SMOKE SCREEN
James* hunches his skinny shoulders and leans against the kitchen island, holding a bottle of kombucha. His hand is splattered with dry house paint; the quietly spoken 18-year-old is not long home from his job on a construction site.
Each night, James fills his bong with cannabis and inhales. It’s a daily habit he’s had since he was about 15, when he began smoking cannabis to help him sleep. The lanky teen was just 13 when he took his first toke of a joint, offered by a friend. “I think 13 was definitely too young,” he says, shifting awkwardly on his feet. “I feel like if I hadn’t been so into it, I could have done better at school. In Year 11 and 12 particularly, I’d get pretty stoned.
“For my whole childhood, until I tried pot, I just couldn’t sleep at night. I was so restless and my mind wouldn’t stop going. I had mates who gave me pot, then I realised I could fall asleep and not wake up till morning.”
James lives in a renovated bungalow in Wellington’s southern suburbs with his parents and a younger sister. He spends about $140 a week on his cannabis habit; his parents allow him to smoke at home, even though it is currently illegal (he also chills out by listening to audio books). The teen rarely touches alcohol, however. He says he has friends who are binge drinkers and can turn violent. “They end up beating each other up when they get drunk. In my opinion, if they sat around and had a joint they’d be cracking up [with laughter] instead. Some of them drink and smoke together, and then get zombified and pass out.”
Once, he accidentally smoked a synthetic cannabis joint. “A guy just dropped this joint on the ground and I picked it up. All I could think about was flying rats. I’d not do that again deliberately.”
James is one of the 12% of New Zealanders who regularly use marijuana. And while most young people don’t partake habitually, their largely positive attitudes to “weed” are out of step with increasingly conservative attitudes to other risky behaviours, such as drinking, smoking and having sex. Ministry of Health research shows alcohol consumption among 15- to 24-year-olds has dropped dramatically since 2006. That same year, 23.4% of this age group were smokers; now it’s 15.4%. And although we don’t have comparable statistics here, sexual activity in the US among those in their early 20s is declining – in fact, they’re two-and-a-half times more likely to
