found out my son is taking drugs

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my 12 y/o son is into hanging out with his mates in evenings and his father who he lives with told me he smelt weed or something like that on him the other night.
knowing my son is doing drugs upsets me but my ex (sons father) doesnt seem to be too worried, i told him he should ground him untill he learns his lesson but he just say its a phase hes going to like boys will be boys.

what shall i do? is some drug taking some craze that some kids go through or should i step in ?

Black market weed can cause psychosis, serious mental illness because a lot of it is skunk, the massively strengthened variety. Definitely try to educate your son about the dangers. Many ordinary people have ended up locked up for years in mental hospitals from smoking illegal weed when they lose touch with reality.

Yes, you should definitely do something if your 12 year old is smoking weed. It's not healthy or legal. He probably shouldn't be living with a parent who thinks it's fine, either.

(Note that I'm not talking about pot use by adults. That's an entirely different matter.)

12 is pretty young to be doing weed. Yeah it's a phase that a lot of teenagers (boys & girls) go through but a 12 year old isn't even a teenager yet.

Just try to turn this into a lesson for him. Explain to him that marijuana can be detrimental to a developing brain and that he should wait until he is an adult and can make those decisions for himself.

What would stepping in entail? Isn't grounding really the only thing you can do? Maybe ground him if you find out he's doing it again?

Also, I don't think there's really a risk of psychosis unless you're already at risk for psychosis to begin with. But it's not smart to be doing it at a young age. Is his dad actually cool with him doing it or is he just recommending taking a less severe approach to putting a stop to it?

I know that here in California, some autistic children are actually prescribed it.

I don't want to worry you but your son should probably move areas or change schools, maybe even join some kind of after school activity. That's how my mother dealt with all bad influences in my life at that age. To be honest he's just looking for community and somewhere to belong.

I know people say weed is harmless but this isn't Amsterdam, in the UK weed or skunk is often sprayed with ridiculous things, including class A drugs and even a few pharmaceutical things.

No offence but your ex husband sounds like a douche. Your son is 12 not 21. He hasn't even fully developed biologically. If possible, try and get your son to stay with you weekends too, he probably needs more attention.

well maybe i will tell him what damage drugs can to. his dad is a rather laid back man who probally would just give our son a slap on the wrist or something. I dont know much about drugs as i've never got involved in them ( i didn' even have friends when i was his age and well i dont now either).

my son lives near the coast and so its quite a good place for teens to hang out.(my son is nearly 13) they like hiding out underneath those boardwalks so its not uncommon, but i will step in because he is my son as much as it is my ex's son.

“Boys will be boys, so you must let them take drugs—and pay for it, to top it all, I guess”? Ha, ha, HAH! Try telling my parents that, if you even dare

What they found was a correlation, that a lot of people with schizophrenia also used or had used marijuana in the past. However it was unclear how many use it to self medicate, every person I have met with schizophrenia uses marijuana to calm their symptoms.

The cannabis being sold legally is not anything different than the stuff being sold illegally, its all weed. It might be a good idea to look up some more up-to-date marijuana info.

Maybe you're right but are you familiar with this?

https://www.livescience.com/24873-marij ... fects.html

Well, I can give you my experience. I had a bad trip from it. I felt the room spinning and felt extremely nauseous. I was shaking and had cold sweats. I was 19 then. 38 now. Will never ever do it again.

Step in. His father might see this as something harmless or might not know how to approach the problem but weed can be a very big pitfall for pre-teens and teenagers because it can cause apathy and their grades and so on can suffer, and additionally, that he has demonstrated that he is impressionable and is easily led astray. It's important to keep pre teens and teens, especially boys, occupied with activities because when a bunch of boys around the age they start to become rebellious have nothing to do but hang around, they get bored, and drugs and bad behavior are the most readily available fix for that. They need a more positive and productive way to channel their energy like sports or other activities that keep them occupied after school.

I’m glad my parents didn’t have that mentality with me, because forcing me to attend a lot of activities in addition to school would have been an excellent way to make me fail at school. I was busy enough studying. In fact, I never had enough time. And it was a rebellious thing for me to do, because my parents thought I studied too much and were always pressuring me to study less and spend more time with them, consequences be damned. Only I seemed to be interested in my own grades, and that’s what kept me determined.

Studying is fine. Hanging around doing drugs and anti social things is not.

It's never good for a kid, especially one as young as 12, to be hanging out with people who play hooky from school, and smoke marijuana (and perhaps do other drugs, too). Perhaps he's going through a "phase." But it could be a dangerous one. It's not necessarily the drugs themselves---it's the people who do and sell drugs. Many of them are really not nice people.

My experience with kids that age who smoked marijuana is that they were frequently became harder drug users rather quickly.

I believe both parents have to nip this in the bud.

This is very true. Marijuana advocates often say that the claim that it is a starter drug that leads to other drugs is propaganda don't taje in to account the context of impressionable young boys who bend easily to peer pressure and who do not have the neurological development to thoroughly assess situations and make the best judgement. And today, there is an opioid epidemic. A disturbingly high number of kids see no difference between trying pot and trying heroin. I wish that were an exaggeration but it's not. It was a big problem in my area and this was an upper middle class area.

I don't know about "cheap weed causes psychosis", but I know some of my friends have had weed that was laced with something else before. It might be rare, but it does happen.