7 Reasons Parents Should Not Test Kids for Drug Use

[chucky1432]

So if i ever have kids i'll definitely tell them which drugs are bad because i don't want them going around like half the 16 year olds here now smoking crack everyday. I may also show them what they may turn out like if they take up heavy drinking and hard drug use by showing them a few of my relatives. That should scare them .

Good strategy, but by the time your in high school, must of that stuff is common knowledge, and the kids already know it....All I'm trying to say is don't blame the parents, because yes the kids will do drugs, but the parents can't run around like Sherlock Holmes to find out what they are on.....I'm a freaking school teacher I know, kids know way too much, but they don't know as much as they think they know and that's the fucking truth

 

[ramsay st rider]

i dont blame the parents in this scenario although they didnt handle the sitch well. teenagers are rebellious. i can just imagine my parents telling me i would have to do drug tests at that age. i probably would have told them to fuck off and thrown a urine sample in their faces, then rebel some more by spending their money on drugs. simple teenage psychology. the parents are not to blame but they only exacerbated the situation by imposing these tests. its like criminalising your kids

 

[hydroazuanacaine]

Personal accountability in the US is almost completely dead.

What makes you say this (other than bush)? I feel the opposite- here in the us, whenever something bad happens, someone always has to be responsible and brought to justice. That's absurd. Sometimes horrible things happen despite people having done what they could. And not all mistakes are is condemnable as their results.

Of course hindsight is 20/20 and these parents made mistakes, but this article doesn't provide any evidence that the parents were not doing everything they thought was best to save their child, and to suggest they weren't would be disrespectful. As drug users, i think everyone here should know that parents' love and genuine attempts at helping are not always enough.

 

[Finder]

First of all, little note to Finder. Do you really think that they did not sit down and talk to their child?

Sure. Is it really that hard to believe?

What makes you jump to the conclusion (a conclusion backed by pretty cocky, unpleasant posts) that the parents "blindly drug tested him and threw him in rehab..."

The article. Perhaps it was the way it was written, but that is how I drew my conclusion.

"When Kim Manlove and his wife discovered that their teenage son was abusing pot and alcohol, they did what they thought was right: They purchased commercially available drug-testing kits and began administering random urine screens at home."

So they find out their son was using--I wonder if the author's definition of "abusing" is any use at all, but that's something else entirely--and immediately begin drug testing him at home.

"When his parents finally caught on [to their son using drugs the test didn't detect], they enrolled him in treatment."

He was still "using"--how much, how often, what problems it was causing is never noted--so they toss him in rehab at 15. This kid doesn't need rehab he needs a fucking talking to and some parents to you know, actually do some parenting like grounding him, removing privileges, not treating him like an addict on parole.

they don't just have the ability to spontaneously generate experience or information

There's this thing called the internet where you can quite easily gather information. People are sheep, though, and content to just take whatever information they are force fed.

Yeah, blame the parents, that's a great idea........It's all the parents fault, the parents were so stupid instead of trying to stop them, they should educate them about doing drugs............Just in case I missed anything, by the time you are in high school, haven't you already been educated about drugs.......Anybody ever heard of D.A.R.E, that's where you learn about those things......How about kids just shouldn't do drugs, why the fuck do kids have to do drugs.???........Go find a sport, hobby, study harder, hang out with your friends, you have the rest of your life to experiment with drugs, honestly this is utterly ridiculous to blame the parents for doing what they thought was right for their kid....

Whoa, dude, no one is advocating they should educate the kid about doing drugs nor is anyone advocating kids need to be doing drugs that I've seen in this thread. No need to make stuff up to try and prove an asinine point. Ignorance is not an excuse...just because they were only "doing what they thought was right" doesn't automatically make things ok. Even the law claims ignorance is no excuse. This case sounds to me like the parents didn't have a damn clue what they were doing.

What makes you say this (other than bush)? I feel the opposite- here in the us, whenever something bad happens, someone always has to be responsible and brought to justice. That's absurd. Sometimes horrible things happen despite people having done what they could. And not all mistakes are is condemnable as their results.

I blame video games. I blame movies. I blame the drugs. I blame society. I blame [insert here]. You seriously think people have accountability in the US? Are you paying attention?

Of course hindsight is 20/20 and these parents made mistakes, but this article doesn't provide any evidence that the parents were not doing everything they thought was best to save their child, and to suggest they weren't would be disrespectful. As drug users, i think everyone here should know that parents' love and genuine attempts at helping are not always enough.

You're right, the article does not highlight everything they could have or didn't do and my comments are based on that fact. Honestly, when it comes to drug use, my glass is definitely half empty. Ignorance abounds, and giving anyone the benefit of the doubt in regard to any substance use is too much in my humble, jaded opinion.

