High in the Psychesphere and What it is that Gets Me Here

These rare reflections by a police officer provide insights into modern ritual of use involving music and the spoken word as adjuncts to the experience itself, and suggests that skill in marihuana use may develop the promise of this special tool. Surprising and delightful, it provides a fresh perspective on the local constabulary.

“I am a 25-year-old male living in a large city of the United States. I’ve been using marijuana casually for about 8 years, and in the past 4 years the experience has taken on increased significance to my life. I consider marijuana use to be an important aid in my spiritual/psychological development – a journey of which I greatly value. It’s unfortunate that my employer doesn’t approve of this, for I work for the city police department.”

I love being a stoner. Oh, how I would thoroughly enjoy a life of minimal responsibility. Living in someone’s basement, waking up at noon, sparking up, watching “Gilligan’s Island”, and maybe working part time at a convenience store. But smoking a lot of marijuana has, in fact, not succeeded in enabling me to be content with a lifestyle of adolescent oblivion. Laughing my way through those “Gilligan’s Island” episodes while taking bong hits sure is a lot of fun, but things start to change as my mind becomes engaged in the vast array before it. The hysterics shift to thoughtful analysis of the show (often begetting more hysterics). Then thoughts on other matters come about, from philosophic, to cultural, political, personal, cosmic, and spiritual. I take pen to paper and write with great fluency and at great length, unlike anything I’m able to do while not high on marijuana. Like others who subsequently read what they’ve written while high, I have found my thoughts to meander and traverse paths that they would not have followed otherwise. This isn’t to say that the ideas don’t hold up upon “sober” reexamination, rather that they come from a different but entirely valid point of reference. It’s as if we have this filtering mechanism that dissuades our normal mindset from reaching into territory that it deems not relevant to its proximate physical circumstances and inclination toward normality. With marijuana as a tool, I have learned to lift this veil and allow my mental functions to operate somewhat independently of the stifling influence of our social consensus reality. What a wonderful gift it is to be able to take a step up and perceive from a higher perspective.

However, such cognitive enhancement does not come about without effort. I find the best analogy for marijuana is that of a tool with which, in order to achieve proficiency, one must develop skill. My early experiences of smoking marijuana were that of being presented with an experience of limited potential, for I would just feel pleasantly light-headed. It took a great deal of experimentation to realize that with this hammer I could do more than randomly pound in nails. I could actually build something. Or that given this shovel, I could do more than hold it, I could actually take it by the handle and do some digging and uncover buried treasure. Or given this spectrometer, I could…do spectroscopy.

Getting high continues to be a learning process that is complemented by other means of study and development. As such, I think it was no coincidence that my marijuana experiences became significantly more profound around the same time I was discovering psilocybin mushrooms, meditation, yoga, and an overall increased interest in academic studies. In fact, my grades in college actually improved in correlation with my use of marijuana. I don’t mean to imply that I found it useful to be high when I took exams or wrote research papers, but rather being high had the carryover effect of strengthening my capacity to concentrate and fostering my interest in the subject at hand. By no means has marijuana ever been a “problem drug” for me, but rather one that aids my overall sense of balance and peace of being, something that reinforces holistic healthy living and an active engagement in the world. As Abbie Hoffman said, “I experimented with drugs in college, and the experiment was a great success!” The success of marijuana for me is not in that it offers an “escape” but rather that it provides a balance to my job responsibilities and the mindset that is required of being a police officer. The great amount of practical, political, legalistic “thinking in the box”, and the hyper-alertness to my physical surroundings that is the nature of police work would be destructive to my mind and body if I didn’t let go of it when I came home. Marijuana consistently provides an opportunity for my mind to relax and operate in ways that it is deprived of during the course of my work. Additionally, I have sometimes been prone to a moderate degree of insomnia, which is alleviated by marijuana more effectively and without the morning after sense of feeling “drugged” (isn’t that ironic) of the over the counter sleep medications.

The act of smoking marijuana has become an important ritual for my spiritual/psychological development. I find it helpful to follow basically the same set of actions each time so as to be able to best navigate the pathway to the frontier of the psychesphere, inner space. My ritual begins by lighting incense and putting a William Burroughs spoken word CD on shuffle play. I take out my bong and fill the bowl with marijuana. I then slide ice cubes down the cylinder of the bong and fill it to the right point with water. I turn off all lights except for a soft red light. In front of the stereo, on the oriental carpet, I gather the bong, the sacred lighter, a jug of spring water and a notebook and pen. I take a slow deep breath, put in a Jesus & Mary Chain CD on shuffle play and spark up. The Jesus & Mary Chain is a band that resonates so particularly well with me in my state of being high, that I listen to them every time I get high inside my apartment, and only when I am high. The music is the centerpiece of my marijuana ritual and of truly sacred significance. I inhale as the brilliant guitar chords emit their distinctive distorted reverberation and I am taken up to a beautiful blissful space, turned on to the sensuous light-footed peace of being, emerging with a youthful sense of energy and life force. I credit these vivid peaks of the experience to be the result of having had a number of spectacular mushroom trips that have sensitized me to the mild psychedelic effects of marijuana. The nature and complexities of the psychedelic experience are beyond the scope of this essay so it will suffice to say that the marijuana experience induces a mindset in which fruitful reflection and analysis of psychedelic experiences can be conducted.

The gift of insight to my mushroom adventures alone would be reason enough to use marijuana, but there is much more. All that which is meaningful and stimulating is enhanced while high. Often I will feel compelled to write down the cascade of thoughts that present themselves to me. I will also add the stimuli of changing CDs to the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno or others. Physical sensations are heightened and I will masturbate, or have sex if in the presence of a compatible partner. Cognition is enhanced and I take great interest in watching documentary videos by such late and great visionary thinkers as Terrence McKenna, Timothy Leary, Carl Sagan, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, all of whom credit marijuana with inspiring their work. I also enjoy long conversations with friends, as the sense of relating is enhanced. I love my drug buddies. Good company applies not only to humans for I also love to get high with cats, while they get high on catnip or just carry about in their normal and peculiar way.

But just as life is not only lived indoors, getting high should not be done exclusively indoors. Oh the wonder of being high in a natural setting! It’s amazing what wise teachers are the trees, the sky, the grass, the birds, and the ponds. The balanced, beautiful speed of nature envelops me and I’m brought back to memories of how I’ve always loved the Robin Red Breast. This is how it all was before industrial civilization became the dominant influence on how we as human beings experience our lives. This is how it was before we as children were socialized into incorporating the adult world limitations into our mindset, before the cell phones, the cars, and the deadlines. What a freeing, uniting feeling it is to let go of our bank accounts, job titles, ego dysfunctions, wrist watches, and just be the way we were before we can remember, together with the land and air, the animals, and the other human beings. In fact, only true love, perhaps, can compete with the wonder of the marijuana high.

As you see, I become very sentimental and glorify the experience of being high. But of course we can’t physically be under the influence of marijuana all the time. For many of us, physical world responsibilities (like having a career or raising a family) are important and take up a great amount of our time and energy. And for all of us, to one extent or another we must be careful of the LAW. What an awful thing it is, that in this nation that supposedly values freedom and the pursuit of happiness, it is illegal to possess one of the great means of achieving such freedom and happiness. Had I known in high school or early in college the extent to which marijuana would play a role in my life, I don’t think I would have chosen to become a police officer. But as it is, I’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and effort to make my police career a reality, so I’m not about to let go of it at this point. While the job certainly has its moments, I do find a good deal of satisfaction in it. Furthermore, if I was not doing the job, someone else would be, and they might not exercise their discretion such as I would, especially with the enforcement of drug laws. So I’d like to think that I’m helping in small ways to subvert the drug war from within. However, living this “double life” of sorts brings with it a fair amount of tension with the tightrope I must constantly navigate to avoid detection. I want to live my life as a human being and keep my police career, although I realize that this amounts to having my cake and eating it, too. I’m aware of the precariousness of the situation, and take reasonable steps to ensure not being found out, including long periods of abstaining from marijuana use in anticipation of drug tests. But if it comes down to having to make a decision (or the decision being made for me) I’m mentally prepared to accept a change in careers and life circumstances. First and foremost my priority is to live as a human being, inclusive of the marijuana that helps to achieve and enhance my human experiences. But life isn’t about getting high. Getting high is all about living life.

B.W. is a lawyer in his early 50s who resumed marijuana use after a hiatus of over 20 years. With his own personal growroom, some rules for use, and a joyful heart, he observes that the beauty of snowflakes in his backyard is no less than those of the majestic Rockies.

I consider myself well adjusted and I lead a happy, successful, contented life. I have an excellent reputation with other members of the Bar and I make a comfortable living. My wife and I have been married almost 30 years and have grown two daughters that we take pride in. My mother says I’m “the nicest person she knows!” And she means it! So now you know a little about me.

As far as my marijuana use, I smoked for a few years in the middle 70’s but gave it up for a few reasons…lack of steady supply, paranoia and a desire to set a good example for my then young children. Since I was then starting my legal career, I was a little paranoid about getting busted. In addition to that paranoia, I often experienced other types of paranoia when I smoked it. I started to worry about things like “am I doing well enough at work?” “do I have enough money?” “did I make a mistake on a file”…stuff people worry about, but marijuana intensified the worry. Smoking is not for the anxious. Weed focuses your mind, and if your mind is cluttered with troubles, you’ll dwell on those troubles, sometimes with an intensity that can scare you! Alcohol is probably better for the anxiety-laden. Drink numbs the mind while cannabis stimulates the mind and focuses the mind…sometimes on the wrong things!

In those years when I didn’t smoke, I sometimes thought back to the days I spent under a magical cannabis haze and said to myself, “those were some of the happiest days of my life!”

Anyway, I never smoked again until 1998…almost twenty years after I gave it up. For most of those 20 years, I had abstained from all drugs and alcohol. I often said, “Anyone can deal with life using drugs or alcohol, but I’m facing life head on…no buffers between me and reality!” I wasn’t miserable, in fact, I was happy then, too! I think non-users can live a full life. Cannabis can enhance the pleasures of life but life can be lived and enjoyed in many different ways.

