#7

So it was sometime during my senior year of college wherein I indulged for the first time in that wonderful world of weed, urged on by the nudges and machinations of my good friend Lydia and her long-time boyfriend Edgar who had recently moved to Seattle from Hawaii, bringing with him all his troublemaking ways from the wrong side of the tracks but which my ripe young mind, sheltered as it was from any such influences before that point, found tempting and alluring and I believe part of the reason I was so eager to dive into this new world was that I had grown up with all the propagandic lies about weed from concerned parental figures and society in general who make up scare tactics and horror stories about weed just to keep their children from indulging. I shudder to think about how many young minds eventually do turn to weed once they found out all they have been told is a lie, for if you are told something is poison your whole life and then discover it is not actually poison you suddenly lose all reasons for avoiding it, so you happily guzzle down the stoner Kool-Aid when it is revealed that stoners are actually pretty Kool people. If one is to educate children on drugs let one be honest about the health and mental dangers,which in the case of weed are almost (visibly) next to none. That’s the whole problem: weed scare tactics are all based around terms like “gateway drug” and “lung cancer” but alcohol is a far better gateway drug than weed and nicotine causes more lung cancer deaths than weed ever has or will. Typical drug prevention programs do far more harm than good because they warn against the entirely wrong kind of danger: what they should warn kids about is how much fun it feels like you’re having, how instantly and mentally addicting it can be certain personality types, such as yours truly, a proud anti-weed crusader when I first came to Seattle, which at the time unbeknownst to me was pretty much the weed capital of Washington state. You see, when I first arrived in Seattle, I pictured weed as this dangerous drug that only the criminally stupid used: poor souls who had not yet seen the light about the true destructive power of this devil’s drug. My beliefs about weed were broad and unspecific and founded on the scare tactics of a government bent on demonizing weed as much as possible, a government that continues to infiltrate the thought process of parents, doctors, and schools alike. True, weed is gaining more social acceptance in recent years, but for doe-eyed young me it may as well have been a crucifix to a vampire, a silver bullet to a werewolf. The reports of weed’s danger to me had been grossly exaggerated while simultaneously been not nearly described enough, so who could blame me (besides me) for believing Lydia’s stoner hype, as up until that fateful first stoned night she and I had shared many heated arguments over how stupid/cool weed was, and it was through slow self-education on the internet that I began to discover all that weed had to offer me, while of course being prevented from seeing its long-term psychological effects because they are intensely personal – some people can smoke weed every few months and never feel the temptation to do it again. I am not one of those people, and neither are most stoners, because of course I and they all merrily agree that weed is the best ever and it’s only the losers who don’t smoke and like cigarettes we soon find ourselves introduced to an entirely new sub-culture all too eager to bring us into their high-doldrums where just the very fact of being stoned is enough to fuel a good time regardless of how much less than nothing is being accomplished. I still remember my first night of smoking weed, an event at which all my friends were gathered in great anticipation of my first time being stoned – I was already known as the wacky, off-the-wall one, and everyone was more than sure that a high version of me would prove to be well worth the wait. So there we were with Lydia, Edgar, and several others, ready with a utilitarian red plastic bong fully loaded with a fat bowl of delicious green, from which I kept pulling hits until I reached about 7 or 8, and out of nowhere, I was high. I remember the moment specifically because Edgar said in a deliberately high pitched voice: “He’s fuckin blaaaaazed!” I kept on asking people to make sure I was indeed high – I did not want my first time to be a dud, as I had heard that many people do not experience a true feeling of being stoned their first time around, so I was determined to take absolutely full advantage of what I was planning to be an experiment, to see if I liked it. Turned out, I loved it, I was giddy, excited, exuberant, but looking back on it I have a hard time remembering how exactly this differed from my usual personality. I was the wacky one, I was the one who was always loud and funny and a little bit weird, and I can’t help but wonder how much of me entertaining and surprising and making Lydia “so proud” of me was based simply on the fact that I was stoned and not the act itself of being stoned. I remember feeling different, and oh man the munchies – about an hour into being stoned we all trooped down to