DOSE:

5 oz

smoked

Cannabis

(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

I remember the first time I smoked weed. We were over at a girls house with several friends. A good friend of mine had started smoking weed, but he was really the only one of us that was doing it. We were only about 15 at the time. I didn’t get high.

Time progressed and I did it every now and then with this friend. He had already got a OMVI before he was 16, and he wasn’t going to be able to drive until he was 21. He started dealing - which paid for anything he smoked. I was the driver for these pickups. It meant that I would drive him to his dealer to get a 1/4 lb, we would smoke after we picked it up, and I would usually get a little weed too. It was at this point that I started to love smoking weed. I loved the paranoia. I was always worried about getting caught - do I look high? I loved the inner calm that it gave me. I remember smoking and feeling like I had strong pressure pushing against my forehead and chest. Eventually, my friend went away. He had a fight with his mother and was never seen again.

I stopped smoking. I missed it, but I didn’t go out of my way to try to start smoking again. I didn’t have anyone to get it from. Before long, I was a manager at a McDonalds. I got promoted quickly. I knew everyone that smoked weed in that restaurant, from the moment I would set eyes on them. I couldn’t let on that I smoked - or wanted to smoke with them. But one day, someone started working there and they called me out on being a smoker. We started smoking after work and at various times. For the next year, I smoked a couple times a week - only after work. It made the job a lot easier. I would get stressed out during work and I would have a lot of additional responsibilities. Nothing seemed to help me calm down and unwind like a joint after work with this fellow employee. And there were many times that he had such good weed, I would debate how I could get home afterward (and I was rather experienced at driving high). At this point, I considered weed as a casual thing. I did it to relax and for recreation. I never was high at work or when I was around certain people (from work, parents, bosses, etc). I would get high after work and go home and chill for the night.

Eventually, my friend from work moved. Work seemed to get a lot more stressful. I would drink 40oz a lot, but that didn’t seem to do it. There was a girl I had been eyeing for several years. She was a real partier. Well, by way of rumor and talk, I realized she liked me and we started hanging out. And we smoked a lot. Every night. She kind of broke me in. Eventually, I just didn’t care who I was high around. And I didn’t care if people knew I was high. I still worked at McDonalds. I had been smoking with her all night and I got called into work (by another manager who I was good friends with). I remember being so high I could hardly function. I couldn’t even count out a 20pc McNuggets. After attempts to count it, I gave up and filled the box - just hoping it was pretty close. That was the point where I realized that I had become a 'stoner' so to speak. I just always wanted to be high, and I just didn’t care if people noticed or what they thought.

Up until that point, I never really bought any weed. I just chipped in and smoked with others. And I got really high, in a variety of places - mainly public places. Never had any weed around the house, nor did I smoke there. I loved being high. The paranoia was gone. I didn’t have the giggles anymore. I didn’t have a lot of the characteristics that I had when I first started smoking. I realized the difference - now I would just get laid out. And I would go for the 'combo meal'. Getting drunk and really high... Soon the mentality changed from getting high - to just getting absolutely fucked up. I guess that happened when I went away to college.

The first two years in college, weed was scarce, but when we got it, we got REALLY fucked up. We didn’t smoke very much anymore, so most of us had a low tolerance. We would each drink a 12pk and smoke several bongs- and we would be crushed. But my Junior year, things seemed to change. We meet a lot of people that were from a smoking crowd. They would come over and play Beirut (drinking game a.k.a. beer pong) with us EVERY night and we would smoke a lot too. Soon I started to realize how much weed we were going through. In between the 5 of us, we could go through a 1/4 oz easily. And sometimes, we would go though a 1/2 between all 5 of us. We just started smoking a lot - all the time. Getting high before class, after class, and for the rest of the night after we were done with the days classes.

And we finally realized how hardcore we were after 420 this year. We went through 5oz of weed between the 5 of us over the course of Monday to Friday (420). The whole week was a blur. I don’t think there was a single moment of that week I wasn’t high. And we had no concept of what day it was or when things happened. We would bring up a topic, and then we would pause, and we would try to figure out what day it happened. And we couldn’t. We would get so high, we would pass out, wake up a few hours later, and continue smoking.

Anyway, this continued until July 3, 2001. We had reached the point that we had, what we determined to be, too high of a tolerance. We would meet fellow smokers that seemed to be really hardcore. People who we always thought were just 100% serious smokers. And before the night was over, we would have completely smoked these people out, to the point that they just couldn’t take another hit, and we would keep on going.

So here I am today, on a break from smoking. Soon I will get a real job and take a drug test. I need to pass and I need to lower my tolerance. Maybe sometime again, I will smoke. In the mean time, I miss it. I really miss the inner calm that it gives me. I miss the fact that it can take me from being raging mad to completely peaceful in one bowl. And I miss how much easier it made work - it cut away any leftover stress from work the moment I started smoking. And I miss running around in public just completely high. Noticing things that would not ordinarily be picked up on. I miss every bit of it. It actually made me a better employee (I had been promoted faster than almost anyone else at work) and it made me a better student (3.98 GPA - smoking is the only thing that got me calmed down enough that I could actually study). Weed - I will always miss having it - and I will always look forward to the day that it is legal to have it.

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 8133
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: May 24, 2004	Views: 18,022
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Cannabis (1) : Various (28), Loss of Magic (34), Glowing Experiences (4), Addiction & Habituation (10), Difficult Experiences (5), Retrospective / Summary (11)