Back to my return to marijuana use. In 1998, a cousin gave me a small amount. I didn’t rush to use it. It laid around for six months…then I had the idea to plant one of the bag seeds in my backyard! It grew to 8 feet and I had a supply again! Eventually, I swallowed some with some honey and entered into a very pleasant and mildly altered consciousness. After I used it for a week, I remember saying to a friend, “I’ve just spent the happiest week of my life.” I always considered myself happy…but now I was busting at the seams!

Marijuana makes me happy in a way that nothing else can do. Life becomes a joy. If I happened to be a little grumpy before smoking, I’ll be pleasant after smoking. If I was happy before smoking, I’ll feel even better after smoking. My focus would sharpen. I would watch television and say, “That was the greatest television show I’ve ever seen.” I could concentrate on every nuance of a show. When I wasn’t smoking, I would squeeze my remote and jump from channel to channel in the hope of finding something interesting. After a smoke, I would be fascinated by a show on building America’s highway system! Now, I don’t claim that falling under the spell of a DRAGNET episode makes me a better person, but, for that half hour, I’m having a great time!!! And that Joe Friday is one great cop! His only flaw is his hatred of marijuana users! It’s too bad he never worked crowd control and experienced the difference between 100 tokers and 100 drunks. He may have gone easier on the “dopers.”

Life is to be enjoyed and cannabis helps me do that! I heard that Benjamin Franklin once said, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” In my opinion, marijuana is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

Marijuana also draws me to people. Under normal conditions, I might see my brother (who lives a 9 iron away) about once every week during the winter. After I started smoking again, I found myself marching over there 9 days in a row! And the funny thing was…he looked forward to seeing me even on the 9th day! OK, maybe his wife wasn’t as happy to see me as he was, but you get the point. With the help of some THC, I was interesting, kind, creative, talkative, and funny. I made conversation an art form. After smoking, I often wonder, “Who can I call and talk to?” If I didn’t smoke, I wouldn’t think of calling anyone! Men don’t use the phone to “just catch up on things.” Men call when there is business to be transacted. Marijuana changes that! I want to talk for the pleasure of human interaction.

Marijuana led me to peaceful life under my own roof. I once smoked on the steps of the back door of my garage. It was a night in winter. My yard was moonlit and snowflakes were slowly falling. It was beautiful. I asked myself, “Why do people save to buy a chalet in Vail? Nothing could look any prettier than my backyard!

Cannabis can be the vehicle for a wonderful life. I suppose it would work better in Vail than in poverty, but if you have a kind soul, I think it will work anywhere.

To avoid supply problems, I decided to grow my own. It has been a fun hobby. In the cold of the Northeast, I have a warm little closet in my basement where it’s always sunny and 80. It smells a little skunky, but I like the smell. My plant census ranges from 4 to 6. They are for personal use only. I wouldn’t even give any away. Since I’m breaking the law, I want to break it as gently as possible.

When I was building my growroom, I felt like I was preparing a nursery. It was a pleasant feeling of expectation and wonder. Something new is coming home and it will be good for me. It cost about $350 for the lights and another $150 for fans, drywall, lumber and timers. It is a self-contained 2×3 closet. I expect it to provide all my needs quite easily. My first harvest is expected in the next three to four weeks.

In deciding to grow my own, I also considered my health. Since marijuana is inhaled quite deeply, it’s better to use a potent product. It is healthier to get high on two or three tokes of primo weed than ten tokes of an inferior product. I want to be easy on my lungs. In fact, I am using a vaporizer to minimize any potential for lung damage. A vaporizer heats the weed and releases the active ingredients. The heat is not high enough to burn the herb. I can thereby avoid those harmful combustion by-products.

I hope this gives an insight on what life is like with marijuana. I have an affection for marijuana. It has been kind to me. I can smoke it at night and wake in the morning with no hangover or lethargy. I work harder. I think it is because some of my restlessness is gone. I feel more content. I can work when it’s time to work…and relax when it’s time to relax…more or less, anyway.

I have rules for using cannabis. I never drive under the influence and never work under the influence. If someone is counting on me to be straight, I will be straight. My fellow travelers also have the right to expect drivers who are fully functional and alert. If I’m headed for a party, I’ll ask my wife if she can drive to the party and back. I don’t want to hurt anyone or put anyone at risk.

I still avoid alcohol. I haven’t touched a drop in about fifteen years. My happiest days were not my drunk days. My sickest days were my drunk days! Alcohol is liquid poison. I have the stretch marks on my vomiting muscles to prove it! The other day, a local Judge told me about his golf trip. He said he drank a bit too much and felt rotten the next day. How much more fun he could have had if he had used cannabis instead! I realize that it’s not for all personality types. Some people need the numbing effects of alcohol. Cannabis isn’t good for numbing…it’s good for savoring life when a life is in balance already.

Now that I’m in my 50’s, I can relax a bit and enjoy life more…and the herb has helped me do that. My mother even wants to try it! She doesn’t want to smoke it, so I think I’ll bake her some brownies. If I could make my mother happier, I’d feel good.

The moral of the story is this. Live right, be kind, be loving, develop a giving heart and cannabis can help you live a richer life. Build a good life first, though. Marijuana can never do that for you. That is up to you.

Graduating from Harvard while smoking daily, this composer attributes any deficits in his prolific musical creativity to not going to Yale.

I am 41 years old. I smoke a small amount of high-quality marijuana every day, and have done so for about 23 years, with a few break periods thrown in. I offer the following description of my life not as a boast, but rather to show that I am not a ‘slacker burn-out pot-head’:

I write classical music for a living, and am rather successful at it. My music is frequently performed in the United States by the best musicians. I have an excellent marriage of 14 years, and an organized and responsible financial life. [Not much money, though!]. I got a Ph.D. From Harvard in record time [3 1/2 years], and have won many prizes and awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship. I am active in charity work. I am in very good health: thin, I exercise every day, and I eat a balanced, considered diet. I read a great deal, and study science topics as a layman. I recently had an MRI of my brain [as part of the diagnosis of a now-resolved medical problem]. A neuroradiologist friend who read the MRI said that my brain was in unusually good shape for my age, as healthy as can be. He does not know about my pot smoking.

I began to smoke marijuana regularly because I liked it a lot. I simply enjoyed the light feeling of intoxication and fantasy. Later on, I found that it helps in my work as a composer of classical music, but at first it was really just recreational for me. There is one important exception: anger and temper problems. These problems run in my family. The men on my father’s side, including me, are given to violent, sometimes physical outbursts of temper, at times with no cause. Smoking marijuana has removed this problem from my life. It is hard to get angry when you are stoned. I get an equal amount of help from my daily 20-30 minute meditation.

I was always very careful not to compose my music high. It seemed obvious that it wouldn’t work, and when I tried it, it didn’t. Then one year I went to a very prestigious music retreat, and found that many of the best composers there did in fact work stoned, from time to time. Once again, I tried it a little and liked it. I used to make a notation if an idea was conceived while high. I would look at it when straight, and it was often a good idea. Since that time I have become more and more relaxed about working this way, and will compose stoned if it seems right to me for that specific situation.

Sometimes, although I feel like smoking, I hold off from it for several hours, just to see what will happen. Sometimes, inspiration does not strike for quite some time, and eventually I decide that the workday is over. I celebrate by smoking a little herb. Moments after I smoke, I suddenly become very busy, and I often create something very good. Of course it is hard to know objectively if a given passage of music is good, but these ‘stoned’ passages are often the favorite passages of audiences and critics. I am often glad that I did not smoke until I was ready.’

On the other hand, marijuana seems strongly contraindicated for certain composing problems. Whether or not smoking pot will help is a matter of my intuition. Sometimes that intuition is wrong. But I have certainly written some of my best music under the influence of marijuana. Electronic music in particular, which in my style of working is very spontaneous and depends on noticing transient details and seizing the moment, seems to profit from it the most. Only certain kinds of musical activities work well while I am high:

Things that go well while high: electronic music, basic concepts of new pieces, details of orchestration, playing well-studied familiar pieces, improvisations of two minutes or less.

Things that go poorly: complex counterpoint, pulling together of the whole project, sight-reading unfamiliar music, solving technical computer problems, memorizing.

When I need more money than composing can provide, I do computer music engraving. This is highly technical and detailed work. It involves looking at the hand-written pages of some composer’s brand new orchestral piece, and getting it into the computer, using the computer keyboard, music keyboard, and mouse. Once in the computer, it must be turned into an accurate and readable score. This process provides the printed music for all the musicians in the orchestra. I have lots of objective evidence, based on my customer’s corrections, that I do this more accurately when high. I have done 95% of my engraving work high. Please don’t tell my customers!

I try to avoid being high for emotionally important events. I would not want to have a serious talk with my wife while high, nor go to a wedding or funeral. I don’t like to be high when I am sad or serious. I probably was high when I decided to go to Harvard, and I often regret that decision!!! [Yale had a better music school]

I don’t use any other recreational drugs, with the rare exception of psilocybin every year or two. Alcohol has for several years made me violently ill, even in milligram doses. I vomit until I get dry heaves, and have a devastating migraine, so I try to avoid it. But even apart from that I think it is a horrid drug. It makes people violent and thoughtless and dangerous. It is very damaging to the body. I don’t think drugs should be illegal, but if one drug were to be made illegal, it should be alcohol. Of course we all know where that led. Tens of thousands of people in jail, violence in the streets, organized crime, huge waste of tax dollars …. just like today with marijuana’s illegal status. Imagine if tobacco were made illegal. People would descend to savage depths as yet unknown!

“Timothy” is a pseudonym. The 25 year-old author is a successful businessman and a dedicated husband and father. Wives and mothers may find his househusbandry of particular interest, as lesser male habits are consigned to the dustbin.

