DOSE:

4 hits

smoked

Cannabis

Well first of all I suppose I should explain why the 25 year gap. It seems that in my late twenties, I became a little too fond of alcohol. It was messing up my life. I was not in control and I experienced several blackouts which I was very disturbed by. So when it was suggested to me that my problem was that I had become an alcoholic, I reluctantly decided that I had to investigate. In 1982 I stopped drinking for about 7 months and attended numerous AA meetings. I kept looking for someone to tell me that I was not an alcoholic. I was looking in the wrong place.

I finally concluded that the only way to prove that I wasn't an alcoholic would be to drink again and not have trouble. Well that worked really well for one evening. The next night as I was celebrating my new found non-alcoholism, I realized that perhaps I was in trouble. However, I felt the need for further experimentation and didn't return to AA until the following spring. One unfortunate side effect of AA indoctrination was that I could no longer party innocently unaware of the knowledge that I was a hopeless alcoholic. In other words AA had ruined my drinking. So I sobered up again and adopted an AA way of life for the next five years. I met my husband in AA and married him after three years of sobriety. After 5 years or so I was very bored with AA. I had accepted that I could not drink in safety but I was really tired of talking about it. So I gradually started withdrawing from AA. Around this time my husband had a material awakening and we both underwent a complete AA detox. It was a lot like deprogramming ourselves after being in a cult. Neither of us drank. Years went by. We had a baby. We had been moving around the country a few times due to school and jobs and landed in California, eventually settling in the foothills east of Sacramento when my daughter was three years old. Been here ever since.

I'd always maintained that pot was never my problem but I quit smoking it because it tended to make me forget why I shouldn't drink. I believed that my years of ingesting psychedelics probably forestalled my alcoholism for ten to fifteen years. I also firmly believed that pot should be legalized. Just because I didn't smoke it didn't mean I wanted to kill anybody else's buzz. Meanwhile time had been seriously passing. I was well into middle age when my daughter was in middle school. In fact I was usually about ten-fifteen years older than most of the other Moms due to my “lost years” ( I wasn't really lost, I'd just been traveling a lesser known road) and I was sitting in when they had the guest lecturer on drugs come in to tell the kiddies about the evils of drugs and alcohol. I used to joke with people that I'd tried every drug that had been invented before I sobered up. But there were a few I knew nothing about like Ecstasy because it just wasn't well known back then. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Ecstasy was in fact MDMA which I'd really enjoyed once upon a time. I was really tickled by that little piece of trivia. Another interesting surprise was when I heard that Cannabis was supposedly a lot stronger than it used to be. Now this was intriguing to me. I was admittedly curious. But I didn't do anything about it. At least not for another 5 years.

I'm not exactly sure when I determined that I wanted to smoke pot again. Maybe it was when the aches and pains of arthritis began to seriously impair my ability to enjoy life. I kept hurting myself in my efforts to get some healthy exercise. I had to have knee surgery. I needed physical therapy for a shoulder injury. I fell down walking my dog and limped for six months after. Maybe it was the number of medical marijuana sites I stumbled upon on the Internet. I started wondering if I should try pot to see if it helped.

I lived in California after all. It ought to be easy to get some pot. Not as easy as you think. I'm now fifty something years old and I live over 3,000 miles away from any of my old connections. I tried asking my doctor if he thought it would help. He said, “It's not the standard of treatment. I wouldn't recommend it. Besides, it will make you gain weight.” Very disappointing answer. Fortunately the woman who sometimes cleans my house had become a pretty good friend. She was the usual fifteen years younger than me and had kids my daughter's age. We talked a lot about what we were like as teenagers (so much wilder than kids today). She mentioned that her husband still smoked pot but claimed that she didn't. I told her how I didn't now but used to and didn't think here was anything wrong with it. I'd keep bringing up stuff I'd found about pot on the Internet and how I thought about getting one of those medical marijuana cards and she told me that her husband had gotten one once after getting busted so he could legally smoke during the mandatory rehab period. I was reluctant to really get one though. I'm not a big truster in the government's benevolence.

Finally she admitted to me that she sometimes indulged on weekends and agreed to turn me on. So at last I am able to report on what it's like to get stoned after 25 years of abstinence. At first I choked. I'm not accustomed to inhaling hot smoke any more and the first toke was a bit of a shock to my lungs. It didn't taste quite the way I recalled. Of course now that I think about it, there was a lot of variety in the taste of pot back then too and I guess I just had this rosy memory of the very best flavor. I didn't feel stoned immediately and I wanted to keep smoking even though my friend only took a couple of hits and said she'd had enough. Silly me. I smoked approximately 1/3 of a joint of a homegrown sinsimilla that was yellowish green color, sticky with resin.

That “Don't take Drugs” lecturer at Helen's school was right about it being stronger than it used to be. The high hasn't changed that much. You just get there on fewer hits. I wonder if it's because of the Sinsimilla revolution? Back in the old days most good pot had tons of seeds. The more loaded with seeds the greater the concentration of bud. Yes, we smoked the leaves too. We weren't a bunch of pot farming connoisseurs back then, we were mostly middle class suburban white kids. The Internet hadn't been invented yet. When we talked about different kinds of pot, we identified it by what country it came from, not which plant family. And we sneered at most home grown. Good pot was mostly believed to have come from Acapulco, Jamaica or Colombia (of course the little plastic sandwich baggies came from the grocery store so we didn't really know where it came from). Wheww! It seems Like I just had a Grampa Simpson moment just now. OK, I'm not trying to speak for a generation, I'm just relating my impressions of suburban drug culture in New England in the 70s. I think I turned on for the first time in 1969 just like most folks on the east coast. It didn't seem to matter how old you were in 1969 (I was fourteen). That was just the year when the counter culture tidal wave reached the east coast.

Back to my first experience stoned after 25 years. I felt the familiar buzz and fuzziness and a smile landed on my face that just wouldn't quit. Kelly and I became really chatty and almost but not quite tripped over into uncontrolled laughter over nothing in particular. Time seemed to slow down. I remember the television was on and wished we had music instead.

Then I had to get home and make supper. I took the back way home and used my cruise control so I wouldn't go to fast or slow. [Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!] In a lot of ways I felt like a kid again and felt just a tad sneaky for not telling my husband about it. We've been married for twenty two years and we've had our ups and downs but we've been in a real good space for the last 3-4 years and I don't want to rock the boat. I don't want to mess with the marital dynamic just yet. I'm not sure whether I'm making a permanent shift in life style or just experimenting. My next plan is to try smoking before exercising to see if it prevents pain. Anyway, nobody noticed anything different at home. We have a pretty laid back household so it wasn't difficult at all.

Exp Year: 2008	ExpID: 76658
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 5, 2011	Views: 41,090
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Cannabis (1) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Retrospective / Summary (11), General (1)