Dialogue: When it's their kids, dopeheads prefer to peddle righteousness

Not long ago, I had the hellish misfortune to spend an afternoon with a throng of peers, cronies and acquaintances who had recently become parents.

Needless to say, every single aspect of this experience was a perfect nightmare. Every person at this picnic stood before me as terrible confirmation (like I needed more) that parenthood turns the cerebrum to meringue.

As it happens, I have given rather a lot of thought to this fascinating, terrifying aspect of the human process over the past few years.

I've come to the conclusion (this was reached fairly early on in my analysis) that parenthood dissolves that part of the brain that one normally engages when required to understand irony.

At least four new parents (their eyeballs permanently scarlet with exhaustion) dragged their screaming, dribbling, noxious toddlers over and began to try to list the ways in which people who don't have children miss out.

They weren't particularly convincing (God only knows why people with teething infants think those infants are a selling point for parenthood) but 10 points, I guess, for Messianic zeal.

I tell you this story because these relatively youthful, Gen-X parents turned their attention to a relatively interesting subject about how to keep your child safe from marijuana in today's schools.

Specifically, they wanted to know why it was that so many youngsters find pot so easy to get.

"I mean, where the hell does a 13-year-old get marijuana from?" they asked each other, and me (oh joy) on repeated occasions. All of them employing, of course, the righteous umbrage one embraces when one becomes a new parent.

But the interesting part was that almost everyone who engaged in that conversation was stoned. Plenty of us saw the irony in this but many did not. This suggests that there are a lot of Gen-Xs around who cannot see that there is an enormous discrepancy between what they do and what they say.

Every generation boasts such persons. I just thought mine would be different.

I particularly thought it would be different when it came to discussing its marijuana use with its children. But, hey ho, perhaps not. Perhaps the overriding instinct is to protect one's children's innocence. And one's own, of course.

Perhaps it's harder than one imagines to admit to one's children, and indeed to oneself, that one has spent much of one's life as a no-hoping doper. At the very least, perhaps one prefers to fudge the issue.

Certainly, back at the picnic, people began to take a certain poetic licence when analysing youth access to marijuana.

They preferred to blame never-seen crime lords - rather than their own love, and hoarding, of marijuana - for the fact that their kids might one day have access to weed.

"There are people who are paid to wait outside schools to sell pot to the kids when they come out," observed one woman.

Then she delivered an even bigger beauty. She said she'd heard that various drug barons parked vans with catering windows alongside the school tuck-shop and sort of sold their stuff from there. I was dying of laughter at the time.

Someone else proposed that there's a whole bunch of pot-pushers working the school buses. Which may be true, although I have my doubts.

But no one mentioned the most likely scenario - that the reason kids today have easy access to weed, and the reason our kids will have even easier access to weed, is that their own parents and siblings keep it at home. Which is fine with me - I'm all for liberalising the stuff - but I do think Gen X has to decide exactly what it wants to tell its kids about marijuana.

I wonder if we're as brave as we pretend on this point. I think we're fobbing our kids off on the old favourite - Do As I Say, Not As I Do.