Lessons from a truant mind — why we need to talk to our kids about marijuana

This is going to be personal. Why? Because I was a teenage delinquent. And yes, each reprobate has their own blueprint for rebellion and ours was marijuana, dagga, doobie or joie de vivre as we used to say when we were outlaws in Pretoria.

Marijuana use is now legal in South Africa for personal use and for home cultivation, but look around you. There are more swanky weed stores and “apothecaries” in South Africa than Jamaica probably.

And if there are young adults in your household or circle, there will be weed smoking (or eating).

Now, dagga had a hierarchy of highness back then, from Durban Poison to Rooibaard to Malawi cob, moving down to majat – low-grade dagga full of pips that were cleared in the creases of double-LP covers. No “indoor” or “outdoor” bullshit. No Gorilla Glue or Purple Blossom.

Today you walk in and get served by professional staff, young students working the counters, sometimes behind glass like in a pharmacy, and you buy your stash from Acapulco to Afghanistan. The smoke holes are generally chilled places with no alcohol or tobacco smoking allowed. Games are played, live music is performed. There is gentle harmony, long, rambling conversations.

The truant mind

So, here is the thing. I have smoked dagga since I was a teenager, so I have been able to track the different stages of how I have come to use it over at least 47 years and how it has affected me.

I have a particular character and a mind that functions in a way that, I later have come to understand, is restless. Not that I mind, mind you.

As an adolescent you do not quite get to meet your mind yet, to understand it or put it to good use. That’s because it is still busy uploading, experiencing the world, overwhelmed by love or loathing, joy or the depths of despair. Psychologist Adam Phillips’s 2009 article in the London Review of Books, titled “In praise of difficult children”, bears some quoting before we get to the point of this all.

“When you play truant you have a better time. But how do you know what a better time is, or how do you learn what a better time is? You become aware, in adolescence and in a new way, that there are many kinds of good time to be had, and that they are often in conflict with each other.”

Phillips explains that, in betraying yourself by participating in risky behaviour such as taking drugs or drinking alcohol, and misidentifying your idea of a good time, you “discover something essential about yourself” – something, he says, “you couldn’t discover without having betrayed yourself”.

He writes: “You have to be bad in order to discover what kind of good you want to be (or are able to be).”

The upshot, he says, is that “adults who look after adolescents have both to want them to behave badly, and to try to stop them; and to be able to do this the adults have to enjoy having truant minds themselves”.

Rules of engagement

I am pleased to report that my mind is still truant and that I have learnt over the years the best uses of cannabis sativa or indica in helping the galloping horses.

As school kids we confined our smoking to weekends only. Scoring marijuana in those days was a risky business, so it was not always readily available.

I learnt early that I did not enjoy alcohol. Weed left less damage in the long run, apart from your lungs, but now you can have an edible in almost any shape or form, including a broccoli pie.

I never smoked during the week or when I worked. There was no way anyone could handle a newsroom at a South African newspaper covering violence and crime in those days stoned or on a plak (high). You needed your wits about you.

It was there I learnt that most of my colleagues preferred alcohol, and lots of it – so much so that some of them would pass out on their plates of fish and chips at the Royal across the road from the Cape Times where I worked.

So, our smoking was confined to weekends. It was a habit I kept up most of my life. Later, when I grew older, we would smoke in the evenings.

It is remarkable how many people across the globe, since Covid-19, have switched to marijuana as a recreational drug rather than alcohol. Especially older people, those in their sixties, seventies and eighties, which is actually the best time to discover the full range of benefits of smoking a doobie.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Cannabis prohibition was Calvinistic, classist and racist, so good riddance

But young developing minds should play gently with this generous plant; there are many who cannot tolerate its effects, as I could not tolerate alcohol.

Find out about marijuana. Stay away from the old scaremongers. Just as we parents model (hopefully positively) for our children how to drink alcohol, so we must model and teach them the secrets and the dos and don’ts of the business of 420.

By the way, for those out of the loop, 420 was born when, in the 1970s, five students in California would arrange to meet each day at 4.20pm to smoke it up. It has become the international symbol of the spikey-leafed wonder. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.