generalspeaking

Friday, February 08, 2019

The Trials of Parenting and the Tribulations of Children

"In the ... household there was a culture of marijuana use. [The boy] was invited to, and given marijuana, to smoke regularly on weekends ... [He] indicated he would smoke marijuana six to seven times every weekend he spent at his mother's."
"At times, if he coughed when smoking he was called a 'pussy'."
"While the production of the number of plants that [the mother] had in 2016 may be legal now [with the legalization of recreational cannabis in Canada from October 2018], that production was illegal then."
Judge Paul Scovil, Bridgewater, Nova Scotia provincial court

A judge said a mother and her common-law partner “were promoting a culture of cannabis use to (the woman’s) 13-year old son.” - 123RF

The unnamed (in protection of his privacy rights as a juvenile) boy's mother had two marijuana plants growing in a room distinguished by a sign that read: 'Mum's Grow Op'. The 13-year-old boy and his older brother were obviously exposed to a casual atmosphere of recreational pot. The younger boy lived part time with his father who was separated from the mother, both having shared custody. The older boy was charged with trafficking, giving cannabis to his younger sibling. That charge led to the older boy being given a 12-month conditional sentence.

As for the mother and her common-law husband, step-father to the boys, they too were charged. They are no longer together as a couple, but when they were and the boys were with them on weekends it was, according to the charges, standard procedure for the marijuana plants being grown by the mother to produce the wherewithal by which the 13-year-old during the course of a weekend would smoke marijuana six to seven times. The couple, in other words, were grooming the teen-age boys to become habitual marijuana users.

Both adults in the household were in their 30s and unemployed, both with no more than Grade 9 educations and they had both earned multiple prior convictions for breaking laws. The mother was found guilty of producing marijuana. The stepfather was convicted of trafficking in the years 2016 and 2017. The defence the stepfather put forward was that he had gained no profit, that what he was charged with was merely "a moral breach and only a technical violation of the law" since the drugs were shared within the family unit.

The judge would have none of it, noting that legislation clearly "has specific concerns regarding the provision of drugs of any kind to children." The stepfather was jailed for 90 days, the mother ordered to 45 days in jail, and both are able to serve their time intermittently, possibly on weekends. With no employment to complicate their lives, it is unlikely that this kind of arrangement, useful for the employed, would benefit them in a like manner.

The way in which this scenario of parents providing marijuana to underage children was revealed, was when the boy's father, who had joint custody, found his son attempting to smoke in the basement of their house. What he was trying to smoke was not marijuana, but catnip. When the father pursued a questioning of his son the entire story of coerced indoctrination into a life of cannabis use by a minor on the part of his mother was revealed.