Dear Honey,

We have such a wonderful life with each other. Our lives have been filled with an amazing act of nature, a wonderful three-year-old daughter to bring us together. And we have a beautiful house in a great neighborhood, two new cars, all of the food we could ever want, and not a worry in the clouds. However, you seem to be concerned about marijuana and its effect on me. I know it’s an illegal substance, but honestly, I don’t understand why. I hope in this letter that I’ll be able to show you why I enjoy it and how I think it helps me to be a better, rather than a worse person.

Let me get to the point. I am already a very successful business man, at the age of 25. I have been with the same company for seven years now and am one of their top producers. Surely someone under the influence of marijuana could not accomplish such a feat, right? Your memory becomes impaired and remembering the simple things, like where the car keys are, is difficult while using pot, right? Business comes easy to me, though, and I am motivated to work hard and get ahead. Let’s move to something a little more sacred and intimate.

What a lovely daughter we have. Three years old and so filled with life and curiosity. So full of energy and lusting for everything that life has to offer. According to many published studies on marijuana and fertility, I should be shooting blanks by now. Eight years of consistent use should surely cause a drop in sperm count and give me retarded little triple tailed tad poles that don’t move. Nope, wrong again.

Speaking of sexual relations, remember all of those times when you have told me, “Wow, I have never felt like that before.” Where, at the end of our love making, a simple touch would leave you trembling on the bed, shaking and laughing because it all felt so good? Where two hours of foreplay was followed by hour-long love making sessions that left us holding each other tightly and remembering the love that we have for each other? That was, oddly enough, a product not only my love for you, but also pot. Don’t get me wrong, the sex is great without it, but when I’m under the influence of this “horrible” substance, I slow down and really enjoy each moment, making particular sure to give attention to everything you need and completely satisfy you. Wait a second, you may say, I thought pot decreased sexual appetite as well. Apparently that is wrong as well.

Neither of us likes to clean the house on a normal day, but with pot, I will take a toothbrush to every square inch of our house. You’ve seen me do it, as a matter of fact. I’ve organized every closet in the house, every cabinet in the kitchen and the bathroom, the garage, vacuumed, dusted, cleaned all of the windows, made all of the beds, and straightened every pillow in less than three hours. All of this while you were able to sit down, eat Oreo’s, and watch TV. If anyone exemplified the stereotypical pot head, it would have been you! Oddly enough, I enjoyed letting you sit back and relax. You work as hard as I do, but with pot, I sincerely enjoyed the intricacies of our house, appreciated the fine furnishings, and came to the realization of how lucky we are.

Having the munchies, being unmotivated and unwilling to help anyone but yourself. That is what the government has burned into all of our heads about pot, but yet, I have never done so much work in one day as when I’m smoking. I’ve accomplished more than most people can accomplish in a month for the well being of their home. And to top it all off, I LOVED CLEANING THE WHOLE HOUSE. I could have cleaned even more. The challenge of making something new again, to rejuvenate the old and dirty to make bright and new, that is what pot allows me to do. But according to every commercial against pot, I should be sitting down in the basement, toking up and watching TV, all red eyed, eating a huge bag of chips and hitting you in the face. Cheating on you with every woman that walks by and unable to listen to anything you say. Fortunately, that is not me and pot would never make me into that.

Pot does make me enjoy food: think about all of those gourmet meals that I have prepared with no cookbook in front of me. All of those times you sat down at the dinner table and asked for seconds and thirds of chicken that has never tasted so good. That was a direct result of the creative juices that start to flow with the beloved cannabis. It makes me happy to let you just sit back and enjoy the cooking show while I prepare this for you, because my zest for the simpler things has been brought back to life and again, I love to do these things with the help of pot.

You ask if I would want our little girl, when she grows up, to smoke cannabis herself. My answer to you is, yes. If people can act responsibly with this wonderful gift from nature, then they should be allowed to enjoy it. The fact is, drinking can be a fruit that we can enjoy, but I agree with the governments stand on age restrictions of alcohol, just as I would with marijuana. The key thing is responsibility of use. When our little girl grows up, has a place of her own, and has demonstrated responsibility in her life, only then would I feel comfortable with her use of marijuana. An open and honest environment would be ideal for trying marijuana for the first time.

When I haven’t had marijuana on me, I never once have actually HAD to have it. Over the past few years I have tried desperately to quit smoking cigarettes, but I just haven’t been able to do it. My body has made it very obvious to me that I need to replenish my nicotine levels. Otherwise I just won’t feel right. Nicotine cravings have literally encompassed my life and I feel powerless against them. On the other hand, if I have no marijuana, I have never scoured together change from the car to run and track down some pot. If it’s available, great, but otherwise I can leave it alone.

The fact is that I smoke pot. I love it for its mind awakening attributes. I don’t agree with the government’s stand on marijuana policies. Just because it’s a law, doesn’t mean its right. It used to be against the law in England to practice certain religions, so a group of people left to start their own colony where they could do as they wished. It’s now called America. The 1800’s in America had no rules against drugs, other than that people other than whites could not use them. It was the law, but again it was not right. Just because something is illegal doesn’t mean it should be.

I hope you understand that I love you dearly and do not want to upset you or concern you, but I am doing fine and this substance has done everything for me, except hurt me. The only thing I can see bad about it is the act of smoking it. So why don’t I break out the brownie pan and cook some up?

Love,

Timothy

The author is a graduate student in his mid-30s at an East Coast University who has smoked marijuana for over 10 years. As in the essay “Lady Chatterly Stoned”, a moment of insight yields increased coherence in reading ability. The pervasiveness of marijuana use within the programming community is revealed, as is the persistence of insights yielding enhanced language proficiency in the normal state.

I grew up in a fairly sheltered environment in New England, and in the late Seventies and early Eighties can remember being bombarded with anti-drug use propaganda. I can remember as a high school student a certain group of fellow students whom I knew only as “the stoners,” who lurked under the trees outside the cafeteria everyday at lunch time, ostensibly smoking tobacco cigarettes and with whom I had very little interaction. I can also remember however, encountering certain inconsistencies in the sum total of material I was being exposed to in high school. I thought it quite strange that while being told of all the health risks of sexual activity and doing drugs in “Health class,” I would one scant hour later be shuffled off to English Literature class to study the literary products of the some of the English-speaking world’s greatest drug addicts and sexual adventurers. I would wonder sometimes if I was the only one who saw the irony in it.

While the exploits and imagery which appeared in these poems and plays painted an exciting and at times, unnerving vision of reality which I nonetheless found alluring, I discovered that I had a greater propensity for logical thought than for literary skill or critique. And having learnt of the existence of computers in my high school threw myself into understanding them and taught myself the fundamentals of computer programming rather than any of the more “creative” arts. This, of all the things to happen to me in high school, was to have the most lasting repercussions for my life. When I left for college, I decided to pursue my abilities in working with computers and symbolic logic. Though I had retained a certain degree of curiosity concerning marijuana, it was many years later, after I had sought out as many books as I could, both pro and con on the issue, that I felt confident that trying marijuana would be a good idea.

Consequently, the first time I ever got stoned was in graduate school. When I eventually left graduate school, I took a job as a system’s programmer in a research laboratory. It was here that I had the opportunity to explore issues in computer programming in the variety of states-of-mind that my salary could afford me. In this environment I discovered a very useful application of the marijuana-induced state of mind for computer code construction.

The day-to-day functioning of my laboratory involved the processing of large quantities of data in a variety of ways, depending upon the type of analysis being performed. Each of the various tasks was sufficiently different from the others as to require a degree of ingenuity to efficiently perform the data reduction. My approach then, was always to spend a day or two mulling over the problem, becoming familiar with the desired output of the program and functional requirements of each individual component. On many occasions I would return home at the end of the day and, in a recreational context, “partake of the sacred herb,” as one of my long-term friends would refer to it. Invariably there would be occasions where I would be stoned and thinking about work. What I discovered was that sometimes it was during these periods that I would have insight into approaches to a programming problem. In this state of mind, I found that I could visualize the solution to a problem as a complete whole, a dialog or the script of a conversation between myself and the computer, rather than as individual functional lines of code, wherein each major component was like an act in a play furthering the plot development of the “story” until it reached its conclusion. The next day or two later, I would go into my office, sit in front of my computer and write the entire program line by line entirely from the visual image of the composite whole formed in my mind earlier. The code might take a week or two to write and compile, but the finished product almost always remained an instantiation of the initial marijuana-induced vision. 1

As I began to use this approach more and more, I found myself thinking about the nature of the mind and mental states. Clearly it seemed that I was inducing a state of mind which facilitated the manipulation of a finite set of tools (the elements of the programming language) for the construction of a means to a known end. Theorizing about how this was possible, I decided to think of the marijuana-induced state of mind either as suppressing logical thought to allow a different form of consciousness to arise, or as loosening the strictness of the application of logical criteria to any given proposition. In either interpretation, the net effect was a moderately controlled exercise in free association of pre-defined computer functions with tasks. In this state of mind, I found that I was less inclined to assert a one-to-one mapping between particular command-sequences and desired results, but rather remained open to the multiplicity of methods at my disposal for achieving any single goal. It is from a consideration of the various different ways of doing the same thing, I feel, that efficiency and elegance of computer code is achieved. The end result of this code optimization is not merely aesthetic, but utilitarian as well: elegant code presumes reusability. The type of code which I have received the greatest personal satisfaction from writing is code where the smallest part has had the highest functionality. Almost without exception, I have found that I have achieved this level of programming by first “pre-processing” the task under the influence of marijuana.

As I continued to employ this approach, I became more and more interested not only in the manner in which the mind functioned, but in particular the role played by language within the mind. This was instigated by an event one evening when, in the middle of the night, I awoke with the need to urinate, and yet awake, found myself “thinking” in assembly language. Though I entirely understood the import of the message as “Get out of bed. Walk down the hall. Urinate.” The form of the message was in assembly codes. 2 The next morning, fascinated by the prospect of thinking in a different language, I decided I wanted to study a language as remotely removed from my own native English in order to observe its effects on my mind, and so began a study of Asian languages.