 

[chucky1432]

Whoa, dude, no one is advocating they should educate the kid about doing drugs nor is anyone advocating kids need to be doing drugs that I've seen in this thread. No need to make stuff up to try and prove an asinine point. Ignorance is not an excuse...just because they were only "doing what they thought was right" doesn't automatically make things ok. Even the law claims ignorance is no excuse. This case sounds to me like the parents didn't have a damn clue what they were doing.

I think when someone says if they find an "E" pill in their child's room, they would buy a kit to test the pill, that would fall under educating about doing drugs. So that wouldn't be making something up dude.........

 

[paranoid android]

Well if i did find out that my kid was doing E id make sure that they atleast knew enough to test the stuff with a kit. The fact is that they are more then likely going to be doing E anyway so why not reduce the harm of it? They could be doing much worse drugs thats for sure.

Id certainly teach them that certain drugs are pretty safe while other can be really fucking dangerous, can kill you and can be horribly addictive. Nobody ever told me that by the time i got into drugs which was around 10 years old if you count alcohol and if i had access to cocaine, heroin or meth back then i would have taken it. I didnt know that these drugs where much if anymore dangerous then cannabis or shrooms because we where always taught that all drugs where really dangerous and could very well kill you.

When i got abit older around 16 years old and i ran into people that had been addicted to heroin and cocaine i actually listened when they told me these drugs where bad news for the most part. So i think that abit of real education and hard reduction as opposed to scare mongering would work on most kids.

Anything has to be more effective then the just don't do drugs because they will kill you mantra.

 

[chucky1432]

When i got abit older around 16 years old and i ran into people that had been addicted to heroin and cocaine i actually listened when they told me these drugs where bad news for the most part. So i think that abit of real education and hard reduction as opposed to scare mongering would work on most kids.

You listened, but how many people know Heroin is bad shit and still try it....Better yet, how many people who snort Heroin, smoke it, then have to inject it, even though all the evidence of I.V Heroin and addiction is out there......Do you really think you can scare people into not taking drugs???? I must admit I was scared for awhile, but all of sudden I was like, let me see what these people are talking about....

 

[paranoid android]

You listened, but how many people know Heroin is bad shit and still try it....Better yet, how many people who snort Heroin, smoke it, then have to inject it, even though all the evidence of I.V Heroin and addiction is out there......Do you really think you can scare people into not taking drugs???? I must admit I was scared for awhile, but all of sudden I was like, let me see what these people are talking about....

I get your point and for some people the danger of these drugs can be appealing in and of itself. Still the vast majority of people who try drugs like ecstasy don't go on to try drugs like heroin. Many people who do E don't even snort coke on any kind of a regular basis. I would say that alot have tried it but i have met alot of people that just don't like coke at all thus they never do it more then a few times or just once.

I have never tried heroin though i would if it was very prevalent around here but i have tried cocaine and crack. I knew how addictive crack could be before i tried it (i think i actually did it before i snorted coke) but i did it anyway because i was drinking all the time and was feeling depressed and bored. Coke/crack was not my type of drug so i never really took to it although i did do my fair share of it now and again.

Meth is a drug that im scared of and would not try. I was not scared of it until i actually saw first hand what it did to people and some of them where good friends of mine. The tales on bluelight of just how bad meth has fucked people over has only served to turn me away from the stuff even more.

Also if BL has done one thing for me it has showed me how horrible IV use is especially with pills so i have never Ived the dilaudid that i get prescribed alot despite hearing about the incredible rush it produces.

 

[jamaica0535]

yeah, this makes sense, if you find E it's perfectly fine, but anything else and it's off to rehab...Last time I checked "E "didn't come with a warning "safe for 12 and under"....

E really isn't that addicting, yea you can get serotonin syndrome but you almost have to try to get that as far as taking it multiple times a day for days on end... deaths are rare and more often than not caused by contradictions as far as whats in the pill, if you know your taking mdma you can be pretty fucking certain that your not going to die. if you dont test it, who the fuck knows?

i honestly dont mind psychs, its something that if someone decides to do it they should probably do it later rather than sooner. I tried LSD at 16 and it changed how i viewed the world completly for the better... mushrooms were another thing i considered to be a positive experience. E was ok, but the hangover i get most of the time makes me rarely want to do it.. Responsible drug use, i have very little against. some drugs are just too hard to use responsibly. people get stupid, and people die.

ive seen more than a few family members go down the road of addiction through oxy, meth, benzos, and booze...

