes, Ann glowed like a homing beacon. I walked her to class on Thursday and wrote her a poem. On Friday, we flew to Seattle to meet her parents. A little over a week later, I asked her to marry me -- that was 38 years and many pounds of pot ago.

We were married in June of 1970, standing on a hill watching a sailboat race in Puget Sound. Six years later, the first of our four children was born and with him came the start of decades of parental responsibilities. I found Fatherhood to be one of the very best things to ever happen in my life, except perhaps for Grand fatherhood. The marathon challenge of raising children was exactly what Ann and I were on this earth to do. Our three sons and daughter are now 25-to-33-years old. They are the recent graduates of Yale, Lafayette, Colgate, and Cornell. Three of our four children also competed in Division I athletics; and all have graduated from the college they started at, and within four years, too. Two are married and currently Ann and I have four grandchildren.

Regardless that our marriage was a product of the '60's -- flower power and all that -- I turned out to be a strict and loving parent. We farm and are in the cattle business. We live on a ranch three miles from our next-door neighbors. When our kids were growing up with no TV, or cable, or Internet to sop up time and attention -- we were like families of an earlier era, we talked to each other instead. Our children all learned to read long before they went off to school -- because in our family, you read a book if you were bored -- or went out to play, or invented a game. Zero time was spent hanging out at the Mall. No school grade lower than a "B" was ever acceptable at our house. And, of course, while living on a farm, there were always plenty of chores to do. Mealtimes at our house were always together. My wife, Ann, and I saw chief among our many jobs as parents was the gradual hand-off, to our kids, of the reigns that controlled their own lives -- and we tried to make that hand-off at the very earliest time possible. We were here on this planet to be their parents, not their friends; our job was to prepare them to fly away. We pushed plenty of extra curricular activities: 4-H, sports, etc. Burning off childhood's energy properly builds strong kids and is the key to every parent's sanity. At least two sports each per child was our prescription. If not sports then, theater or band. Our simple policy with kids and drugs: NONE. No Beer, Booze, or Wine. NONE. No prescription drugs, no Pot, no Pop -- and of course, no Tobacco. The one thing that sets us off from most other parents was we never allowed our kids Caffeine in any form, none. We've never let soda pop into our home, though, we do keep tea and coffee to re-supply visiting adult addicts. And, surprise -- our four kids, as adults, aren't addicted to caffeine today. This was our parental drug program: Leave all drugs alone. Be a kid when you are a kid, you are going to have plenty of time to be an adult for the rest of your life.

Another word about the ubiquitous CAFFEINE, America's one and only true "gateway drug"(if there is such a thing): Caffeine is now available in caffeinated candy and so-called "energy drinks" that are really nothing but sweetened "drug drinks." Espresso shops are on every corner for a shot of "mini-meth". Children don't need any damn caffeine, ever. And kids sure don't need the 12 teaspoons of sugar and/or corn syrup per glass or the swirl of industrial chemicals that pop is made from -- wake up America, this isn't food for young growing bodies. Young brains and psyches have plenty of internal challenges without "getting a buzz on" in the process. The maturation of the human neurology is a slow and delicate process and psychoactive drugs have no business there. Getting high, in any form, should be treated just like driving a semi-truck or skydiving; it is a potentially hazardous undertaking reserved ONLY FOR ADULTS.

The majority of the people I know who have had real problems with alcohol and drugs got started young -- usually sneaking their folk's booze or prescription drugs when they were 13 or 14 years old. Really bad habits easily get started then, before the competing good habits are firmly rooted. My wife and I were very frank and open with our kids, from the very earliest ages, about the dangers of drugs -- about the heroin, cocaine, and alcohol induced nightmares of two of Ann's youngest siblings, the DWIs that Grandpa got, or the Uncle that had to be lead, in an alcoholic stupor, off to bed every night, or the another Uncle arrested for drunk and disorderly who also got picked up for a DWI and had to call cross-country from jail to arrange for babysitting for his child that he'd left home alone.

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Gerge Rohrbacher is a member of NORML's Board of Directors and a former Washington state senator.