Eventually re-entering graduate school for this purpose (among others), I found the effort required to grapple with a foreign language to be challenging. Though I tried to employ marijuana for this purpose, as I had with programming, I met with mixed results. I was well aware of several of my fellow graduate students who advocated and seemed to prefer the marijuana-induced state of mind for developing language proficiency. Now certainly I had gotten stoned, sometimes intentionally, other times unintentionally, prior to studying. On the occasions during which I could focus on my school assignments (usually emphasizing content comprehension), I was deeply engaged in the material and able to gain an understanding of the full import of each and every sentence. On the occasions when I attempted this with language study however, I would experience an inability to focus on the task at hand; the consultation of dictionaries and grammars, and the attendant tediousness which can so beset novice students became unbearable for me in that state of mind.

Given these problems I simply came to the conclusion that what was indeed a highly functional approach to languages for human-computer interaction was simply not applicable to human-human interaction languages. Consequently, though continuing to use marijuana in casual settings for relaxing and recreation, I avoided attempting schoolwork when stoned for over a year.

Eventually some of my out-of-town friends found me in my new setting, and began to visit. On one occasion, I had as a guest a friend whose habits were to start the day with a joint and a pot of coffee. He would routinely awaken around 10 am, walk into my study, sit down and say “What say, we twist up a thin one?” which was his way of asking me to unlock my stash and turn it over to him. The end result was that an hour later he would have finished his “breakfast,” and I, rather than let him smoke all of my pot by himself, would be thoroughly stoned and seated at my desk with texts and schoolwork piled around me.

For several weeks during this semester, I had been struggling with readings in a new genre of literature. Every aspect of the assignments was a challenge: different vocabulary, different sentence structures, and different conceptual content. Up until this point my study habits remained unchanged, involving dictionaries and grammars applied sequentially to each individual word until a composite sentence could be formed. Given very little choice in such a state of mind, I would study as best I could in the same manner I had been. This same basic pattern repeated itself for the couple of weeks during which my friend stayed with me, until one morning when something quite different happened.

My approach when studying stoned was always to bring as much concentration to bear on whatever aspect of the task I was working on, apply sustained effort until I had reached a conclusion, and then hurriedly write it down before forgetting it. Reaching the end of a sentence, I would then re-read all my notes and attempt to piece the meaning together. It would usually require repeated attempts until I could concentrate hard enough to get a complete translation. On one particular occasion however, as I said, something different happened. For some indeterminate period of time I was straining over a sentence and all at once, in a moment, the entire sentence as a single unit “flashed” in my mind and I read not syllable-by-syllable translated, but “read” the sentence as a coherent meaning unit.

Now it is usually hoped that at some point in the career of a foreign language specialist, this will happen. And, I am sure that there are those for whom this more “intuitive” approach to language comes naturally, and for whom strictly logical and rational thought seems painful and equally alien from everyday functional existence. But for me, going through life without a dominant framework of linear thought seemed to court danger, if not madness. Yet as a result of my experience, I could see in clearly demonstrable terms the facility of such occasionally less logically-stringent states-of-mind, in which the progression of thoughts is no longer logically sequential, but rather arise one after another through thematic association. It was in just such a state of mind where the marijuana which induced it had served as a catalyst to galvanize my comprehension of the language. It was simply that it had taken me 1-1/2 years to reach the point in my studies at which I had amassed a sufficient quantity, a “critical mass” if you will, of syntactic and semantic background of the language. When I had this experience the first time it seemed spontaneous; I was so surprised by the experience I consciously did it again and I could actually feel myself using cognitive resources not usually employed in my daily life to comprehend the characters and import of the text. The only analogy I could seem to make was to shifting hand positions on a weight-lifting bar; the sensation was not unlike exercising an unused muscle group to perform a familiar routine.

Following this experience, I found that I was able to retain the ability to read this language employing these newfound abilities in a non-altered state of mind with few if any deleterious side effects. Rather than serving to undermine my previous reasoned-approach to language comprehension, this event served to inform it by providing a basic ability to read texts within my vocabulary, having moved from a state of passive comprehension into a state of active engagement with the language.

In retrospect, I can see that in my initial attempts to reduce my learning curve with a new language I was confusing facility with a language (what I had experienced with computer programming), with the pre-requisite to this, the acquisition of additional linguistic tools (what I was attempting). Moreover, I realized that this application of the marijuana-induced state of mind had less to do with the manipulation of a fixed quantity of symbols and their inter-relations in an expanded context, than with the generation of a clearly orthogonal state of mind. Initially occurring under a much greater dosage of marijuana, the logical aspect of this resultant state of mind was either entirely suppressed or sufficiently diffuse as to be effectively non-functional. In this state of mind, thoughts seem not to be piece-wise continuous, but rather single, self-contained units of meaning. From this perspective, I could understand why the ancient Grammarian school of India considered the fundamental unit of meaning in language to be the complete utterance or sentence (in Sanskrit, spo_a). For them, anyone who engaged a language through analysis of grammar and words did not really know the language. Full knowledge of a language was evinced by the conception and expression of ideas as single units on the part of the speaker or writer, and demonstrated on the part of the listener or reader through comprehension of the message as a whole, understanding it as “an instantaneous flash of insight (pratibha). 3 ” Whether or not I would agree entirely with the propositions of the Grammarians, the acquisition of the ability to comprehend language in precisely this manner was a milestone in my education. Having generated this cognitive faculty repeatedly when stoned, it became a familiar means of engaging a text, and I could eventually generate it at will, either without recourse to marijuana or sometimes in dependence on only the slightest whiff of smoke. Nonetheless, still when I do this I am acutely aware of generating a state of mind discretely different from my “ordinary” state of mind.

Taking into account the advantage of the reverse tolerance effect in the case of an experienced marijuana user, when properly employed I believe it is possible to use marijuana in a task-oriented training environment to increase language facility. By first employing traditional study practices in an ordinary state of mind, the semantic basis above and beyond basic grammar training is established. By repeatedly attempting to read selected passages which employ only the previously studied vocabulary and grammatical structures, the basis for patterning a new state of consciousness is established. Given enough time and serious effort, it is possible to generate that new state of mind, and eventually integrate it into the repertoire of tools used in one’s ordinary state of mind.

In the years that have passed since I had these experiences, I have had the opportunity to interact with many people far removed from the relatively homogeneous intellectual graduate-student environment. Until such times I had never known anyone with a seriously debilitating drug problem or who experienced permanent psychological trauma as a result of drug use. Since then however, I have realized that most people are goal-oriented, and those who find themselves driven towards a specific end, will use whatever means at their disposal to achieve it. Consequently, someone who is self-destructive will use any tool at their disposal to injure themself. It is most unfortunate that this is the case, though it is only slightly less unfortunate that such events are focused upon by society in a well-meaning effort to prevent such incidents. The concentration of the government’s effort to prevent such self-destructive acts has thus far been focused on removing access to tools, such as marijuana, which can be employed either for one’s benefit or harm, and not on addressing the issues which give rise to such behavior. This book, and the numerous other materials written and compiled by Lester Grinspoon, go a long way towards dispelling the cloud of ignorance which still seems to persist in many parts of the world, and in the United States in particular. Only an honest and proper understanding of the functioning of marijuana can dispel the ignorance associated with it.

When Lester initially approached me about being a contributor to this volume I felt quite honored by the opportunity to share my own personal experiences with marijuana with the growing community of people in this country open to such ideas. Given the nature of academic politics and the tenuous nature of untenured researchers in academia, I regret being unable to sign my name to this brief contribution but simultaneously look forward to the day when volumes such as this one will be seen as a historical curiosity, reflecting a period in time when what will be common knowledge was forbidden truth, and my identity can be stated without fear of reprisals.

REFERENCES:

1. I am not making a claim as to the uniqueness of this approach to computer programming; if anything, quite the opposite. I am reminded of the not very widely advertised story of a federal sub-contractor who, in the late-1980s, bought into the paranoia of the federal government’s concern over drug-usage and implemented a drug-testing program in their central facilities. An outside consulting firm was brought in and drug-testing of all current employees began. By the time the first few batches of the employees and staff had been tested, one upper management official noticed that a large percentage of their programming staff tested thus far had been fired for positive drug-tests, and that it was only a matter of weeks before the entire facility would be effectively without computer staff. The testing program was halted, all the fired staff were requested to return to work, and nothing more was ever said of the matter.

2. Assembly language is a “low level” language for dictating precise instruction to a computer at the level of the central processing chip and other hardware. The language therefore, is comprised of commands for moving data from one memory location to another and performing binary arithmetic. Having been working on a project written entirely in assembly language for the previous three weeks, I had become quite accustomed to thinking about the program in both the symbols and syntax of assembly language. Thinking about anything else in that manner was a novelty for me.

3. Harold G. Coward and K. Kunjunni Raja, “Introduction to the Philosophy of the Grammarians” in The Philosophy of the Grammarians. Princeton: Princeton University Pr. (1990), pp.3-97 (p.10).

Breakthroughs in cognitive abilities are frequently reported. Here, we discover on a lonely winter’s night the skill to transport one’s self to an English garden, all the delights that await therein, and the blessed portal to all of literature. Read on.

I learned word processing the fast and easy way, by harnessing terror and moderating it with ethanol. In 1987 I spent one whole night with a computer, two joints, a glass of vodka, and an instruction manual for WordPerfect 4.7, and by morning WordPerfect was hard-wired into whichever ganglia integrate the actions of fingers and eyes and brain in a way that made it possible to operate the function keys rapidly, reflexively and without thinking.

I say “without thinking” because were someone to have asked which keys did what I could not have said. Terrors lessons seem to bypass ordinary reason-based learning processes; no “thinking” is involved is such learning. The resultant learning is similar to that of knowing how to ride a bicycle: were a novice to ask how to maintain balance, what can be said?

My discovery of terror as a catalyst for rapid learning cannot possibly be unique to me. It was a chance discovery that happened on a cold January night in 1974 when, at the age of 31, I learned to read – i.e., to comprehend whole sentences for the first time in my life. Till then I was effectively illiterate.

