Breaking the Greerhead Pledge

My first, and probably last, experience with Marijuana

Don’t worry, a serious article is coming out tomorrow, or at latest on Monday. Consider this an appetizer after a long drought.

I don’t like weed. I hate the smell of it, as well as the culture that has developed around its consumption. You can’t go far in most American cities without the skunky stench of ganja these days, although I’m sure a century ago I’d be making the same complaints about Cigarettes. Before that, my nose would be too filled with the smell of horse droppings and smog to notice the relatively pleasant aroma of the tobacco pipe. It doesn’t change the fact that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Although I find weed to be bad for society, I don’t think it is much more degenerate than Alcohol. At least, that’s what I had thought before trying it. Stoners are the most annoying group of addicts, but Alcohol is probably more dangerous. I’m not saying there aren’t negative effects of THC consumption, but on paper the only way it’s going to kill you is through the munchies giving you diabetes. It is because of this that I was willing to break the Greerhead Pledge and give the green a try. I just wanted to experience it, so I could have a more well-informed opinion on it. Just saying it makes me cringe at myself, since we all know how many roads to hell have been paved with the good intention of experimentation. It was not the first time I had “experimented”. I tried a gummy previously out of curiosity, but I felt nothing. I had taken a few puffs of a joint before, but then too I had felt nothing. I believed myself to be immune to THC because of this, and it was this hubris that would be my downfall.

The person who gave me the stuff was much more attuned to the substance, and must have given me a much larger dose than what I experienced in my previous experiments. I didn’t think it would be a problem, due to many years of potheads proudly exclaiming that it is “impossible to overdose on weed”. For a while, I thought that I was in the clear. It must have had a delayed fuse or something, because it took forever for me to feel anything. Suddenly, my ears began to feel tingly. Then my cheeks, then my arms, then my legs, and then my feet. The glare of the TV became more apparent. It was really nice for about two or three minutes, I couldn’t stop smiling. The delirium didn’t stop, though. I began having vivid imaginations that I can barely recollect. It was very close to a dreamlike state, so much so that I began to worry that I had not just taken Marijuana. It was becoming uncomfortable at this point, I noticed I could not focus at all on anything. I had trouble keeping my head straight, and began to confuse the pile of clothes in front of me for a sleeping person (the lights were off). All of my senses were elevated. I couldn’t help but pay very close attention to my breath, which sounded loud. My mouth felt very dry, and I felt this dryness in such detail that it was unlike any dry mouth I had ever had before. Not only did I feel outer sensations, but also internal processes. I could feel the food I had ate an hour prior digesting in my stomach, and it sort of confused me. I thought it was possible it was gonna come back up, but I don’t think it was. Apparently, weed is antiemetic.

I returned to where I had sat myself down earlier, and became increasingly paranoid. I had heard many stories about people “freaking out” on weed, but never imagined it would be like this. My vision slowly turned into what seemed like slow-turning frames, where every instance was just a snapshot. I could not tell if I was awake or asleep, or what memories had really happened. I had no ability to keep track of time, and minutes felt no different from hours. I began to remember the phenomenon of Weed bringing out people’s inner Schizophrenia early in life, and wondered if this is what I was experiencing. I was in a state of such discomfort that I did not believe it was possible for this to be the effects of the “safe drug”, but I trusted the guy who gave it to me enough to not try and poison me, so the only conclusion left was that I had set off some sort of dormant schizophrenia gene and was now gonna be in a time prison neuralink torture chamber for the rest of my life. There was a persistent thought that this experience would permanently rewire my brain, that I would no longer be the man I was prior to taking that edible, even if it didn’t cause me to go full schizo. It happens. People get one-tapped by all sorts of drugs. Weed might not make you into a schizo, but I’ve heard of people getting turned into lazy hippy freaks because weed “transformed them” (in their own words). This is what makes Alcohol less dangerous than weed. It’s more likely to kill you, give you brain damage, and age you, but it’s less likely to truly change who you are. Drunkenness is a profoundly dull experience, there is almost no interesting qualities about the state as compared to normalcy. It’s you, if you were tired and dizzy, with your mental faculties running on low power mode. In most other drugs there is a potential for you to retreat into a haunting inner world.

I tried to snap out of it and watch the movie which was on, which I legitimately cannot remember a single detail of despite trying my damnedest to focus on it. Being completely unable to take in information from the movie scared me, because this was beyond anything I had ever experienced with Alcohol. I’ve always been able to, at least for 30 seconds to 1 minute, lock in and temporarily sober up when drunk. In this scenario I truly had no ability to do so. I could never have imagined that weed, given what people say about it, could be so powerful. Somewhere, in that churning sea, I was able to find sleep, and by the time I woke up it had mostly worn off. It wasn’t fully worn off until mid-day the next day.

Luckily I feel back to my old self, but I can’t tell if I’m just a huge THC lightweight or if any of you guys have had this experience. I don’t plan on doing THC ever again, even if this was a product of dosage. I experience similar disorientation and sickness when taking over-the-counter cough medicines containing DXM.