My wife and I chose to settle in our Los Angeles neighborhood because it had everything a young family would want: shady, tree-lined streets, charming cottages and bungalows, lots of kids with involved parents. My instant affection for the place was based on all of those domestic details. And one summer several years ago, it turned into full-blown love when I went to my first neighborhood happy-hour playdate. At least that's what I call it now: For several years it was a warm-weather ritual on Friday evenings. A vast, multihouse event, in which five adjacent front yards would serve as the setting of a massive, multifamily, multigenerational, postwork playdate and cocktail hour. You brought your kids. You brought some food. And you brought your poison.
One neighbor specialized in gimlets, another in craft beers, and yet another in cult bargain wines. It didn't take long for this impromptu family rave to fragment into further vice tribes. Just as kids of a certain age gravitated toward the playhouse and others played kickball, for the adults there was the secret smoker's club, a group of people who perched on the perimeter, furtively sharing a single cigarette, ready to stamp it out if a kid approached. And then there was the secret pot club, a group of recreational stoners who had more vigilant security procedures. They would collectively disappear entirely, smoke in shifts, and return to the party. I once observed a mother/lookout stopping curious kids from finding the pot smoker's circle in a side yard by intercepting the kids with a platter of cheese and crackers. Paranoia makes perfect.
This parental impulse for mood alteration is as old as the five o'clock Scotch and evening paper, the midday Long Island iced tea, mother's little helper, and the '70s-era pot stash on the coffee table. "At a certain time each day baby needs a pacifier, and so does daddy," says one father we'll call Neal. But the difference between these parents and previous generations is the stealth integration of family and fun. These are the people who have eschewed the three-martini lunch to get out of work early enough to get home in time to play with their kids.
In the parallel culture of playdate vice, these parents tell their kids to "use their words" while using code words themselves. In my neighborhood, cigarettes are "mints" and smoking pot is "watering the lawn." Yes, these are clever people, who have done well in life by being clever and using reasonably good judgment. These parents aren't wake-and-bake types, but working professionals who categorize their smoking as recreational. And lucky for them, they live in an uncommonly pedestrian corner of L.A. and don't have to get into cars after the party.
Unlike the legitimate Scotch- and martini-fueled happy hours of yore, where getting drunk was a given, today's parental mood alteration seems simultaneously more extreme and more judicious. Moreover, entrance into today's vice tribes is by no means instantaneous. One young father we'll call Craig says that he'd known a neighbor for a year and a half, and had thought that the guy was the model of a well-adjusted, successful family man before he realized that the guy's contented nature was due to constant pot smoking. A mother we'll call Hannah—who now regularly smokes pot with her neighbors—says, "It took two years for me to find out that these people smoked pot, but now when there's a dinner party, other people are asked to bring a salad or a side dish, and I'm asked to bring the weed." Talk about potluck.
Of course parental pot isn't relegated to social gatherings. It has its uses at home, too. Craig says smoking pot can make him a more attentive and involved playmate to his son. "It makes me more present," he claims. "If we're playing and it takes some absurd turn, I'm more inclined to think: "Oh, so this is where we're going. Okay. Let's go!"
This on-demand creative openness has its flip side, as the necessities of good parenting don't allow for constant mood alteration. One mother we'll call Marny is concerned about the Jekyll-and-Hyde possibilities of occasional pot-fueled mood swings and how it could confuse her kids. You might be stoned and playing Ben Ten with your kid for an hour one day and then the next day you need to be working on the computer all day long and might be a little crankier about it than you would otherwise. She jokes that it would almost be better to be high all the time.
But all parents agree that a little too much pot is better than a littte too much booze. Legal or not, "There's nothing worse for parenting than a hangover," says Marny. "And it's not like we're getting messed up and driving our kids around, which our parents very well might've been," says another. "We feed them organic food. We're using car seats. We don't drive drunk, and we're not about to drive high." While parenting may make you feel emotionally grounded, you're grounded the other way too, meaning you're not going anywhere if you haven't lined up a babysitter. So you might as well make good use of the liquor cabinet or the stash, as the case may be. (All the better when the neighbors are of like mind.)
And that stash is better than ever, which can pose a problem if you're not careful. Hannah says the difference between today's pot and the pot of her youth is extreme. It's like roller coasters," she says. "In high school the craziest ride was the Matterhorn. But now it's the Grim Reaper. Pot has become more technologically advanced. Today it's crypto, intense, hallucinatory stuff. We went to a party at the end of which I said to the hosts, "You warned us that the pork was going to be spicy. Why didn't you warn us that the pot was going to be so strong?"
While some parents joke, others aren't amused. "If they want to get high around their kids, that's their decision," says one wary mother we'll call Michele, who still occasionally indulges in a toke now and again. "But I certainly don't want them stoned and babysitting my kids. God forbid a kid gets hurt and the mom is too high to deal with it responsibly."
Still some of these high-functioning smoking parents are determined to have the last laugh, in more ways than one. Hannah is determined to keep being a great parent and pot smoker. And, she says, "I'm ready for the jokes my pot smoking friends are going to make when they find out I want to start a Brownie troop."
