Marijuana

I had been smoking marijuana for so long, it seemed like second nature. Its funny how something I couldn’t do very well at the start would be something I would fall in love with. I still remember my first real smoke, the first time I really inhaled. Kansas City. I remember my room mate G glaring at me from the other side of the table making sure I really inhaled deeply.
“Naw nigga you aint inhaling hit it again.”
I cant describe the first time I got high, I don’t recall it. I have no reason to believe it was anything unlike the several hundred times I got high.

What’s sad is that it made me feel so good, made me feel legitimate. I didn’t need anything else. As long as I had a blunt, I could spend hours inside of a book, or writing on paper, dazing off to music. It made me feel so good because I felt so bad otherwise. When I started smoking my life was a total mess. I had plans but they were more like fantasies. I had no real goal or ambition other than I wanted to smoke weed and write. It’s almost painful to admit such things, but I am growing and maturing and part of that means looking back on your past and seeing your mistakes. I take pride in the fact that I can look back on myself two years ago and see where I fell and see where I should have said no when I said yes.

Marijuana almost cost me my life. Not because of an over dose or because of harmful side effects but because of the lifestyle that came with it. I thank God that it only sucked three years out of my life. My attempt to quit was a year long process. I knew it was bad when it started taking over my writing. When I found out I couldn’t write without weed. It took me a while to wrestle my gift away from my addiction. My smoking took over other things as well my job, my school, it seemed like a lot of things, if not everything was better high. I could do (so I felt) everything better high.

I am amused in the fact that people say marijuana is such a low class drug, the effects are so minimal as compared to other drugs. I don’t debate that, I am just relieved that I didn’t get myself caught up in harder drugs. Even drinking was not something I preferred to do, for me smoking weed was enough.

When I was caught and arrested for marijuana it was not a wake up call as one would expect. I was too focused on the way I was caught. (Which even to this day I admit was racial profiling) I didn’t see that if I simply didn’t have any thing illegal on me I wouldn’t even had anything to worry about when the cop pulled me over.

Though, I don’t blame all my follies and young lifestyle on drugs. Even now, I can look back and admit that while I was addicted to the drug and at times it tried to attach itself to every facet of my life, I was not a heavy user. I had my own limit of how much I could smoke and would smoke. This maybe saved me a little but not much. I never learned to roll my own blunt. This was a deliberate action on my part, so that I would be limited in how much and how often I could smoke. I was against pipes (and oddly the one time I used it I was caught with it by the police) so if I couldn’t find someone to roll for me I just couldn’t smoke.

I did a lot of silly and reckless things in order to buy marijuana. A lot of gas and a lot of time was wasted driving to the ghettos of Kansas city to get small amounts of weed. I can recall several times when I would make the forty minute trip out to Kansas City with my friend Phil just to return empty handed or worse with weed that was little more than grass clippings. I can’t even recall nore, do I wash to recall all the times I was ripped off.

I don’t know how much different my life would be if I had never had smoked that first blunt, if I had of not lived the life that lead me to even be in that apartment. And though I am filled with remorse for my lost opportunities I cannot let regret overwhelm me.

I watched a close friend blow through his money buying weed, I watched a friend lose opportunities because of weed. They say the drug is not harmful to your body, but it can take a heavy toll on your brain. One does not think clearly with marijuana, even after the effects have been warn off it is still in your system. Something done out of casual boredom soon takes over your life as a priority. I don’t assume I can stop someone who is heavily smoking or even someone who may be curious. But I do know that someone who is along the same path as me someone who wants to stop but sees no reason to or just cant because they don’t believe it is effecting them should take close stock of their life. Would your life be better or worse if you stopped smoking? And if you feel it would be, why don’t you stop? Or do you realize that it would leave a gap in your life. Does your time and effort revolving around getting high next? Your priorities are revolving around getting high and wasting time. At the apex of youth, wasting time is not something we should be doing.