Every Mothers Day, millions of American women receive cards from their children. In 2005, more than 150 million Mothers Day cards were sent to the 82.5 million American women who were mothers, and today there are 300,000 more mothers than there were then. (Those numbers come from U.S. Census reports that can be found here and here.)

Some Mothers Day cards are funny, some are bland, and some are handmade and sincere. And then some, this year at least, address marijuana legalization.

The source of these particular cards is a group called Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation, or SAFER, a national non-profit that tries to educate people about the relative harms of marijuana and alcohol. More specifically, they argue that our laws should reflect the fact that while alcohol kills 20,000 people a year, no studies have found a link between marijuana overdose and death (at least according to this post on the blog Momlogic). SAFER’s idea was that Mothers Day could also become “Tell your Mothers Day.” 

The pro-legalization Mothers Day e-card, put together by the Women’s Marijuana Movement, a SAFER project, starts innocuously enough. Alongside a picture of a pink carnation, it reads, “Thank you for raising me to be thoughtful and compassionate.” But from there it quickly moves to the card’s real point. “I want to share some news that might surprise you, but should not upset you: I believe marijuana should be legal.”

As an AP article about the e-card points out, mothers are considered one of the nation’s most powerful lobbies, and the idea behind the card is that if enough moms start supporting marijuana legalization, laws could change quickly. However, the AP article also mentions that even pot activists admit that they “sometimes find it easier to attend protests or lobby lawmakers about pot than to tell their mothers they smoke weed.”

But of course while some parents remain adamantly against marijuana (a full 63% of American women, and 48% of men, still do not support legalizing pot), on the other end of the spectrum are the parents who smoke pot themselves, perhaps even with their kids.

Jezebel, in its recent post about mothers and marijuana (it really did seem to be sort of a trend this year), linked to a website called The Weed Blog, whose Mothers Day post was titled Moms Like Marijuana Too. It reiterated a number of the core beliefs of a group called Mom’s for Marijuana, among them that children should be fully educated about both the risks and the benefits of marijuana and that marijuana should not be used by kids with “developing minds under the age of legal consent” except with parental guidance. Jezebel took up this “thorny issue” of parents smoking pot with their kids, whether casually or to offer “parental guidance,” and added that many people knew a kid in high school whose parents “ascribed to the ‘I’d rather have them do it at home philosophy.’” I certainly knew kids whose parents were like this in high school, but these days, twelve years later, I still have no idea what ends up being better for kids.

I imagine some of the ideas on The Weed Blog feed into some of the negative stereotypes people might have about mothers who support legalizing drugs—that they are potheads who do drugs with their kids, something that most Americans probably don’t support.  However, these people might be surprise to learn that one of the leaders of the Women’s Marijuana Movement is, in fact, a self-described conservative lawyer who believes strongly in legalizing marijuana even though she doesn’t use it herself. So take that, stereotypes.