A friend of mine told me a scary story. He is a marriage and family therapist. This is a first-hand account that he witnessed personally.

A couple went out for the night and left their three children in the care of a baby sitter. The baby sitter snooped through their dresser drawers and found some marijuana. She called her parents who called the police. When the couple came home their children were gone, under the protection of the county child protection agency. The cops had completely searched their house and the couple were arrested. The children were held for 3 days by the county and then released to a relative. The parents were allowed 9 hours of visitation per week. They had to undergo drug testing and be clean for 6 months (or something like that) before the state would release their children back to their custody. If they failed any of those drug tests they were at risk of losing custody of their children FOREVER.

Had the parents been complete alcoholics, or hooked on prescription drugs, child protection would never had been involved. But, because marijuana is illegal, even a small amount of marijuana in the home can result in the placement of the children under a state child protection agency.

This is insane. My friend did an assessment on the parents and concluded they were great parents, great role models and had done a fine job of raising the kids, one of which was 10 years old. So for 10 years they had been outstanding parents.

Now obviously there are situations where children need protection from their own parents. Marijuana use is not one of those situations. Marijuana is considered less harmful in virtually every way compared to alcohol. To be clear, children should not be exposed to drugs. Nor should they be exposed to severe alcoholism or prescription pill poppers.

This is a result of the insane laws prohibiting the use of marijuana, driven largely by the fundamentalist Christian bastards that I constantly bitch about on this blog. The criminalization of marijuana is a huge failure of public policy and it has to be changed. The reason it isn’t changed is because of god damn Jesus freaks, half of whom are complete fucking alcoholics and pill poppers and who seriously harm their children by indoctrinating them into their radical, intolerant and hateful religion.

Good thing I don’t smoke marijuana. Or believe in God.