WHY I SAID YES

By COURTNEY CARLSON

As a recent college graduate, I'm pretty certain my next job will not require Senate confirmation hearings. But because I live in a world where the depth of a breath is the difference between the President and the guy who asks, "You want fries with that?" this confession makes me nervous. Mom, Dad, you loved me, you paid attention to me, and you told me not to smoke marijuana--but I did anyway. I wasn't experimenting. I was taking deep breaths and inhaling.

My mother's generation says, "It was the '70s," with an air of understanding that sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll were O.K. before the Surgeon General got involved. But I was born in the '70s and inhaled in the '90s. By then, I knew the implications and the potential repercussions. I heard Nancy Reagan tell me to "just say no," but I eagerly said yes. Unlike my parents' generation, I can't blame my experimentation on a decade.

Now, my mom is no dummy. She spent her evenings at home, where "quality time" was making homemade bread and propaganda, indoctrinating me about the dangers of everything that sounded like fun. The conversations evolved from Cheerios are better for you than Froot Loops to no sex before marriage, no drinking to excess and certainly no drugs. I was the last of my friends to live under a midnight curfew; I always had to be home for dinner; and if I was going out, I had to leave a phone number.

A lot of these messages sunk in. Cheerios is my breakfast food of choice. I know that drinking too much gives me a hangover and that sleep before midnight is the most valuable kind. Yet under my parents' watchful eyes, I still managed to find an illegal drug more than once by the time I was a senior in high school. I had a sense of adventure, and I certainly didn't want to be in the library all the time. I sought out others who felt the same way. And in my age of invincibility, none of the tragic stories seemed like they could happen to me.

My parents' warnings did make a difference. Parents who talked about their flower-child days and getting wasted at Woodstock seemed to give tacit consent by fondly relating their experiences. They didn't want to be hypocrites, and their children tended to go further because they felt no guilt. They were the kids who took bong hits instead of seminars.

By contrast, guilt nipped my fun right in the bud. Yes, I went on to disobey my mother, but only so much. I felt O.K. in doing so because on most other fronts, I went along with her. Thou Shalt Not Smoke Pot is not the 11th Commandment, I rationalized. Armed with that perspective and the sound of my mother's voice in my head, I could tinker with the rules and push the boundaries without being afraid I would cross them. So, Mom, it was your fault after all.

But despite what politicians say, marijuana was not my gateway to heroin and a crack pipe. I have not used other drugs, and I don't plan to. Aside from the occasional roll through a stop sign, I am a law-abiding citizen. As I write these words, I have this sense of shame that makes me hope that my first-grade teacher and my best friend's parents don't read this issue of TIME. They still think I'm a good kid. Fortunately, my mother didn't know about my behavior until I had more or less turned out all right.

As a California voter, I cast a ballot to legalize marijuana for medical use. So perhaps by the time I'm ready for Senate confirmation, the nonsense about who did and who didn't will have ended.