that holy grail of stoner heaven known as 7-11 to stock up on goodies and Mountain Dew and whatever we could get our grubby little fingers on, and on the way there I can recall experiencing a feeling akin to pins and needles running through my hands, which at the time I described as ants crawling all over them. It was an intriguing sensation, one that could not be explained by any visible phenomena except for the obvious fact that I was stoned, and that fact alone was enough to delight and amaze me. A new stae of mind unlocked a new me, or at least that’s what it felt like, as all my preconceptions about weed flew out the window to be replaced by the preconceptions of my new circle of stoner firneds, enablers content to aid me in my path to destruction that was at least fun enough to feel like imagination. As I have recounted previously, I had been drunk before, in both an unpleasant and pleasant fashion, but this was a brand new feeling, and for someone whose youth was spent continent-hopping with his straight-edge missionary family, the idea that there were yet new planes of existence to unlock was beyond exciting, a kind of weird hybrid of dangerous and thrilling. Not only was I super duper high, I was also illegal – instantly accepted into a whole new kingdom of cool kids, from which my sobriety had so far exluded me, and of course for someone who has always considered himself an outcast or at least a fringe-dweller, this was pretty damn skippy, a new experience complete with new friends and new states of mind and did I mention how much fun it was? Nobody had warned me about that – I had previously told Lydia that the prospect of marvelling at string for a few hours did not sound appealing at all to me, but nobody warned me about how much fun this could apparently be. Weed eventually does dig its claws into you like a mutant cancerous worm, but the first dozen times are so much fun, and I wish someone could have warned me about that instead of exclusively lecturing me on the dangers of it. Weed at first is like that jolly new rich kid friend that happily shares the wealth as he goes out of his way to be generous: buying you things, taking you to theme parks, movies, the zoo – insert entertainment of your choice, and you are having so much fun and it is so thrilling that you don’t notice when the friend becomes a jerk, when he starts asking to borrow money, when he suddenly gets mad that you have friends aside from him, and when you begin to alienate your other friends because of all the demands he makes. At some point weed ceases to be fun and starts to shove you artuond, inserting the memory of itself even into the times when you are sober, and nobody knows exactly when this happens until it is too late, because if we could tell, well we’d all just go right up to that brink and choose to not take the plunge into habitual compulsion, a lifestyle in which our decision to smoke weed is based around the fact that it feels like it is the only way we can see colors anymore, or even taste food and they say food tastes better when you’re stoned and that feels true, at first, in that honeymoon period where you love your new friend too dearly to notice him picking your wallet and seeping into every available brain crevasse with his insistent permeation. The first time, I drank Mountain Dew, which was already my favorite drink of all time, so when I sipped that soda in my state of being stoned, experiencing the THC-fueled explosion of color and flavor sensation, my mind was immediately flooded with the conclusion that Mountain Dew had never before tasted this good, and that I had never truly appreciated its flavors until that night. Stoners like to claim that weed awakens the mind to new experiences and though it does open the mind to the experience of being stoned, that is about all it does. Food doesn’t taste better while you’re high, you merely think it tastes better, and yes there’s a difference. You see, your tongue is always tasting the exact same flavors – they are there for you to pick out no matter whether you are drunk, high, or tripping. What weed does is simply confuse your brain – because you are in an altered state, it is easy to conclude that everything else is altered, but it’s not, only you are, which means a fuller appreciation of life and food does not occur-  you only think it does, and once a stoner turns into a pothead, being high becomes the only way he can enjoy food, because it does enhance appetite – but once again, appetite only in your mind. Weed is also what began to kickstart me on cigarettes, which go perfectly hand-in-hand with it – one state of inebriation enhancing another – it’s like an intoxicating conspiracy to co-opt any colors in any addict’s life that are not experienced while high or drunk. After that first night of smoking weed, I knew I was hooked, but I didn’t know how much yet. If I had, I would have run away screaming.  Weed is, quite literally, way too much fun, and for those whose main goal in life is just fun, it is the easiest drug in the world on which to get hooked. Another plus side to it? No hangover, no withdrawals, no cravings. Just heavenly stonerdom….until it turns on you.