We have a child who has gone off to college and did not perform well his first year. We also found out during this time that he smoked pot in high school a little, and during his freshman year at college was dropping acid, smoking pot, and taking with some prescription medication like Adderall (not his prescription).
After a summer's worth of counseling, our child says that he will abstain as long as we're paying for school. He is mad that we're controlling; we're saying that you do it, we're done supporting you, if you thinking we are controlling because of us not wanting you to do drugs... please... we don't care.
He still thinks we're the screwed up parents and it's a generational thing, and provides a flood of information and "studies" that claim it to be overall harmless. As support for it being OK for him to do, he cites legalization efforts, reduce punishment (making possession a misdemeanor). As parents I don't much care for what other parents think is OK and my child seems to hang around other kids whose parents actively let their kids smoke pot. Blows my mind.
For the record, I did drink in school, and I did smoke pot twice and it didn't do much for me other than make me paranoid. I haven't done any drugs since. I believe a lot of kids experiment (giving it a try or two). As an adult, I don't do drugs, and I average about one drink a week, usually socially. He likes to say pot is safer than alcohol. But he cannot grasp that while I don't get drunk, he fully gets high or goes on a trip for 4-8 hours.
I am an adult with a fully developed brain, he's an adolescent with a brain that has not completed development.
What are the best ways to get a kid to put drugs in their past and move on?