I discovered marijuana for the first time in the summer after seventh grade, and from the very start, it was something I enjoyed. I hadn’t realized it yet, but I’m cursed with an addictive personality. Maybe I should have pieced it together from how I devoured candy, cartoons, and video games, but alas. Though I didn’t fall headfirst into addiction, I knew shortly after that first inhale of those skunk-flavored fumes that I wanted to do it again.
Those first experiences were almost akin to mushroom or LSD trips, though it would be years until I would grow to understand that. It was unclear whether the intensity was due to how much more potent the weed has gotten since our parents first encountered it or simply because of how young we were when my friends and I discovered it. But in those days, just a few hits would cause colors and sensations to intensify. Listening to music was euphoric, encountering police cars petrifying, and conversing with our parents while high, a colossal and often fruitless endeavor.
With red eyes, stupefied stares, and reeking hoodies, it’s a wonder we could fool anyone at all in those early delinquent days. My friends and I would spend significant portions of our weekends smoking, and when Monday would roll around, we’d begin planning for the next one. And each time we made plans for the weekend ahead, we would impractically heighten in our minds what they would turn into. We would breathe something almost fantastical into the visions of itineraries that would typically culminate in hushed huddles in forsaken forests on blustery winter nights. But even still, each week in class, I could feel my attention beginning to drift toward those exciting weekends that never quite came to fruition.
I was at the mercy of an addiction. I was good at talking myself out of it, though; I watched YouTube videos about how weed was a harmless substance and went along my merry way. But there was a part of me that was aware of a change beginning to occur beneath the surface. Within months of trying that first homemade bottle bong with a friend in the woods, I’d graduated to smoking nearly every day. I wasn’t a dishonest person, but my addiction began to necessitate lies.
Though I didn’t fully dive into the deep end, my relationship with marijuana in those early years actually had many of the hallmarks of physical addiction. The days without it would bring with them mild withdrawal symptoms. My appetite, sleep, and immune system all seemed to suffer in its absence.
There are few studies that speak well of marijuana use in adolescents. It’s only in the cases of rare illnesses and disabilities that the substance has much value to offer children and teenagers. But I didn’t care. I cherry-picked from the sources that justified my decisions.
As I continued to smoke, I found myself in increasingly precarious situations. Though I didn’t graduate to other drugs, I was spending time with more and more nefarious sorts.
A week before high school began, I found myself confronting a knife at my throat, pleading to be set free. It happened in the park I’d walked my dog through regularly since elementary school.
Though the situation wasn’t my fault, it was one I would never have found myself in if marijuana hadn’t entered into my life. To my adolescent self, though, that hardly felt like reason enough to quit. My relationship with weed had changed.
Weed wasn’t so much about fun anymore as it was about numbing. I think it may have actually helped me to cope with the aftermath of that life-threatening situation. I think it helped the trauma to lay dormant. Throughout high school, I didn’t present outwardly as someone who suffered from PTSD. Instead of allowing these newfound fears to shape me, I happily assumed the title of a pothead and let them sink into a haze of smoke and psychedelic rock. I let anxieties hide behind glazed eyes and wore tie-dyed shirts that concealed pain beneath vibrant spatterings of color.
Though I maintained good grades in honors classes — in what seems, in retrospect, almost a superhuman feat of achievement — weed remained a major part of my life throughout high school. Even in college, it was difficult for me to put the bong aside. And as more and more members of the psychonautically inclined millennial youth entered my life, the struggles around smoking only mounted. The freedom of university living was too much too soon, and I allowed weed to eat up more and more of my days.
By then, I’d begun to develop an understanding not only of marijuana’s greatest benefits but of its most awful side effects. I began to think more about the future and whether I wanted weed to remain a part of it. I’d quit for weeks and even occasionally months at a time, but each time I returned to smoking, it was to the reminder of what exactly I’d missed about it.
When the pandemic hit, marijuana’s role in my life changed once again. It felt like a drug that kept me from sliding into an existential depression. In those early days of lockdown, when paranoias and restrictions were at their highest, a hit could be enough to keep me from spiraling toward fury or despair. When I smoked, I felt contented — even comfortable in my quarantine. Rage and defeat would turn quickly into awe for the internet machines in our pockets and a fascination with the variety of entertainment avenues that still remained open to us. Throughout Corona, this weed addiction of mine hardly seemed like a vice worth confronting.
In 2022 as I began to explore my love for writing more deeply, weed’s role in my life had changed yet again. I discovered for the first time that it was possible for me to write while high. Where in high school and college, the attempts to churn out essays under the influence would typically result in something simplistic at best and lost and disjointed at worst, marijuana began to seem suddenly as though it was offering real creative utility.
As I’ve continued along this path, it’s become something that it never used to be. Though I don’t depend on it to write, I find that it brings something new to the creative process when I do. I think it brings with it a level of introspection foreign to me in more sober states. Weed can even be motivational. There are times when I’ve closed my laptop, burnt out from writing for the day, and then, after smoking a bit, will feel a jolt of renewed interest in the subject I’ve been addressing. New angles will occur to me. I’ll be more attuned to the poetic ways my ideas can be expressed. My approach to writing will be less concrete in nature.
As strange as it is to say, I think there are entire articles that owe their existence to bong hits. I’ve arrived at ideas, implemented them, and edited them meticulously, all while stagnant clouds of exhaled smoke have hovered in the air around me. It’s often difficult to deny the creative utility weed can offer.
But at the same time, I notice its side effects. I fear for my short-term memory and don’t always want weed to define me. There are times when it numbs me in ways that I regret afterward. There are times when it confines me to corners in concert halls, and there are times that it leaves me motionless in my bedroom, unable to formulate my future. At its worst, it leaves me struggling to even commit to the day ahead.
Even though, in my adult life, I’ve managed to achieve a place of moderation with my marijuana use, I certainly can’t say I’m beyond the addiction struggle entirely. As the substance has grown increasingly legal and its medical applications increasingly well understood, though, I’ve learned more appropriate ways of using it. As I’ve explored mindfulness and meditation, too, I’ve gained a more measured approach to my habit.
My relationship with marijuana has always been a fluid one. The role that it’s played in my life has varied wildly. As I’ve grown older and more acquainted with its benefits and consequences, I’ve felt more and more conflicted about the habit. If I don’t quit, I fear that it might forever limit my capacities to explore life, but I fear that if I do, I’d lose a creative tool, a happy reprieve in an ailing world, and a small part of myself.