From: debra kirk
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2014 1:14 PM
To: PSUMComments (GOV sponsored)
Subject: marijuana proposition comment, please replace prior comment with this version

Good afternoon lieutenant governor and attendees.  My name is debra kirk, I am calling from Kodiak.
  
I am a mother of two boys, a twenty-one year old and eighteen year old. I poured much of my energy for all their young years into helping them lead strong, motivated, curious and intelligent lives, leaving no room for and making wide berths around, the “high” lifestyle of those who used marijuana, and on an island which often has much less to offer than larger towns, that effort was often a major challenge. But it has been rewarding in that they haven’t spiraled into a life of drug use that is so sadly not uncommon on Kodiak Island and many other towns in Alaska.
 Yes marijuana has always been available here, kids tell me it’s easy to get. Easy to get for them, but its not easy for many parents to keep their kids off of it, especially those who have to work long hours and have little help with childrearing.  What happens outside their doors can either be a help or a hindrance, if recreational marijuana becomes legal it will only make that job of keeping our children clean harder, as it will then become undeniably more accessible.

Unfortunately movies, music and the media in general make marijuana use hopelessly appealing to almost all kids so that the age of 21 becomes pretty meaningless and arbitrary.

For those parents who have young children and don’t see the harm of another supposedly safe substance being in circulation in our society, just wait a few years until you hit adolescence with your children. Believe me, the trials of juggling sports lessons, homework, dinnertime, and even split family custody will seem like a cakewalk; add drugs into the mix (and marijuana is a drug) and you are in a whole different ballgame. Legalize this substance and a double the job of the parent.

No one I know wants their child to use marijuana. What most parents also know intuitively, and science has only confirmed in about the last ten years, is that kids’ brains aren’t done growing until the mid twenties. Car insurance companies had this figured out long ago.

A collaborated study done between northwestern medicine and Massachusettes general hospital/Harvard medical school was published April 16 of this year in the Journal of Neuroscience. What it shows is that the degree of brain abnormalities in key areas relating to emotion and motivation is directly related to the number of joints a person smoked per week, in some cases only once or two a week.
 One author of this study described it this way, “these are core, fundamental structures of the brain, they form the basis for how you assess positive and negative features about things in the environment and make decisions about them”

So, to me, this provides proof of what I have heard from many other parents whose kids have long since begun to use marijuana, it’s a demotivator, among other things.

One of the ways I’ve helped to guide my children is to be a frequent volunteer in their schools. If anyone follows school politics you would know that collectively, all schools nationwide are and have been for some time now, expected to constantly increase student scores. The words common core might ring a bell. Apparently as a nation we are falling behind other countries in test scores and Alaska is no different, we here also must find a way to teach our students more. So at a time when the amount of information schools must teach to students is increasing very fast, does it make sense to legalize and make more available a substance that promotes the likelihood that the exact opposite will happen in about 20% of our student body? These kids are our future and it’s up to us to guide and lead. Please do the right thing for the next generation.

And lastly I’d like to say once again thank you Mr. Treadwell for allowing this democratic process to proceed.