DOSE:

smoked

Cannabis

(daily)

BODY WEIGHT:

154 lb

I started smoking weed around the age of 16. The first time was incredible, I fell instantly in love with it. My mind was set free from all the troubles in my world and the outside world. I remember when I left my friend's house where I smoked it, that I had a totally new outlook on life, it was almost as though I had been granted a new brain by the almighty up above. For the record, I'm not a devout christian but if I belonged to any religion this would be it. I felt in love with the whole world, and it was such a spiritually uplifting experience, the high was fantastic, but this new outlook and perspective on life was much better. I knew myself, my strengths, my weaknesses and my thoughts were clear and rational. Before this first time high I had only taken alcohol and cigarettes as any form of drug.

A year or two passed then I went to University. First term of University was cool. I met new friends here, from different backgrounds to my own. Since I am from the countryside, I didn't know how people from the city went about their daily life. It was almost a culture shock for me, meeting these new people and not knowing what to expect. Lo and behold, these people turned out to be my new smoking buddies. They are my friends to this day, and always have been.

I met loads of new people, not just the aforementioned friends. People from all over the University, from different countries, as far as America. I loved Uni life, I felt that people loved me, and I loved them. However, this all changed. And I had the biggest battle with my mind that I have ever had during my entire life. As the fresher's week died down, my flat mates and I began to smoke weed and enjoy our first year of Uni (that's what being a student is all about, right?). We began to smoke every now and then, which turned into smoking every day, or every night to be perfectly honest. This allowed us to get whatever work we needed to get done, finished off in time for its submittance.

Weed is a drug which turns most people into lazy assed, unhealthy looking layabouts, which is what I had turned into without really realising it. I've always been quite an active person all my life, I used to be a good footballer with realistic intentions of making it big in the game (recked by an injury). Consequently, I didn't adjust to my new found state very well, and wanted to clean up my act. At the same time the weed was ever present, and I had to smoke it, it's hard to resist when you can smell it all the time. I began smoking more and more, with the rest of my friends. Everything was still alright in this first term. I'd just conjoured up a typical pothead image. Scruffy looking, lazy student.

So the first term finished, and I came back for the second, straight away we began smoking where we'd left off, I pulled a whitey as a result of my time off from weed, but everything was still good, I felt sound as a person. This term I think we smoked more than any other term in the year, and things started happening, inexplicable things in all reality. I began to get paranoid off the weed, but I pretended that I could use the weed to psychologically anaylse myself and get better for it, and at the same time the weed still had a nice effect on me, made me feel high and good (mainly).

Meanwhile, the paranoia kept creeping in and sinking into my psychological state. I didn't realise it because I was shrugging it off as if nothing was happening and putting up a false image that everything was ok. Still smoking the ganj, and still the paranoia was getting more and more intense. It got to the stage where I started smoking with my friends and began to think about whether or not they were talking about me. As a result I just sat there and didn't really say much. I felt that anything I did say would sound dumb. I'd listen in on friend's conversations, and force myself to believe that they were talking about me, so as to justify that I wasn't crazy and believing it all ( deep huh?).

As you could imagine, this state of mind went from bad to worse, and I began to trust no one when I was smoking. I tried to act like I was cool, and at times I didn't feel as though I was myself. I felt like another person, and probably was trying to be. This led me to believe I had developed schizophrenia. I became obsessed about the idea and started talking to myself, to make myself believe that I was a schizo. I don't know why I did this. I think I've always been fascinated with the human psyche, and Fight Club had probably sub-conciously eaten its way into this unexplainable part of my mind.

I started hating people because I imagined that they hated me, and I couldn't get high properly, I just kept on analysing people's actions and words whenever we were smoking. After leaving University first year for my summer holiday (present), all of those thoughts have left me, I'm not paranoid and I don't feel like I did at University, which was at times a paranoid wreck. This is the moral of the story. The weed hit my head, and stayed there, it was ALL in the mind. I am not a schizo, I'm not paranoid, I just became obsessed with the ideas that I was. I am in a healthy state of mind, and I'm healthy as a person. I will still smoke weed, but much less than I did before.

Exp Year: 2003	ExpID: 24964
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jan 13, 2008	Views: 9,026
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Cannabis (1) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Health Problems (27), Addiction & Habituation (10), Depression (15), Relationships (44), Not Applicable (38)