kids are going to do what they are going to do. my parents grounded me when they found my bongs. still smoking weed... but i have the common sense to know that i have addictive tendencies and moderate my use of the more addictive ones, stayed away from coke and meth... ive railed an oxy here and there over the past year, taken few hydrocodones every now and then, and done benzos with about the same frequency. no amount of fear mongering will result in 0 drug use, some people managed to get pretty brainwashed by DARE back in the day and never touched anything in fear of "reffer madness" or whatever the fuck they harped on about... but many of those same kids got curious and tried drugs, and go figure, a lot of people enjoyed them. What the world needs is less fear mongering and more education as far as doing it safe, like sex ed for drugs "we know your going to do it, so you might as well know how to be safe about it". i wonder how many kids were like "lets take some pills" and then they swallow a couple of methadones with some xanax and die shortly later from respiratory failure... because they didn't realize that the combination would cause that sort of thing... kid huffing the duster certainly didnt think he would die at the bottom of a pool, but then again he was huffing duster, its common sense that darwinism would take over sooner or later...

 

[Roxicodone King]

YEA WTF. I ,ean my parents just were like hes experimenting let him figure it out. I think if parents push to hard it makes the kid want to do that thing that the parents are so against more. but i dont know

You REALLY think this is the best idea? Just let kids do whatever they want? Let kids figure it out on their own? Fuck, I know a lot of us on this site are anti-gov't, anti-authority, etc. etc., but does NO ONE else think that gee, maybe some supervision is good? This article doesn't talk about the (my guess) 95% of kids who, after getting drug tested my rents, quit doing anything and go on with their lives. Don't get me wrong---there is a big difference between experimenting and addictive beahaviour. If your kid is smoking up or drinking once in a while, testing could very well stop that. HOWEVER, if your kid is an alcoholic or addict (actually has the genetic predisposition and shit), then obviously intervention is needed (some kind of program).

I guess what I am saying is that you can't blame these parents. Unless you have had experience with addiction, you are probably totally and utterly clueless about addiction. Overall, I guess that I would say the drug tests alone can be useful, but in the case of a true addict/alcoholic, they are just ONE useful part in a bigger program (rehab, detox,12 step,shrink, etc. etc.). I just don't think that it is fair to villafy these parents for trying to help their kid, just because it ended badly.

 

[4EverTweakin]

This by no means is a constructive post, but what a stupid fucking kid. Let us all learn a lesson, and steer clear of whip-its and diving boards.

Just the whip-it is fine, though.

 

[ValeTudo]

lol the real issue here is the guy is called manlove

 

[ValeTudo]

holy shit i just read that article

that guy practically killed his son
and working as a councilor? is that legal?

 

[youarewhatyouis]

What I don't get is that many of these parents were in their late-teens/early-20's during the Summer of Love. Most of them either smoked pot in their day or had friends who survived such behavior.

Now these same people have bought into the whole "drug war" thing, and I find it quite mystifying, to say the least...

yes, and the excuse is always: "well it was the 60's! haw haw haw!"

but we cant say "well, I did drugs, but it was the 00s."

 

[tobala]

My point was if you or your pals smoked weed in the 60's/70's and are now having cerebral spasms because your kid is experimenting with it 35 years later, you are a douchebag--especially if you are setting up drug tests in your 1.5 bathrooms because Joe Government said that's how to deal with the non-problem...

 

[thujone]

these unfortunate people probably saw drug testing at home as a way to safeguard their kid from getting into bigger trouble at the hands of LEO. can't really fault them because their kid made a mistake.

nobody really "pushes" anyone into doing something, because the person being "pushed" always knows deep down that they're going down a bad path but decide to go that way anyhow to spite the people they're rebelling against.

 

[IAmJacksUserName]

I hope these parents are happy knowing they essentially had a hand in their son's death. Great parenting.

Is it really fair to blame the drug testing for the fact that the kid inhaled computer duster and dived into a pool? Even when I was smoking pot and drinking at his age, I wasn't anywhere near that stupid.

 

[chucky1432]

My point was if you or your pals smoked weed in the 60's/70's and are now having cerebral spasms because your kid is experimenting with it 35 years later, you are a douchebag--especially if you are setting up drug tests in your 1.5 bathrooms because Joe Government said that's how to deal with the non-problem...

I agree with you, but not everyone was doing it.......I know tons of people without kids and shit, who didn't participate.......Actually I don't believe that era was any crazier than now........We are pretty crazy now, we even have more stuff to do:D

 

[tobala]

^^^^ And thank God (or whatever) for that... %)

 

[anonymous1419]

There is a episode of Intervention on tonight(Canada) about a girl who huffs computer duster. Looks like an insane episode. I bet it already played in the USA.

That Intervention was fucking insane. Almost scary.

And I think I'll print this article out and set it on the kitchen table for my parents to read. 8)