OK, I'll bite. I'm a step parent to two teenagers, one who has gone through significant drug problems, rehab, and who has really gotten his life on his own off to a rocky start because of it. It's been an extremely difficult chapter of our lives. I will also tell you we did everything as parents to get help from family therapy to gobs of individualized attention, to individual counseling. It all started when he got a job at the local movie theatre and fell into the social fold of the other losers working there. He was 17 at the time. It cost him everything he had, and he's now 18 and struggling on his own. Tough love. I think now it's starting to hit him how stupid he's been.

This is a kid who as a younger teen adamantly swore off drugs because he knew his real dad ruined his own life with drugs, and he harbored a ton of hate his whole life over that fact. Fortunately, his mom was smart enough to get the kids away from that influence at a very young age (she was a very young mother).

Here's the fact. Whether it's legal or not, people are going to get pot. It's widely and readily available in schools, workplaces and just about any place else you care to look. In big city schools, kids can't get away from it, and nearly half of all high school students experiment with it before they finish high school. That's just how many admit to it in surveys. The actual number is probably even higher. Sitting in group therapy sessions with other teens telling their stories gave a chilling account on how rampant drugs are in the schools here. Kids getting high between classes, on lunch breaks, and dealing on school grounds is absolutely commonplace, and all high school kids have easy access to drugs. When all their friends are trying it, the peer pressure is overwhelming, hence the marked increase in teen drug use in recent years. Arizona's proximity to Mexico only serves to make it worse. Pot is super cheap here, and a kid can easly score a quarter ounce for a week's worth of lunch money.

And it's not just pot either. It's ecstasy, heroin (I couldn't believe how many teen heroin addicts we saw), coke, meth (lots and lots of meth), oxycotin, spray paint....you name it. It's in these kids faces every day.

So...since most of you don't have teens yet, I can tell you this is something you'll have to look forward to. Hopefully your kids don't give into their peers.

Drinking under the age of 21 is illegal to, but the vast majority of high school kids have had drinks. This experimentation is part of growing up, and even NYMM admits he experimented too.

To to answer the question, hell no, I don't want my kids smoking pot, drinking, or doing anything else that's ILLEGAL. I never suggested legalizing pot for kids. It would have to be a 21+ thing like alcohol.

Legalization also solves no social problems aside from decriminalizing dealers and keeping some of that money out of the hands of organized crime.

What it does do is decriminalize something that millions of people do already. Do you really think that illegality is really a deterrent for drug use? If you think that, you're kidding yourselves. The recurring theme I saw with kids getting treatment is the overwhelming feeling they weren't doing anything wrong. They don't even think about the legality issue until they get busted, and even then, it does little to stop the patterns.

Marijuana is already a cash crop. You might as well legitimize it and collect taxes to be put towards the common good instead of letting it continue to support organized crime and foreign drug traffickers. It's here. It's already embedded in our society. It's already easily and readily available at low cost. We lost the war on drugs, and we'll continue to lose it as long as people want to get high.

If pot were completely removed from society, a new drug of choice will be found.

As for the gateway drug comment - you obviously didn't read my first response to that. People don't do other drugs because they smoked pot. People do other drugs because they want to experiment with themselves. Addiction comes from abuse.

As for kids and drugs, I've been there guys....I watched it happen with one of my own, and it was brutally hard. Drugs and alcohol are and always should be illegal for kids who haven't fully developed the maturity to make the right decisions for themselves. That goes with alcohol, curfews, driving the family car...everything. It's an adult decision, and I believe adults should have the freedom to do to their bodies what they please.

If they crash their car because they're under the influence, then let existing laws deal with them accordingly. Alcohol is legal, but driving under the influence of it is not. The same should ring true for anything.