This often ended up being a source of violence and contention for us. I was entirely against the religious ideals of the culture that I grew up in from as far back as I remember, but certainly at the age of 8 years old and forward.
I remember being baptized in the Mormon church to be initiated into the club. It was so very important to my dad and my grandpa to have my long hair cut short for this event. I remember crying in a fit of rage while I was held down and my hair was cut. The whole time I was thinking “The pictures of Jesus in the Bible and in the Book of Mormon showed him having long hair!”.
The whole “fitting in” thing got very un-necessary and un-desirable for me. I realized that this was just a country club and that I didn’t want to be a member. So I never attempted to fit in. I lived how I felt, and I tattooed it on my body so that I didn’t have the option of being one way to one person, and a completely different way to someone else.
It was important for me to make that stand. I went through many changes, and as I changed I added more and more ink. I have quite a history on my body to tell my story of growing up Mormon in a non-Mormon mindset.
So this brings me to when I was a teenager and I started getting stoned with my neighbor Joey. We both worked for his dad on the irrigation ditches as grunt laborers, and during our lunch and our breaks we’d blaze up a joint.
I felt this was one of the best parts of my day, and I really couldn’t understand prohibition.
So I started buying and wearing shirts that said “Cannabis will save the world”, “free the weed”, etc.
This got me no where fast with my teachers, neighbors and especially my parents.
After one of my parents big disputes, they separated for the 3rd or 4th time and I got tired of fighting with them over dumb shit and I moved in with my grandma Jennie (who we would later name our second child after). Grandma Jennie let me be a kid, and I really enjoyed the freedom of not having to kiss anyone’s ass, or having the expectation of being someone that I was not.
But my parents thought that I was just too independent, and confused it with being crazy, or having ADD, or something. So they doped me up on a bunch of pills.
Later they would complain that I was violent, loud, mean. However I was just trying to mind my own business and live outside their home when they started force feeding me prescription speed (Ritalin) and Zoloft (a highly unpredictable anti-depressant) after forcing me to move back in with them.
So then I developed a few drug habits at the ripe age of 15. After awhile of my drug usage, they got pissed because I was sharing joints with my siblings. I thought “damn, would you rather feed them pills for their issues, or something safe to relax with like weed”?
That attitude got me kicked out of my parents house shortly after they forced me to move back in with them.
This was the game for many years, in and then out, in and then out. I would often have the police called to have me brought home, just to end up running away after a violent episode. Sometimes caused by me, and sometimes caused by others in my family. But the results were usually the same. I would be myself, I would rebel a little bit, maybe color my hair, get a tattoo or something of that sort, and then they would load me up with drugs, and in the end there would be a violent episode.
To this day I have about 4 people who would love to blame all of the miserable episodes of their life on me. But these are the same people who were using their own forms of drugs while at the same time forcing drugs down my throat.
Later on my little brother Justin would kill himself at age 16 years old, while doped up just like I was doped up.
If anyone wants to know how this effects other kids, you don’t have to take my word for it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URP6m0RaQzE
Now that my brother is dead, I often get the episode that killed him blamed on me, which at the time I was not on drugs, I was not violent, and I was taking my brother to church with me.
But because of his depression he was loaded up on several medications, even though depression is a very normal teenage emotion, and it was those drugs that killed him.
I have been using cannabis again since 2007 after quitting for many years, and there is absolutely no way that I get violent now, or back when I was a kid after using cannabis. I don’t get depressed, I don’t get anxious, I don’t get loud, and I don’t get suicidal. But because it was an “illegal drug” it gets blamed over and over and over by parents for their kids behavior.
If only parents could understand that these horrible, toxic prescription drugs are the cause. Or if the would have saw the signs of these drugs while they were getting them prescribed to us.
Utah leads the nation in two very tragic things.
- 1. Prescription drug abuse
- 2. Teen Suicide
My heart goes out to parents who have been duped into giving their kids toxic prescription medications.
My advice. Deal with your kids one on one, don’t dope them up to solve easy problems that all teenagers go through!
From a document by an Idaho state Rep (Tom Trail)
Seven states have approved hemp cultivation. Many more might follow if North Dakota clears all the administrative and legal hurdles. Idaho Rep. Tom Trail, R-Moscow, says he will resubmit a thrice-rejected bill allowing farmers to plant hemp if North Dakota succeeds. To the Eastern Idaho legislators who object, Trail notes that Brigham Young, patriarch of the early Mormon Church, directed Utah settlers to grow hemp.
“I think it’s a good crop,” Trail says.
Here are other references to Brigham Young’s direction to Mormon settlers.
(he also instructed them to grow tobacco)
A.D. 1854. The earliest paper to be made in Utah was formed by hand by Thomas Howard, an English Mormon, assisted by Thomas Hollis. The small beginning was sponsored by Brigham Young (1801-77) and the Mormon Church. The first sheets of paper were produced on June 27, 1854 and probably found their original use in the printing of the Deseret News, Brigham Young‘s newspaper, which began publication in Great Salt Lake City, June 15, 1850 this notice appeared in his newspaper: Rags! Rags! Rags! Save your rags, everybody in Deseret, save your rags; old wagon covers [hemp], tents [hemp], quilts [hemp and flax], shirts [hemp], etc., are wanted for paper. [First mill opened in the Far West.]
http://www.hempmuseum.org/SUBROOMS/HEMP%20PAPER%20CHRON.htm
This one from Rep. Tom Trails of Idaho:
http://www.infotrail.com/idaho2008/Pre_Legislative_Update/Hemp_Update/hemp_update.html
Like the prohibition in the 30′s that cost much money and many lives. This prohibition (of cannabis) will end too!