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Last week, I ran into one of my
teenage nieces at a trance party. I was just there out of
curiosity -- really. "You are the coolest aunt, "
she told me.
She has a point. I've lived on
a commune, hitchhiked across Europe, marched in demonstrations,
have an open mind and love to experience new things.
It was that love of new things that led me to my first experience
with pot, back in the '60's.
I was 18 and in my first year
of college. My friend, Bill, and I went to his apartment to
pick up the rest of our crowd, and a bunch of people were
sitting around the table smoking a joint.
Do you want to try it? Bill asked.
Sure, I said. I'm always up for an adventure. Besides, I knew
some people who had smoked and nothing terrible had happened
to them. And I trusted Bill.
So I sat there and inhaled and coughed -- and coughed some
more. I watched as one girl's eyes started turning red. Watched
as she started laughing at everything anyone said. She looked
like she was having a great time. I wanted to have a great
time too, so I kept pulling the stuff into my lungs -- but
nothing happened.
The veterans told me that that
often happens the first time.
The second time, I did it with my roommate, Shelly. We stuffed
a towel into the crack of our dorm room door and lit up.
Wow. I think that's the highest I've ever been. After a few
tokes, we started laughing and couldn't stop. I fell back
on my bed and suddenly felt like I was on one of those stools
that you can spin and it gets higher and higher. Only my stool
was sitting on top of the planet and I was spinning off into
outer space. Very weird.
We both felt it was more than we had bargained for, so we called
our friend David in the dorm next door to help us through it.
You'll know how high I was when I tell you that at some point,
I was holding his hand and I looked down and thought that I was
holding just a hand -- unattached to a body. It was scary.
Over the next year or so, almost all my friends tried it.
It was no big deal. We knew it was illegal and we were careful.
We knew this one guy who got busted but he dealt. We weren't
into that.
So I smoked off and on for a few years and then this funny
thing started happening. Actually, I think it was happening
all along, but it started to get to me. I would smoke and
I would get kind of paranoid.
Like I remember this one time
when I was with my boyfriend and my roommate. We had smoked
and I had gone to the bathroom. I was looking in the mirror
when I heard them laughing in the living room and I was sure
they were laughing at me!
That kind of thing kept happening. I felt that marijuana frees
up something inside you so that unconscious feelings swim
up to the surface and you become aware of them. I was insecure
to begin with, but usually managed to keep those feelings
at bay. When I was high, I couldn't. There they were in all
their glory -- or I should say in all their difficulty and
pain. I wasn't into feeling pain.
Later, I started to worry about
stuff I'd heard about pot - like that it could affect your
short-term memory. I didn't want that to happen to me. My
father had lost his memory when he was old and I didn't want
to take any chances with mine!
I kept hearing people say that
you could get what I got from pot from regular meditation.
And you know what - it's true. I've also discovered other
ways to get the benefits of pot without polluting my mind
and body. That same feeling washes over me when I wake up
in the middle of the night with a new idea, when I'm in love,
when I manage to plug into the universal creative energy that
is both inside and around all of us - then I feel focussed,
creative, tuned in - in short -- high.
So despite my early, mostly positive experiences, I would
say: DON'T SMOKE MARIJUANA.
Three reasons:
One, just like alcohol, marijuana is something you should
wait to do (if you do it at all) when you're an adult. It
can lead you to all sorts of places that you just aren't ready
to deal with. Also, I wouldn't want to take a chance with
a body and brain that were still developing. They're the best
things you've got and you don't want to risk screwing them
up in any way.
Two, for some people it can be dangerous.
I have a very good friend who started smoking daily. It was
just a few tokes, she said, to add color to her day. After
a month or so, she got high and kind of didn't come down.
She thought she was doing great: having lots of realizations,
learning about herself, growing up all at once. She said she
felt like she was having a growth spurt, like she had just
gone through ten years of therapy in a week.
The problem was she was going
too fast. During that last week, she hardly ate and barely
slept. That Saturday, we had to take her to the emergency
room. She started to say really weird things that no one could
understand. She wasn't making sense. And we couldn't get through
to her. At the hospital, they said she was having a "manic
episode", gave her a shot of some kind of strong anti-psychotic
drug and a day later she was back to normal. But she got a
good scare. The doctor said it was probably the marijuana
that did it. He told her it would be a good idea to never
smoke again.
And three, depending on where
you live, you could get into really big trouble with the law.
I know of a girl whose sister got taken away to a foster home
because their mother had given her money to buy pot. And the
mother got charged with neglect. The sister's been in the
foster home for months and the mom is fighting in the courts
to get her back. That kind of thing can happen because marijuana
is illegal.
One final thought. Although pot
is one of the more "gentle" mind altering substances,
it is still mind altering. And any time you are not in full
control of yourself, you are not in the best shape to deal
with things that come you way.
You want to be on top of the
situation.
That's really the best way to
be on top of the world.
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