I smoke weed WITH MY KIDS

A mum tells us how she and her husband ended up having a weekly ritual with their children, involving a packet of cannabis

At first glance, it seems like the perfect family tableau: four heads bent diligently over the living room coffee table, parents and children working together in harmony. But we're not doing a jigsaw, or building property empires in Monopoly. No, we're assembling something else entirely. Because the idea of a cosy night in for my family - me, my husband Johnny*, 24-year-old daughter Maisie* and son Dan*, 20 - is to buy a gram of marijuana, roll a joint and get stoned together. You're probably shocked. I can hardly believe it myself.

We are the very essence of a respectable family: my daughter is a graduate, my son is studying at a Russell Group university, my husband is a banker and I am a secondary school teacher. We're about as far from the stereotype of casual drug takers as can be.

And yet, as I've come to realise, it's middle- class families like mine that often have the most accepting attitude towards drugs. It wasn't always that way. I started my teaching career at a grammar school and must have attended a dozen anti-drugs lectures. I am the mum who bored her children senseless about pills and binge-drinking during their early teens, but I saved my real venom for marijuana.

Back when their father and I met in our early 20s, before we were so respectable, we didn't just discover each other at those hazy student parties; we also discovered weed.

Getting in the habit