Karen is stoned

by philg

From the country’s loudest advocates of shutting down schools… “Mother’s Little Helper Is Back, and Daddy’s Partaking Too” (NYT):

After the kids go to bed, the grown-ups are drinking and smoking pot to distract themselves from the hellscape that is pandemic parenting.

The increase of substance use among parents is “just kind of understandable,” said Jonathan Metzl, the director of the department of medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt University. “This is an incredible, once-in-an-epoch stressful situation, and the kinds of outlets people usually have in their lives are just not available.” We can’t go to the office, we can’t go to the gym, we can’t really see friends or family, and we never get a break.”

(No mention that parents in Sweden can go to the office, to the gym, and can see friends and family!)

What’s up with the drug that went from illegal to “essential” within a few years?

Many states where marijuana is legal have seen a big increase in sales since the virus began; for example, in Washington State, “cannabis revenue spiked at the height of the pandemic,” according to budget analysis from a local news radio station, KXLY. And some data from earlier in the pandemic showed that prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications were on the rise. Prescriptions for Klonopin and other similar drugs rose 10.2 percent in March 2020 from March 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing statistics from IQVIA, a health research firm.

But for some parents, getting just a little stoned is the only way they can eke out a small measure of joy in an otherwise fairly hopeless time. Deborah Stein, 43, said her nightly pot gummy is the one thing allowing her to get a good night’s sleep on a regular basis.

She’s the mother of a 21-month-old in Los Angeles and works in the theater industry, which has been “completely decimated” by the virus, and she and her husband are worried for their future livelihood, along with the health of their families, the air quality, the election and about a million other things.

After dinner, the couple splits a “chill” gummy containing 1.8 milligrams of THC. “It’s a way of carving out this hour or 90 minutes we get to spend together, before we have to walk the dog,” Ms. Stein said. For at least that brief window, “we get to be peaceful.”

So the newspaper that, in response to a virus that kills unhealthy people with a median age of 80+, wanted schools and society shut down now complains that parenting healthy children isn’t as much as it used to be because schools and society are shut down.

Very loosely related… our young neighbor’s new puppy. Why get stoned every night when you can instead be occupied with housetraining?

17 thoughts on “Karen is stoned”

  1. The real story here is that someone is getting “chill, peaceful“, and “a good night’s sleep” from 0.8 milligrams of THC.

    • Some people just can’t hold their THC, LOL:)

      The real question is how much CBD they got… that’s the stuff which makes you sleepy.

  2. Pathetic weak people. I’m almost happy they won’t survive the coming troubles. Scientific article searches by date on pot is pretty funny. 15 years ago everything was negative, gateway drug, long term neuro damage etc. Miraculously the science today keeps finding new ways pot is beneficial. Now that Big Marijuana is emerging it won’t be long before we have RDA’s for pot and they put pot in school lunches. Believe scientists.

  4. You’ve spent most of your adult life trying to make people smarter, better-educated and more competent. In the new reality of the world we’re about to be hit with, we need a lot more stupid people who are content to sit on a couch and watch a screen all day long.

  5. It’s a little like Sri Lanka: they educated lots of people but they had nothing to do with that education, and no way to live. So they kill themselves.

    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/09/sril-s28.html

    Suicides among Wisconsin farmers:

    https://www.dailycardinal.com/article/2020/01/organizations-across-wisconsin-look-to-address-rising-suicide-rate-among-dairy-farmers

    If you reach a critical mass of stoned people and supply them with government food and some money, they can sit and watch YouTube clips of The Young Ones all day long and be happy. Some of them will make money investing in pot companies, and it’ll all be OK.

    • What does Ol’ PJ O’Rourke have to say about Trump these days? I liked his books when I was younger.

    • @GermanL:

      He’s got a new book out, that’s what the Commonwealth Club link is. He’s not much of a Trump fan, but you have to read it for all the penumbras. O’Rourke isn’t easily summarized. He thinks there’s a lot of chaos, and he’s right about that.

      https://www.amazon.com/Please-Calm-Down-Cry-Middle/dp/0802157734

      It’s better to watch the Commonwealth Club’s interviews on YouTube, their website is execrably slow.

    • But generationally speaking, it’s almost as though nobody cares P.J. O’Rourke exists (or anyone else older than 15, mentally or otherwise, for that matter.)

      Consider: P.J.’s interview video has 1,634 views. Claudia Conway has more than a million TikTok followers and she’s building her way to being the next Democratic Presidential candidate at 15 years old. This is why the Democrats want to keep lowering the voting age. I’ll bet if you asked her about what she thinks of P.J. O’Rourke, she’d say: “Who’s he? Probably some old f****** white guy we’re going to exterminate.”

      The future is insanity from one end to the other.

      https://www.businessinsider.com/claudia-conway-tiktok-problem-for-republicans-2020-10

  7. > We can’t go to the office, we can’t go to the gym

    Which validates my hypothesis that the reason companies prefer married workers over single ones is that the married workers would rather be at work than be at home. Also, it’s scary how the gym has become a place for people to hide from their families.

    > Deborah Stein, 43 … she’s the mother of a 21-month-old

    That seems incongruous to me.

  8. What will the Teachers Unions do if all the Jews leave? We can see they’re checking to find out how many passports they have.

    https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/ahead-of-the-election-growing-numbers-of-us-jews-consider-leaving-644183

    ““What they echo to me: ‘We’ve seen this before,’” Segal said. “‘I’m not going to get stuck. I’m not going to get caught. We know how this goes. There’s going to be a civil war. It’s going to be the end of democracy. I’m very concerned for our future. I don’t want to wait and see what happens. My grandparents left Poland in World War II.’”

    Has anybody asked Randi Weingarten what she intends to do?

  9. Very loosely related… our young neighbor’s new puppy. Why get stoned every night when you can instead be occupied with housetraining?

    I am a big fan of puppy therapy. We brought our Aussi home seven months ago, and are happy every day!

Comments are closed.