The first “energy crisis” was upon the land, and I was staying in an empty house in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The only furnishings were a rug, a blanket, and a lamp. My “rent” was to paint the interior of the house – which meant I would be homeless as soon as I finished the job.

About two weeks into not starting the paint job, a particularly cold night set in. Snow that had been around for weeks was hard and crunchy as I had stepped outside to look at my car, a 1960 Chevrolet Impala with a huge engine and a huge empty gas tank. I was cold and I was lonely. I went back inside where there wasn’t even a phone to relieve the loneliness. I was completely isolated and alone, which might be important to what followed, though my experience since suggests being isolated is not essential to using terror as a way to learn – i.e., to imprint “body knowledge” directly into muscles and ganglia, bypassing the usual rational processes used in learning.

My furnishings at the house included the rug, blanket and lamp, plus a change of clothes, a toolbox, paint brush, some money to buy paint, and a paperback copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And on that cold night when I discovered the use of terror in the process of learning … well, there was one other thing I’d brought to that lonely site, only I didn’t know I had it till that night when I stepped outside. It was a tiny thing, buried for months at the bottom of a pocket in my down-filled coat. I found it when I put my hands in the coat’s pockets while I was outside looking at my car. That tiny little thing, and Lady Chatterley, changed everything, for the rest of my life, because on that night, at the age of 31, I learned to read.

The Challenge of Law School

Georgetown Law School was my final and most devastating defeat due to my nonliteracy. I didn’t know I couldn’t read. I assumed, without thinking about it, that everyone “read” as I did; a phrase here, a word there, with gradually an interpretation emerging – or more likely, a misinterpretation.

I entered law school in the fall of 1967. Everyone I knew was going to law school, so I applied too. I got accepted on the basis of an LSAT score that was in the upper third for that class that year. Clearly (in retrospect), one didn’t have to be a strong reader to do well on the Law School Admissions Test. The written instructions were irrelevant to doing what obviously was needed in the test.

In those days I could read single words okay and recognize their relationships to their spoken-word counterparts. I could even grasp whole phrases here and there. But the written instructions for class registration at the Georgetown Law School could as well have been quantum mechanical waste-function equations as far as I was concerned. In college, at Maryland University, I had simply to follow the crowd to get through registration for my classes in engineering.

Vietnam was looming in 1962, my second year in engineering school. And whereas other students who dropped out of engineering because of the math tended to end up studying business or history or English as a way to avoid Vietnam, I was able to stay in engineering because of its relentlessly logical basis. Ohm’s Law, for instance, and Snell’s Law, and Newton’s three laws of motion, in particular the second one, F=ma – which, incidentally, is a complete sentence (having subject, verb and object) that I understood so thoroughly as to feel its universal applicability – made engineering much easier for me than anything involving actual reading of written sentences.

Writing Before Reading

Then came that cold and lonely winter night in 1974. Interesting, though, learning to read that night did not immediately make me aware that I had not previously been effectively illiterate – illiterate, that is, with respect to reading, as opposed to writing. I could write well enough to get through high school and college, and I could read my own writings; but all other written language, beyond that of road signs, was out of reach. The condition was equivalent to knowing how to talk but not to listen.

I lasted a week at law school. I should have quit after the first day, when I couldn’t make any sense at all out of the first sentence of the first case in the case book. I was lost.

Six years later when I learned to read, my whole world changed. How it all came to happen in one night – actually within a period of several minutes – that’s half the interesting part. The other half is the awareness that came to me of the dramatic differences between spoken language and written languages, what Thoreau calls respectively in chapter 3 of Walden “the mother tongue which we learn like brutes at the knees of our mothers, while the other is the maturity of these, the durable language,” became so profoundly obvious. Written English and spoken English are both called English, but in fact each is a separate linguistic form or kind.

I lived for 31 years as a nonparticipant within a literate culture, even though I thought I was a participant. When I finally became a participant in literate culture, the transition was both shocking and valuable, the latter in that my life represents something of the best of both the literate and non-literate aspects of being human.

I had written a short essay either a few months before or after the night I learned to read. The topic was trends in human energy usage over the past half million years. I mailed the essay to Harper’s, which published it in February 1974. Many years later a grade-school teacher told me that learning to write comes before the learning-to-read part of literacy. In my case, that seems to have been so, and it was good to be reminded that literacy has those two parts, reading and writing.

Learning to Read

Around 8 pm on the night I learned to read, I put on my coat and stepped out onto the front lawn, which was covered with crunchy snow. The sky was icy clear. I looked at my white Impala, which was big and – had there been gas – powerful. After a few moments, the cold made me put my hands in my coat pockets where, in the bottom of one of them, I found a joint which someone had given me many months before.

The significance of that joint was unknowable to me at then. I had no particular joy in finding it; my response was something like: “Hmmm, a joint. It’s cold out here. Guess I’ll go in.”

Among the several items I had brought with me to the empty house was the copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, then still new in this country. My intent with the book, silly as this might sound, was to look for dirty words. Even though I couldn’t read books – or paragraphs or even sentences – I could read dirty words, and what I hoped to find that night, and to see sanctified by having been written in a book no less, were the kinds of printed words I’d seen previously only on the walls of public restrooms. Cleary that desire was nonrational, so it must have been powered by some instinct, something inborn but useful to some practical, probably biological, end, such as keeping my sex urge and glands in good operating order.

I went to the bedroom where my rug and blanket and lamp were arranged in the middle of the room. Then I lit the lamp and flopped out on the blanket. Then I lit the joint, took maybe two puffs, and picked up Lady Chatterley and began hunting for the relatives of that most potent of English holy words, fuck.

I have no memory of the intervening moments. before I learned to read. Perhaps only a few seconds passed. Maybe minutes. I don’t know. All I recall is opening the book at a random place, or perhaps at multiple random places, and the next thing I know is that I’m walking up a stone path with flowers beside it, to the gardener’s cottage, which has a thatched roof. The sky in the mental scene which the written words were creating is grayish, and the air is comfortably warm and slightly humid.

The sort of teleportation which the book and the joint provoked that night . . . that was the first time in my life that mental images had been created by printed words. Until that night I had been unable to comprehend phrases longer than about three words. Until that night I had thought that everyone read that way, by looking at words and phrases and then fabricating an interpretation – highly personal, of course, though I didn’t know it then – of the writer’s intent. The seeing of mental images – and from printed words no less! – was the second great revelation of my life. (The first was my personal discovery of time, which happened shortly after I learned to handle spoken language.)

In subsequent evenings, over about half a dozen years or so, I used marijuana as an aid to reading and catching up with the written and literal collective memory of Western and world culture. Eventually I learned to read without having to use marijuana. Perhaps I would eventually have learned to read even without marijuana being involved. Perhaps. The point is, though, that on that night in question, marijuana seemed to loosen up the syllable-by-syllable style of word interpretation that had impeded my comprehension of whole sentences. “Automaticity” is the technical term for what I lacked prior to that night with dope and Lady Chatterley; the word automaticity, when used in regard to reading, refers to the automatic decoding of words, i.e., doing it unconsciously and automatically. Automaticity with respect to reading came to me that night in 1974.

Other Personal Uses of Marijuana

In the summer of 1964 I rode a motorcycle across Mexico while I had dysentery. The resultant bowel damage was permanent and, though medical efforts were made, it could not be treated. Around 1968, which was when I first used marijuana, I discovered that the gut cramping and chronic abdominal pains that made my 8-hour workday nearly exhausting could be managed by a small dose of marijuana.

The feelings of apprehension and terror that, however, accompanied my use of marijuana discouraged me initially from using it regularly to manage my gut discomfort. By the mid Seventies, however, I was using marijuana regularly as a way to control my gut cramps whenever I entered non-work-related social situations. I still use it that way.

A stunning view of violent behavior and its antecedents, personal transformation by self-medication with cannabis, and the revelation of peaceful humanity at one’s center.

My name is Chris and I am a 26-year-old “pot head.” I do not have any current medical issues but I have been through a lot in my life and I feel that weed has helped me to get to where I am today (no, not in jail). Let me start by giving you a brief history of where I am coming from so you might see my issues more clearly.

When I was four years old, my siblings and I were removed from our biological family. Mom and step dad were needle jockeys and got caught. I was the oldest of four kids who were taken. I was put into a couple of foster homes at first, until my temper got the best of me (about 4 homes in a year or so). I thought I was missing my mom, brothers and sister, or maybe I had a mental condition. Well, to make a long story shorter, my next seven years were spent being shuffled from foster homes to group homes and back again and again. The reason for most of the moves had to do with me fighting, kicking, cussing and running away from everywhere. I went through so many psychiatric tests and so much therapy before I turned 11 – all to no avail. I was thrown out of schools and into psyche units, jail and state hospitals. I’ve been on about 15 different mood-altering, make-you-happy prescriptions and still the violence continued. Most places (mainly state homes) I went through provided an environment that was very nurturing to my violent, outrageous needs for an adult to pin me to the floor in restraint fashion. So, while I was taking forced pills to make me smile, I got in plenty of practice to become the violent adult (like my step dad) I was destined to become. When I was 11-15 years old, I was mostly on the run working at different carnivals to support myself. Steadily I grew more violent to the point I would sometimes plan out murder-suicides to people who had barely ticked me off.

By the time I was 16, I had been through countless institutions because of my temper. I even joined a gang in Chicago so I could be safer, as well as having a steady audience that approved of my psychotic behavior (as long as it was directed toward someone else). Well, after I got out of jail one time, I was with some of my “boyz” and we were going to go jump one kid’s dad for upsetting one of the “boyz.” On the way there, I ran into an older Mexican man who I asked for a cigarette. When he gave me the pack to take one, I kept the pack – what was he going to do? Well, I discovered there was a joint inside with the smokes. I had smoked pot once before, but was too drunk to realize the effect, so I smoked this one out of pure curiosity, since I was sober this time. By the end of the joint, all five of us agreed we were having so much fun that we’d better wait to jump on our friend’s dad. I saw a smile for the first time even from one friend who just two days before had witnessed his sister committing suicide by jumping in front of a train after being raped by their mom’s cocaine dealer. I was in no mood to fight, although I was considered the main gun on this mission. It almost scared me that I had temporarily lost my violent edge, which had become my trademark among my circle of friends. It wasn’t even that I tried to snap off all the time, but I honestly couldn’t help it. I had fun smoking weed that time and I started buying it on my own. I always had access to it but never cared about what it might do for me, so I hadn’t experimented with it until this incident.

