Rick Diamond/Getty Images for SkyvilleMelissa Etheridge thinks it’s silly there’s a stigma around smoking weed, especially since it helped her cope with her treatments after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004. She even cops to sharing marijuana with her two oldest kids.
“It wasn’t about being high,” she said of using medical marijuana in a new Yahoo documentary Weed and the American Family. “It was just being to a place where I could communicate with my children, to where I could get up, to where I could eat. It was great medicine.”
Melissa, 55, said she feels it’s important to educate her children about weed without a sense of shame.
The singer and her wife of three years, Linda Wallem, are parents to 10-year-old twins, Johnnie Rose and Miller Steven, along with adult children, Bailey, 20, and Beckett, 18.
“I have smoked with my older two [children],” Melissa says in the documentary. “It was funny at first, and then they realized, it’s a very natural, end-of-the-day [thing] and it brings you much closer. I’d much rather have a smoke with my grown kids than a drink — oh, God, no.”
“My children have a very clear understanding of cannabis,” Etheridge adds. “When I hold it without shame or confusion, then they can understand it as simple as if I was pointing to a bottle of Percocet and said, ‘That’s Mama’s medicine.'”
She added, “You take the naughtiness out of it, and it’s not something that kids run to.”
Johnnie and Miller’s biological mom is Melissa’s ex, actress Tammy Lynn Michaels. Bailey and Beckett’s biological mom is another of Etheridge’s exes, Julie Cypher. Their biological father is rock legend David Crosby.
The Grammy Award-winning singer said she’s also smoked with her wife, calling cannabis “the best marital aid.”
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