Sucks in a big breath. Jeeez mate, I gave no idea what I’d do. Probably lock the daft sod in the boot of a car and get him dropped in Scotland. Or bury him on a beach up to his neck.

As to an actual serious answer, I don’t have a clue sorry.

Is it worth talking to the school and getting the dealer dealt with?
Or if there’s a way for the Police to deal with it that doesn’t drop your lad in it too much?
Sounds like a tough time for all of you – hope you get it sorted.

Give the scammed cash to the Police , He can go ask them to give it back to him , after he told them how he came by it.

Tough one and I really feel for you. Sounds like you’ve tried to be nice and to get through to him. I’d be playing hardball. No devices that can access the Internet, no money, no going out other than for school and then it would be pick up and drop off like he’s a small child. Act like one, then get treated like one.

I’m not sure that the tough approach is very effective. It reminds me a bit of the next door neighbour in American Beauty. Chances are he’ll either rebel against it, or, if you’re so tough that he can’t, he’ll just go off the rails completely when you no longer have any control over him.

I think you need to fully identify the root cause of his behaviour. For most people between 16 and 25 drugs are hedonistic and/or experimental and don’t lead to disaster or habitual use later in life. For your son, it may be that he’s using them just to fit in, or be cool (don’t underestimate the influence of these factors), or it may be that he’s using them as a crutch. Address the causes, not the symptoms.

JP

What the hell would stw do?

I asked myself a question, “what does he expect me to do or hope I’ll do?”. He’s known you all his life and is being pretty candid, it’s a mix of him telling you stuff and you finding out. I decided to be myself and act in character.

He’s still sitting down to dinner with you, that’s better than many other places he could be. So I’d do what I did which wasn’t throw him out, though I did ask friends to put him up for a few nights in an effort to diffuse tensions, it helped.

Sounds like a bit of positive progress. Good for you

who ever says taking weed doesn’t effect your metal health are talking shite

I looked up things I need to know about including cannabis and the links are proven if the users have some genes.

This sort of thing can be quite misleading; when you read the actual Caspi et al paper that suggests this, the link is nowhere near as strong as indicated in the website above. It’s somewhat akin to newspaper headlines screaming ‘Bacon gives you cancer!’, when the actual research suggests a 10% increase in likelihood if you eat bacon for every meal for 10 years.

I’m not saying that there is not a mechanism by which cannabis is detrimental to mental health, but I am suggesting that much research into the drug gets surprisingly confused between causation and correlation.

JP

So weed isn’t good but along with load of other shit it’s become a part of young people’s lives. For a lot more of them than our generation. Stuff that was marginal in my youth is mainstream in clubs these days, so mainstream it’s more likely to be circulating in our kids’ peer groups.

It’s worrying but objectively the kid’s today are doing better than our generation did on drink. Only one of junior’s peer group has died so far, by his age two of my mates had killed their girlfriends in alcohol provoked motorbike crashes (and they both limp both physically and mentally to this day). In the people around me one person’s death can be attributed to cannabis and one heroin (AIDS due to injection), eight have died in RTAs in which all but one riders/drivers had been drinking, one died of liver failure, and several have health issues related to drink. Four suicides (or was one just an RTA and another just a silly fall). And some mountaineering accidents.

It’s a crazy old world out there and preparing our kids to make their way in it is hard. We’re only a small part of what influences, them. I, like the OP worked hard on making that influence positive, If junior gets to 30 in one piece and of sound mind I’ll relax, he’s not there yet.

Just thought of another realy positive thing we did, teaching him to drive. Junior had a really cool instructor who was really cool about everything except drink/drugs. Junior declined to drive whenever he knew he was still hot and knew I’d always pay for a taxi for him to get home and go and pick up the car myself. He got drug tested by the German traffic cops and came up negative, he was so pleased with himself.

We also know that alcohol causes huge harm both to individuals and to society.

There is a big social difference; the bloke who runs the local offy is not a criminal. People who sell drugs are.

I mentioned this thread to my wife who does safeguarding at a local High School. She told me a tale of a meeting a couple of weeks ago with the parents of a lad near 16. He has been getting into drugs and really likes it. He doesn’t want to stop. He has been selling to pay for his habit and got into debt with some of the Manchester bad lads. He owed them £3000. They knew he had a younger sister, what primary school she went to, and what she was called. They offered to cut her up if he didn’t get their money.

Could he not return the drugs? No, he sold some and he and his mates guzzled the rest.

The dad paid up.

Dad is now waiting for juniors 16th birthday at which point he is out of the house. For good. Kid has put drugs before family and enough is enough. He refuses to comply with any sanctions and Plod have been called when dad tries to stop him.

It’s a slippery slope; it’s good there have been some positives on this thread.

Something I’ve thought increasingly as this thread has developed,

You can apply all the sanctions you like, but ultimately he’s got to want to change. It has to come from him. Nothing else is going to work, he’s just going to push back harder.

Even when he’s seemingly on board (or saying that he is), he’s still seeking concessions like the occasional joint which rather suggests to me that he’s not there yet. It’s like the recovering alcoholic going “I’ll just have the one…” Sure son, you can have the occasional toke if you want, once you’ve been clean for six months.

How you get to that point though I’ve no idea.

What you are talking about there is the harm from prohibition – not the harm from drugs

Laws can be so inconvenient.

Can I suggest this thread is perhaps not the best place to discuss drug laws and policy?

apologies for my part in hijacking it

My contribution, for what it’s worth, is similar to Cougar’s immediately above.

The weed / other drugs / scamming aren’t the problem, they’re symptoms. The problem _seems_ to be depression, anxiety or some other mental health issue that he’s self-medicating to avoid dealing with. That’s why counselling and basically just talking is so important, and why sanctions and punishments and monitoring won’t work in the long term, because they don’t seem to be dealing with the heart of the issue.

The moment when you went in and found him fitting his new fish tank heater, and you hugged and talked, sounds awesome. I think that’s what he, you and everyone else wants – warmth, kindness, openness and communication. It’s also what we all shut down readily when we’re pissed off, angry, tired, wanting to blame someone or wanting to avoid dealing with something within ourselves.

My family went through a big upheaval when I was 17 and I think it was only because I was too naive that I didn’t get into drugs as a result, but I remember after months of fighting and arguing that a few sessions of family counselling, where people outside the family actually made us stop and listen to each other and find out and express the things we were _really_ upset about, that we started to change.

Every family’s different and I don’t mean to try and diagnose your problems from across the internet, but I think focussing on the drugs themselves can distract from dealing with the bigger problems – which need time, talking and love. I wish you all the best.

Has he ever been mountain biking?

@boomerlives is it actually possible to kick a kid out at 16? – I thought parental responsibility lasted until 18.

I can empathise with the OP – my step-son was dealing at the age of 18. He then went to Uni which we hoped would be a new start only to find that dealers were handing out “business cards” at the halls he was staying in at Manchester.