Well, over the next ten years I’ve probably averaged a joint a day and none of those days have been spent in jail or therapy or a nuthouse. In fact, the only non-traffic violations I have had since then have been for possession. I no longer think of myself as a rebel or a badass. I don’t have any more violent episodes (and my wife and daughter appreciate that). I’m not on any pills or any other illegal drugs although I’ve tried them all. I just assumed that since the other drugs were illegal also that they couldn’t be any more dangerous than the weed I liked so much. I have also had many problems in the past with my appetite, as well as difficulty sleeping. I hate to say it almost, but marijuana has completely turned my life around and helped me become a productive member of society as opposed to being a threat to everyone. The only problem is that I live in a society that would rather have me sitting in a jail somewhere drug-free and violent instead of letting me have a joint after work every day. Granted, I know the damage it will do to my lungs and brain, but I think a fried brain sits in a skull prettier than a fresh one splattered among the brains of potential victims.

I AM AN ADDICT. I’m not addicted to the THC, which makes me laugh. Nor the stems and seeds, which make me choke. Nor the social gatherings around a joint. Nor the fun I’ve had doing every day things under the influence. I am addicted to the new me. I’m addicted to the fact that I have broken this infamous circle of family violence that I could have easily been a MVP for. I love the fact that yesterday, today and tomorrow, no matter what happens, I will never repeat what I have escaped from. I am addicted to my own inner peace. I love the fact that I have no urge to raise my fist to even the worst of my enemies. I wish everyone could feel the way I do with or without weed. I am a drug addict and I am proud and grateful to God for showing me the way to heal myself.

Stephen Kessler was born in 1947 in Los Angeles. He holds degrees in literature from Bard College and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of six books and chapbooks of original poetry and the translator of eight books of poetry and fiction from Spanish; his translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, the American Poetry Review, Mother Jones, Conjunctions, and many other magazines. His essays, criticism and journalism have appeared widely in the independent literary and alternative press since the early 1970s. He was a founding editor and publisher of small poetry presses Green Horse Press and Alcatraz Editions, the internal journal Alcatraz, and weekly newspapers the Santa Cruz Express and The Sun. Later he edited Outlook, a Mendocino County monthly. He makes his home on the coast of northern California, where he edits the Redwood Coast Review.

Sometimes I wonder what I might have amounted to if I hadn’t become a pothead thirty years ago, when I was in graduate school, and pretty much remained one ever since. If not for marijuana, by now I’d probably be securely tenured in some English department and my mother would be able to brag to her friends about her son the doctor of philosophy. I’d be fluent in Academese, a respectable specialist in some form of critical theory, a teacher admired by his brightest students, a defeated imaginative writer, and a wretchedly unhappy and neurotic person. This, at least, is how I envisioned the path I was on at the time and where it must inevitably lead. Luckily, marijuana intervened.

Getting high, for me, in 1969, at the age of twenty-two, provided a vitally helpful perspective on the pettiness and irrelevance of an academic career to the creative vocation I felt was calling me. Following an acute psychotic episode-usefully assisted by psychedelic drugs, which triggered the explosion of all my internal conflicts and contradictions, I left the doctoral program and its generous fellowship for the full-time pursuit of my first love, poetry. This may not have been possible without a small but steady independent income that enabled me to live without a “real” job, but that financial independence was also existential in that the freedom it provided left me no excuses for not doing what I claimed to want to do, which was to write. Smoking marijuana gave me courage, at the time, to follow my deepest imaginative instincts, not only in the actual writing of poems but in the larger arena of making decisions about my life and how I wished to live it. Contrary to conventional wisdom, my judgment felt to me more fundamentally sound when I was stoned than straight.

Encouraged by the permission I felt to write without parental or professorial approval, I set out on the slow, uncertain, and mostly thankless path of the young poet, laboring over less-than-brilliant lines, writing, revising, sending the finished works to magazines, occasionally publishing, more often collecting rejections. Through most of this artistic apprenticeship I was accompanied by the sweet smell of burning hemp, whose presence surrounding my efforts seemed to expand the atmosphere of creative possibility, enhancing my sense of heroic romance on the seas of the blank page, that heady journey into the unknown. Frequently stoned as I indulged my imagination, I knew I was learning something about poetry, about writing, and about myself.

From there it was a slippery slope into the harder stuff: translation, criticism, journalism, editing and publishing. In the years since my earliest days as a dropout hippie poet I’ve managed to make a working life for myself in these various branches of literary practice, and while I wouldn’t presume to credit pot for anything I’ve managed to accomplish, I do believe its companionship has helped me to maintain a certain equanimity amid the myriad distractions, confusions and aggravations of the surrounding world, enabling me to focus on what matters most, or what I most enjoy. If anything, marijuana has tempered my ambition, relaxing the compulsion to overachieve and giving license to play.

It is this sense of permission – or permissiveness, as the Virtue-pushers would have it – that makes the forbidden herb, for me, a useful antidote to the various societal prohibitions against, for example, “doing nothing.” Pot reinforces my instinctive Taoism. Maybe that’s why it’s considered by some to be a dangerous drug: if everyone used it, nothing would get done. But paradoxical as it may seem, it is precisely when “doing nothing” that I tend to get the most accomplished as an artist. Or the deep involvement, the timelessness, experienced in the flow of creative activity may feel so aimless or effortless that it might as well be nothing, except for the fact that when I resume more consciously purposeful activity I often find persuasive evidence that I was doing something after all: a written text or other crafty artifact, a rack of freshly washed dishes, a stack of firewood, a pile of paid bills whose checks were written while listening to music or some radio show. Stoned or straight, I find these kinds of meditative activities to be a means of grounding myself in the mundane patterns and rhythms out of which imagination rises. The content, style and quality of what I write are not, I’ve found, especially affected by whether or not I’ve been smoking, but I am aware, when high, of more intimate sensuous relations with the language, with the texture of lines and sentences, with a kind of musical understanding not always readily evident to my more rational and sober self. The mild psychosis induced by this subtle alteration of consciousness may provide a different angle of vision, or revision, that can be of use in making esthetic decisions – what works and what doesn’t, how to refine some detail, trim out the excess or develop some incomplete idea.

Obviously such working habits are more dependent on the mind and skill of the individual than they are on what drugs he may or may not be taking. An idiot on marijuana is still an idiot, possibly more so. And one’s response to pot may vary greatly, depending on personality and circumstances. The health effects of smoking anything cannot be entirely positive, and I’ve seen enough stupid people in herbally induced stupors to be disabused of any evangelical notion of marijuana as a panacea. Like any other substance – food, tobacco, caffeine, alcohol, television – its abuse can be toxic and destructive. But unlike these ordinary and often insidious additives to daily life, pot remains not only legally prohibited but even now, at the turn of the millennium, socially stigmatized in a way that, say, coffee (a truly mind-altering substance) is not.

Among my friends, some smoke and some don’t, for reasons of their own – just as I don’t drink coffee because it makes my stomach jumpy – but the ones who do are just as productive in their lives and work and social contributions as are the abstainers. Anecdotally speaking, I’ve seen no correlation one way or another between marijuana use and creativity, citizenship, ethics or character. What I have noticed when smoking with friends is a ritual affirmation of time out, a refreshing pause in the everyday onslaught, a moment of quiet dialogue to savor, an island of sanity in the rush of events. Different people have different ways of relaxing, but those who habitually watch TV – whether in the lethargy of their own living rooms or in the noise and convivial drunkenness of a bar with ball games blaring – seem to me far more at risk for various psychopathologies than those who routinely prefer a few tokes of pot.

While I don’t exactly take pride in my own habit, I don’t consider it a major vice. A couple of puffs in midafternoon, following a late lunch, or at the end of a longish day, in the cocktail hour, or in the evening while listening to some especially beautiful music, strikes me as an eminently civilized way of decompressing the psyche. Whenever I find myself using it more than feels healthy – when I wake up in the morning foggyheaded, or feel a strain on my respiratory system – I may take a break for a few weeks as a way to remind myself of the drug’s potentially negative effects and to refresh my appreciation of its positive ones. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, especially children (I’m content with the knowledge that my eighteen-year-old daughter doesn’t use it), but neither would I discourage the curious from trying it in a conscious, responsible way.

Partner, collaborator, accomplice, friend, companion – marijuana, over the years, has woven itself gently into the pattern of my life in a way that may have prevented me from pushing myself above and beyond whatever I’ve done as a writer. Without the benign corruption of pot, who knows, I might have been a contender. Instead, up to now, in my early fifties, I’ve managed to maintain my physical and mental health, create a few works I hope may be worth saving, cultivate many lasting friendships, and contribute what I could to my communities. For someone of alternately competitive and contemplative tendencies, the path I’ve taken, accompanied by the herbal reality-check of marijuana, feels to me thus far to have been a reasonable compromise. As my father used to say, “Everything in moderation.”

Paul DeFelice is a 41-year-old architect who designs houses and small buildings. Throughout a realistic and detailed examination of his youthful experimentation and travails, then discovery of cannabis’ applications as an aid to both learning and treatment of nicotine addiction, we learn not only of many other benefits, but cautions for moderate use of this “holy smoke.”

I’ve been using cannabis for most of my life, for everything from partying to praying. I’ve received so much from this plant that I became an activist to protect it as a way of giving thanks. I’m currently running a retail store devoted to cannabis smoking and activism and have found, with legal battles and fund raising, that it now seems, like some pot critics say, that my life “revolves around marijuana”! But I believe that if I obey the current prohibition laws, against my better judgment, then I am voluntarily placing myself in prison.

