30 Days of Marijuana

It feels stupid to call it “marijuana”. No one calls it that. “Hey dooood, you wanna smoke some marijuannnaa?”  Although “marijuana” sounds legit with a Hispanic accent. “Yo essay, ju wana smok sum mah-ree-wanna?”

Anyway.

As mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, today starts 30 days of smoking pot every day.

Whether you’ve ever been interested in smoking pot but don’t have the experience or are looking for what to expect, or you’re a pothead who likes reading about his favorite pastime, this is for you.

Mom, this is not for you. Sorry.

Legal

Fortunately, my home state of Connecticut decriminalized marijuana possession in 2012. Unless you’re caught with more than 1/2 ounce, which is more than sufficient for personal use even over several weeks, even for a true pothead, the punishment is just a fine. It’s like a speeding ticket: no arrest or record.

So I’ve got that going for me.

I still think the punishment is a bit rough though and would like to see marijuana not just decriminalized, but legalized country-wide. The thin arguments against legalization are slowly becoming emaciated.

There will always be people who abuse drugs. This is true of alcohol, tobacco, and especially prescription drugs. Shit, people abuse food. Marijuana is less harmful than almost every other drug out there, in spite of its Schedule I classification, which is a ridiculous classification for a fucking plant. Low addiction risk, literally zero possibility of an overdose, and perhaps most importantly, it’s natural (excepting perhaps some of the supercharged strains that exist nowadays). It doesn’t make much sense for marijuana to be illegal when alcohol, for example, a much more dangerous and harmful substance, is legal.

People who get too drunk get sloppy and belligerent and are more prone to violence. People who get too stoned become anxious, quiet, and the thought of hitting another person would probably freak them out.

I like the old joke: “What’s the difference between a drunk driver and a stoned driver? The drunk driver flies through the stop sign while the stoner waits for it to turn green.”

This is an interesting article on the subject of marijuana legalization:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/08/health/gupta-changed-mind-marijuana/

And this is an illuminating pic:

Pot Facts

Pot actually has a lot of health benefits. It’s used to treat a number of different ailments, even cancer, and it does so in a safe, cheap, and effective way.

Since I’m lucky enough to be in perfect physical health, I’m more interested in what effects smoking pot regularly will have on my psyche. I’ll just give you a couple links to read over some facts in case it interests you.

Physical benefits of marijuana:
http://www.businessinsider.com/health-benefits-of-medical-marijuana-2014-4?op=1

Miscellaneous marijuana facts:
http://www.theweedblog.com/42-0-facts-about-marijuana-and-why-it-should-be-legal/

My History & Experience

I was 15 when I first smoked. I slept at a friend’s house whose parents were away, we haphazardly rolled the pot I had into a cut-open cigar wrapper, and smoked it while having to hold it closed. We didn’t know what we were doing, but it worked: we both got really high. Everything was funny, I felt loose and relaxed, and a bit strange. I remember looking at myself in the mirror and laughing. It was a good experience, although it pales in comparison with the times I would get high and commune with nature.

When you’re high in the woods, or whatever type of nature you enjoy, everything seems different. Your senses are heightened. Certain sounds will jump out at you, sounds you’d never appreciated before. Everything looks more alive, and you feel closer to it all than you ordinarily do. This type of appreciation lasts for you far into the future, even to the times you’re not high. In my opinion, pot gifts its smoker with a new perspective, an expansion of consciousness.

Pot also gives you a bit of an outside perspective on your life and your self. At least for me, it makes me see social interactions, life choices, relationships, and more from a perspective I don’t think I could achieve without the drug. It can be an uncomfortable experience seeing yourself from the outside, so to speak. But as long as you don’t get too in your head about it, a lot of good can come from such a perspective. I think pot makes people more compassionate and empathetic. Both good things.

From 15 through 20 years of age I probably averaged smoking maybe 5 or so times per week. The high after you start building a tolerance is much more mellow and relaxing than it is when you first start smoking. In my opinion, the experienced user’s high is a much better one. This is part of the reason for this experiment: to get that same type of relaxed feeling I used to get. I believe that state of mind is ideal for all creative endeavors.

When I smoke nowadays, since it’s such a rare occurrence, I get too high even after one hit (I know some potheads reading this would be jealous of that – don’t be). I smoked this morning at 8 am and felt weird and self-conscious for almost two hours, and it was just one medium-sized hit from a bowl (pictured below). I started writing this post but was paralyzed with self-consciousness so I did other things (like browsing imgur for the next Sunday Newsletter Page) until the high mostly passed.

I know after a week or two of smoking regularly, getting back into the groove, that I’ll feel less anxious after smoking, and will become more operational. Back in the day I used to love getting high then going out to social events (after using eye drops, of course), where I would interact with people who had no idea I was high. The thought of doing that now, with such a low tolerance for and familiarity with the high, makes me nervous.

Long story short, I got in trouble for pot once in the winter of 2003-4, then again that spring. After that fiasco, I just stopped smoking. I missed it, but it didn’t seem worth it anymore. So only a few times per year, almost always after drinking, I’d take a few hits, get too high, then go to sleep. My once beautiful relationship with pot had ended.

But now, just over ten years later, it may be rekindling. A long-forgotten ex with nothing but beautiful shared experiences and only a vague, questionable memory of why things ended so abruptly in the first place.

Expectations

The idea here is obviously not to be a pothead who smokes all day and has no motivation and enjoys nature but doesn’t have the drive to leave his computer to get into nature, like the stereotypical stoner kid who plays video games all day and has no direction in life.

The idea is to use pot as a tool to improve myself. To get a better understanding of myself, my life’s direction, and hopefully to gain some insight into the work I do.

I expect this first week to be a bit unpleasant. To be honest, I really didn’t enjoy being high today, except when I went outside to take a break and felt the sun warming my skin, listened to the crickets chirping, and watched the birds eating from my feeder. My shower was pretty awesome too.

By the second week, my tolerance should be up to a reasonable level, meaning the high will improve and I’ll be able to do my day’s work without staring at the computer screen like a retard and analyzing the shit out of my life.

I don’t really know what to expect from this all, but that’s why I’m trying it. I think pot has a lot to offer the conscious user. Many people far smarter than I am smoke or smoked it regularly. Who am I to argue with Carl Sagan or Steve Jobs?

I do know that when I was younger and smoking regularly, my short-term memory suffered a bit, seemingly from pot. Sometimes I’d leave the house, realize I forgot something, go into the house to get it, then forget what I forgot.

But I now realize that the memory issues stemmed from my belief that pot caused short-term memory loss, and not from an objective effect of the drug on my brain. I no longer hold that belief, and as a result, I won’t suffer any kind of short-term memory issues. However, even if I were to have issues, they would be temporary as they were in my past experience.

And I can see how smoking a ton of pot will kill your motivation if you’re not careful. I’ve experienced the laziness that inevitably accompanies too much pot smoking. The key is to smoke consciously, and to plan the day’s activities in accordance with the altered states of consciousness.

I don’t know. I’m interested to see how this all turns out. Hopefully some good will come of it. Maybe I’ll become a regular smoker again, maybe I won’t. I’ll try to be as objective as I can be when determining whether or not to continue after the 30 days are up. 30 days seems like a long time as I type this, but I know once they’re up they will seem to have flown by. Such is life.

Thanks for reading and following along, you sexy bag of flesh 😉

Update #1