I was born in 1957 in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, which is known for the world’s largest nickel smelter, and resultant moonscape. My father was a pro hockey player in the 40’s and 50’s and, after his final years in hockey, settled down and worked as a beer salesman for over 25 years until his retirement. My mother graduated from university in the 40’s and worked as a pharmacist until her retirement. My Dad’s beer company was owned by a cigarette company for a while. So when I was growing up there were 2 extra fridges in the basement for beer, a hall closet full of cigarettes, and our medicine cabinet and my mother’s workplace full of pharmaceuticals. I often joke that I have booze and drugs flowing in my veins!

However, none of my parents’ drugs were really attractive to me. I did the obligatory experimenting with tobacco and alcohol, but from as early as I can remember, I found myself drawn to cannabis. I can’t even remember exactly when I first became aware of its existence. I think it was probably through the drug warnings and lectures that the teachers and police were giving us in the schools and the “lure of the forbidden fruit”.

The fact that both of my parents made a living dealing legal drugs had a definite effect on my opinion of illegal drugs during my formative years. So did growing up in the 1960’s and 70’s. I understood the laws of prohibition to be completely hypocritical right from the start. I never had a feeling of guilt associated with my drug use, since I saw my parents dealing with and using the hardest drugs known with few apparent personal problems of their own. Of course, my parents had no understanding of cannabis and believed all the negative propaganda. It even stated on the inside cover of my Mom’s organic chemistry textbook that due to international conventions, Cannabis Sativa and Cannabis Indica were both deleted. Mom told me once about a local GP who had a morphine habit for 20 years but was still a fine doctor. I think because she was taught about opiates in university she was less afraid of heroin than of cannabis.

I used to argue with my parents about drugs and pointed to them as examples of how hypocritical people can be. Now I get along a lot better with my parents and I use them as examples of how legal, regulated drugs like alcohol and pharmaceuticals can work in today’s society. Neither my father nor my mother have ever had any kind of problem with the drugs in their care. My father drank little to none. He certainly never drank and drove. My mother did not have a habit of using any of the narcotics, sedatives, tranquilizers, or amphetamines that she worked with all day. These legal drug dealers, my parents, were able to raise their family in a loving, caring way and were/are respected, productive members of society.

My first cannabis experience was with blond Lebanese hash that a neighbourhood kid had gotten from his older, biker-type brother when I was 11 years old. I was just a little 4-eyed nerd kid that wasn’t really accepted into the greaseball tough-guy mostly Italian gang that hung out in my neighbourhood. This was 1968 but Sudbury was still mostly stuck in the 50’s greaser stage. Brylcreem, bikers, rumbles, homemade Italian wine, plain-end cigarettes…anyway, the only reason I got a toke that day was because nobody in the gang new how to smoke it! I had been reading my older sister’s Rolling Stone magazines or Yippee literature (or something) and had seen a photo of a person smoking hash on a pin through a Bic pen tube. When I described this to the leader of the gang with the hash he followed my instructions and everyone was toking…except me! Finally after some pleading on my part someone said I should be allowed a toke since I figured out how to do it. I had already been smoking cigarettes (but not always inhaling) for a couple of years (in order to look tough) so I got a few good tokes in me, enough to cough, and I swear, I got high!!! I laughed and giggled, got paranoid, got the munchies! Of course nobody believed me and everyone said I was “faking it.” Whatever! I liked it and couldn’t wait to try it again.

Even at the tender age of 10, I was drinking home made Italian wine and stolen beer around the campfire. I learned early on that I had no head or stomach for alcohol. I would always get stupid, get sick, throw up, pass out, and get really hung over. But I sure liked pot! I found where most people could drink me under the table, I could smoke them under the table with no apparent harmful after-effects. When high, I felt talkative, imaginative… like I had a better perspective on myself and the world around me. Music sounded better, books were more exciting to read… Of course I could rarely find any kind of cannabis when I was 11 and what I did find was mostly brown Moroccan or blond Leb hash usually purchased from bikers. I didn’t even see actual “marijuana” until I was about 13 and even then it was mixed half with tobacco.

At around age 12 I began to discover that not all kids liked to get drunk, fight, and talk about cars and sports. There was a neighbourhood down the highway where kids liked to play music, dress weird, experiment with drugs and act goofy. At least that’s how it seemed. We’d all pretend to be high even if we weren’t and to us that meant acting as strange and incomprehensible as we could, especially around adults. We were eager to try just about any drug that came along from what I can remember.

Then, still at the tender age of 12, in 1969, I was heading for my first rock show, a matinee at the city arena, when my friend suggested we should take a walk through one of the city’s pool halls and see if we could find some pot. The hall was lined with black-leather bikers who would call out what they had for sale and you could take your pick. When a guy called out “acid for sale” my buddy said “yeah”! All I knew about acid was that it was LSD, that the Beatles had done it, and it was associated with “Peace & Love” (in big fluffy psychedelic cartoon lettering). So for $3 a hit, we each bought a tab of Orange California Sunshine.

One thing is for sure, I was much too young to be dropping so much LSD, especially with no knowledge of the drug’s effects and no experienced guide to help. It was sheer hell! I was terrified! But since this account is supposed to be about cannabis I won’t get into the story of my first acid trip. Except to say that instilled in me an everlasting respect for all drugs, especially psychedelics! I’ve since had hundreds of wonderful trips including some extremely positive life-changing mega-doses.

As I got older, I found it was easier to get cannabis. My older sister was popular among the drug-using crowd of the day. There was always some guy making a play for my sister who would be trying to impress her little brother. This meant that I usually had a reliable connection.

One of the best scenes in high school I can remember is the weekends when the lobby of the school was turned into a coffeehouse complete with checkered tablecloths, candles, and ashtrays. Local folk singers would play, soft drinks and coffee would be served and we’d sing along and dance. Also, all down the school corridors and out in the parking lot kids would be smoking pot and nobody cared!!!!! Parents and teachers used to be so happy just that we were there, under control and not causing trouble somewhere out of sight. These were also the days when, if you smelled pot in the corridors during the school day, it was more likely to be coming from the staff room than from the boys’ room. It felt like pot would be legal any day!

Yet, even in that era of tolerance, when I was 15, a friend and I were dragged out of a pool hall by uniformed police and brought to the station. I, luckily, was not found with any pot. My 15 year-old friend, however, had a half-ounce of pot on him. I was let go after a phone call to my parents. My friend was not so lucky. He wasn’t just strip searched, but CAVITY searched by five uniformed cops. He was never the same and, in a way, neither was I. I have never been okay with this incident. I couldn’t believe that we would allow our children to be treated like this. I can’t believe we still allow our children to be treated like this! I am forever inspired to see that this sort of thing doesn’t happen to children any longer. There is no way that anyone can get sanctimonious with me and invoke the danger of pot to children when this is how the law treats them.

During high school I smoked mostly on weekends since I wasn’t sure if I could handle going to class high. But by the time I was in Grade 12 I was smoking whenever I could. I didn’t do homework or study. I basically socialized as much as possible and I somehow still got my graduation diploma. I even went to Grade 13 but it was mostly to socialize. I had absolutely no interest in anything the school had to offer so I ended up with just a couple of credits. I wouldn’t say that pot kept me from academic achievement as much as did the lack of interesting courses or teachers.

I got busted (officially) for the first time when I was 18 while smoking a doobie in the parking lot of a drinking establishment. I was about to leave for college in the next few days and I just wanted to get it over with without my parents finding out. No such luck! During the ensuing lecture and argument my parents exclaimed that I might as well not waste my time going to college since my brains were “fried on marijuana”! In recent years, I’ve come to realize how that had instilled an attitude in me of “I’ll show them”!

As I went through college from 1975 to 1978 studying Architectural Engineering Technology in Thunder Bay, Ontario, I began to find out that learning and pot smoking went well together. There was only one other pot smoker in my course that I knew of. Approximately 150 students began the course and only 12 of us went on to graduate the 3-year course. 2 of those 12 were us 2 pot smokers. The course was very demanding with a ridiculous workload. I watched through rosy red eyes as student after student suffered breakdowns and collapses and gave up in despair.

The calculus course was not well taught and many students wrote it off as too difficult and esoteric to bother with. I was almost ready to give up on it myself when I got so high on some Cambodian grass the night before the calculus final that I had a breakthrough and scored 24/25 on the final and 25/25 on the re-write. I still have the test papers to prove it!

I was hooked on skiing since age 11 even though I grew up in a place that had nothing higher than 200 vertical feet. I found hockey to be too competitive and violent, especially when stoned. At first I resisted smoking pot and skiing because I thought it would be like drinking and skiing, which I certainly couldn’t do. I gradually came to find that cannabis and skiing went really well together.

I skied fanatically for over 20 years, high every vertical foot of the way practically, and made my way into Warren Miller Ski Films for 3 years, 1985 to 1988, where I was sent to resorts in Europe, the US, and Canada. I was featured in a Warren miller instructional video called “Steeps Leaps and Powder: How the Super Skiers Ski”. Unfortunately, Warren didn’t mention that I would attribute any finesse I might have to skiing while stoned. The only serious injury I ever had (knock on wood) was in Chamonix after 3 weeks with NO POT! I fell down L’Aguille de Medi in Chamonix and hurt my knee!

I would definitely rate cannabis as a performance enhancer (sorry Ross Rebagliatti!). I find it helps manage fear and adrenaline. It’s like I rise out of my body a little ways and guide my body thoughtlessly through space and snow from a position above and behind my head. Sounds weird, but that’s the best I can describe it. It can also stave off fatigue on long hikes in a similar sort of way in that it takes me out of my body just a bit.

I must remember, however, that there was a time when I ate some potent ganja muffins for breakfast one morning and got such a body stone that I couldn’t leave the lodge. I was definitely incapacitated. For me, an important reason why I prefer smoking to eating cannabis is how I can determine fairly instantly how high I am and when to stop. When I eat cannabis I’m never sure just how high I’m going to get. I would also say that eating cannabis has the potential to get a person much higher than smoking it to the point where high doses can equal LSD or psilocybin. Regular smoking of cannabis does not seem to have impaired my judgment when it comes to driving. I enjoy driving while high. I like to point out that I have driven many miles over the last 20 years without a single accident or even speeding ticket. My last vehicle, a 1983 Tercel wagon was retired with a rusted out frame and over 400,000 accident-free kilometers on it and I was high for most of those km’s. Driving while high causes me to drive a little slower and more attentively. I feel more attuned to my car and my surroundings. I’m also less prone to road rage and much more patient and courteous if I’m high.

I’ve made a living as an Architectural Technologist since graduating in 1978. I couldn’t begin to add up the thousands of square feet of building area I designed while stoned. It seems like pot removes the tedium from whatever task I put my mind to, whether washing dishes or shoveling dirt. When drafting it seems like a blank page is much harder to start filling with lines when I’m not high. Also, I’ve never had a complaint or any problem with the integrity of any structure I’ve designed, and I’m scrutinized by engineers, inspectors, and tradesmen.

I think it’s important to mention that I kicked my 20-year tobacco addiction using cannabis. Before I got busted, I was growing kind bud and smoking it quite chronically on top of a pack-a-day cigarette habit. I decided that I needed an oxygen break between cigarettes and doobies so one of them had to go.

I started off by substituting doobies of kind bud whenever I had a tobacco craving. I soon found that I would get too high smoking that many bud joints and would soon become immune to the pot’s effects. I switched to substituting leaf doobies for my cigarette craving and saved the bud for special occasions. Within approximately 2 weeks the tobacco craving subsided and I easily weaned myself off of the leaf joints. In the last few years I’ve given up meat, dairy, alcohol, and coffee. I would say that this is evidence that cannabis IS a gateway drug… OFF of harder drugs! Starting in 1988, after my second cultivation bust and after a life-changing trip on a mega-dose of LSD, I became politically and socially active. During the acid trip, I felt a distinct calling to come to the defense of the Earth. In particular I felt called to defend the cannabis plant. I felt like I had been educating myself for the job my whole life. It was the peak of the Drug War and I felt like I was one of the few people in a position to speak up because I was single and self-employed. I also began a more spiritual relationship with the plant and since that time I feel compelled to say, at the very least, a little (usually silent) prayer of thanks for the gift of cannabis, raising the joint or pipe to my third eye every toke. I used to be a lot more verbal with my prayers but found that it sometimes weirded people out. Besides, God isn’t deaf.

I’ve been a member of the local wilderness and watershed protection groups since 1988 and learned non-violent direct action strategies. I’ve been active on at least 6 blockades and arrested and sued on 2 of them. I believe that the hemp movement is actually another aspect of the environmental movement. At first some fellow activists were uncomfortable with the sight of “marijuana” leaves on their information tables or banners at the blockades. As word got out about hemp for fiber, fuel, food, and medicine, people got on the bandwagon. It is empowering to realize that I, and thousands of people like me, got hemp re-legalized in Canada! It was a powerful demonstration of successful grassroots activism. We got the laws changed and hemp in the ground without any slick TV or magazine ads or corporate funding. It was all by word of mouth, letters to the editor, festivals, photocopied handouts, postering, etc.

I feel like the momentum is continuing, at least in Canada, and that cannabis will soon be legal not just for industrial and medicinal, but for “recreational” purposes as well. These days I’m part owner of Holy Smoke Culture Shop, a retail/activist store and compassion club. We and our customers smoke openly in our store all day long. We’ve had some legal struggles because of it but we’ve triumphed in all our court battles so far. We’re still going after 3 years!

I believe that cannabis will always be a part of my life although I definitely smoke less now than I did as a younger man in my 20’s and 30’s. I’ve learned that if I smoke pot too chronically I’ll become immune or desensitized to its effects and that’s the worst possible punishment. Also, I don’t find that pot is, strictly speaking, an anti-depressant, although it does combat depression for sure. Rather than saying that pot makes me feel “better”, I would say that it makes me feel “more”. That is to say, in the right circumstance, a toke might bring on a tear as readily as a laugh. This is a good thing and not the escapism that we are led to believe it is. It’s part of getting in touch with myself and the world around me.

I look forward to the day when pot smokers and growers can emerge from the underground, bringing with them their precious knowledge of cannabis that they have lovingly protected and cherished during these dark ages, and share it with the rest of humankind. I hope to see a day when the insane concept of “prohibition” is a relic of a tarnished past and the drug war prisoners can all come home.

Pot is not for everyone, but freedom of choice is. An former cannabis user, who nevertheless embraces tolerance, describes an insight that terminated his exploration.

… I didn’t find its effects that impressive. Sure, I would feel some intoxicating effects with none of the negative effects claimed by its opponents… but I certainly did not think the whole experience was worth the fear of arrest and imprisonment. The experience was more one of rebellion than enlightenment.

I am grateful to Dr Grinspoon for inviting this essay showing another viewpoint on marijuana. This viewpoint is perhaps not one you would agree with; however it is merely my own personal impression of how cannabis has affected me. I would like to reinforce a point I make towards the end of the essay: Just because I don’t like something does not mean that I would wish to deny or disparage anyone else’s experiences with it. I am one of those unfortunate souls who don’t take to cannabis. Those who are not familiar cannabis should note that like any drug, it isn’t for everyone.

First, a little about me: I’m a 30 year old British male, currently working as a software engineer for a large private-sector company in Scotland. I graduated from university eight years ago with an electronics degree, but decided to look for a career in software instead. Que sera, sera. I can best be described as evangelical atheist, socially libertarian, economically moderate/centrist.

Now that the boring stuff is over and done with, down to the nitty-gritty: my experiences with the ‘evil weed.’

I didn’t smoke it until I was about 20, although I had heard about it and seen other people smoking it. Over the course of the next 10 years, I tried it about five more times. I had never been tempted to smoke it regularly, partly because of the price premium caused by the UK government’s misguided criminal policy but mostly because I did not find its effects that impressive.

Sure, I would feel some intoxicating effect with none of the negative effects claimed by its opponents… but I certainly didn’t think the whole experience was worth the fear of arrest and imprisonment. The experience was more one of rebellion than enlightenment. In the end, I made no effort to obtain it myself, and would almost never accept it when offered.

I resolved to give up cannabis at least for a few years (not exactly difficult) and gave no more thought to it.

Early this year, I decided to obtain some more and give it another go – at this point it had been roughly 3 years since my last smoke. Alcohol and tobacco had become my recreational drugs of choice, and while these have their own risks, at least I could get my supplies without fear of prosecution! This time, however, the experience was different. Changing social and legal attitudes in the UK made the consequences of possession less severe, and I could be reasonably confident of getting some without fear of my life being ruined if I was caught with it.

However, the smoking experience was also different. With maturing years and less need to ‘rebel’, I was able to examine the whole experience more dispassionately. Also, I took the advice of wiser souls and smoked it without having drunk alcohol first – using cannabis on top of alcohol is something of a habit at parties here; where alcohol is used to break the ice before someone takes out their smoking kit.

What I now discovered about my reaction to cannabis was this: while at first the intoxication was pleasurable, and I felt wonderfully relaxed, something less pleasant would happen: after a while, what I would describe as the ‘straight’ part of me would look at the ‘stoned’ me with contempt. I’d hear part of me say “look at yourself, you overgrown hippy – sitting laughing at things that aren’t funny. What do you think you’re doing? Idiot.” At that point, I’d put out my joint and go and do something else. For all its hazards, smoking has the advantage of being able to control dosage efficiently.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that what I felt was self-loathing, but a kind of self-criticism. Let me try to explain.

From my experience of alcohol, I know that it’s a non-specific depressant: it impairs not only the parts of the brain concerned with coordination, perception and motor skills, but it affects other parts, those responsible for inhibition and self-responsibility. That’s why alcohol can be so dangerous: it not only intoxicates but it can also remove the ability to realise one is intoxicated and take steps to reduce one’s risk. I think anyone who has had to deal with a drunk driver will understand this problem.

Cannabis does not seem to have this problem, leaving the higher brain centres free to exercise self-control and self-analysis.

After some thought, I hope I have been able to work out why I am reacting badly to cannabis. I’ve been used to the disinhibiting effects of alcohol for so long, it came as an unpleasant surprise to retain full conscious understanding of my intoxicated state and to be able to retain self-awareness and self-control in a way that alcohol has never allowed me to. I was able to look inside myself and examine my reasons for seeking intoxication. Sometimes self-analysis can show you things you don’t want to see.

If all this seems hopelessly negative, please don’t think for a moment that I’m trying to disparage or dismiss anyone else’s cannabis experiences: medicinal, recreational, spiritual or otherwise. I know people who’ve had all types of positive experiences with cannabis. I’ve never known anyone who’s had a less-than-positive experience to do anything other than shrug, pass the joint on and do something else.

As I write this, I have used up the last of my supply, and I am seriously wondering whether I should get any more and give it another go. But looking back, that’s what I have been doing these last 10 years: being disappointed, leaving it alone for a while, and then going back in the hope of a “revelation” of some kind. This time… I am not going back. If I have to spend this much mental energy deciding whether or not to get it, it can’t be worth the bother.

Does cannabis have any negative consequences? The only negative ones of any great importance that I can see have all derived from criminalisation. Not only in the United States, but in my country as well, peaceful people have been victimised for seeking happiness, spiritual experience or relief from the symptoms of disease. Cannabis users are forced to pay black-market prices for adulterated resin or grass of unknown strength, but none of this should be news to the US reader.

So what do I think should be done about cannabis? Its record speaks for itself: no recorded fatalities in over 5000 years of use, millions of satisfied users attesting to its benign recreational and medicinal qualities.

The answer is clear: legalization. Let doctors, users and the legal free market come together and decide for themselves how to pursue happiness, wealth and health.

Let me leave you with this thought. To paraphrase Peter McWilliams:

“Ain’t nobody’s business if I don’t, ain’t nobody’s business if you do.”