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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1. An Overview of
The First Time
Because our Puritan-based society has traditionally been uneasy
Addiction and
At the same time, marijuana is an attractive activity for
Strategies of Smokers
There are some smokers who are convinced that "good
Stopping
Notes
14. Looking Ahead:
Smokers of this persuasion speak of marijuana being grown by
In the event of legalization, it is unlikely that names will
The Moment of Awareness
Appendix
On the other hand, I very often have magnificent creative
2. A Denver high school
I don't know if you're interested, but the reason I started
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The Moment of Awareness
While
parts of the marijuana experience change with cultural and social developments,
other aspects remain constant. Here is Baudelaire on a characteristic response
of novice smokers:
Most
novices, of only the first degree of initiation, complain that hashish is slow
in taking effect. They wait with childish impatience for it to do so; and then,
when the drug does not function quickly enough to suit them, they indulge in a
swaggering incredulity, which gives great delight to old initiates, who know
just how hashish sets about its work.
Baudelaire might well have been commenting on the account of a
young woman who was a senior in 1967 at a quiet Catholic college in upstate New York:
It
was a very protective environment, but I had a boyfriend who got some pot, and
he asked if I wanted to try it. I was nervous, but he convinced me that it was
nothing more powerful than aspirin. I was sitting there in the car after taking
a few hits, saying, "Ah, nothing's happening, it's such a waste." I
kept repeating myself, saying over and over that nothing was happening. At this
point my boyfriend was beside himself with laughter, realizing that I was
stoned out of my mind.
I realize now that when I don't think I'm stoned, and I feel I
have to ask, then I probably am. If I'm not stoned, I don't have to ask the
question.[12]
It is still common for new smokers to repeatedly ask, "Am I
stoned?" or to insist over and over that they are not. "How do I know
I'm stoned?" some ask earnestly. When two novices decide to smoke
together, and there is no experienced smoker with them, the results can be
quite funny, with each one trying to decipher clues from the other. This is what
happened in the case of a humanistic psychologist who first tried marijuana
while teaching at a small rural college in the Midwest:
I
was with another fellow, also a teacher, and both of us were trying marijuana
for the first time. And we got into this funny situation, a kind of circle, or
knot. How could we know which of us was stoned? He was saying that I was
stoned, and I was saying, "No, I'm not stoned; I only look stoned to you
because you're stoned." We had very little to go on, not knowing
what to expect, how we would feel, or anything. It's clear, years later, that
we were both wrecked.
It generally takes time—years, in some cases—for the novice to
understand and appreciate the full range of effects and possibilities of this
altered state of consciousness. Indeed, most smokers never experience more than
a small portion of that range, some because they don't care to, others because
they have established for themselves very strict limits, such as smoking only
at parties, for example, or only on weekend evenings. There is a trade-off for
such people: their stoned experiences may be limited, but their sense of
control over the drug—no trivial matter—is usually secure.
Those who began smoking marijuana in college during the mid-1960s
were often heavily influenced by media reports about it. The media erroneously
lumped marijuana together with psychedelic drugs, implying that marijuana leads
to exotic and hallucinatory experiences, which is only rarely true in the United
States.
Ironically, many college students tried marijuana anticipating the reactions
they had read about in Newsweek, which in turn was purporting to describe what
the college students were experiencing, producing a circle of ignorance that
benefited nobody. But because LSD and marijuana are both mind-altering drugs
that came into public awareness at roughly the same time, they were frequently
confused, although they are radically different substances. Indeed, some
students tried LSD rather casually, assuming that the reports about it were no more
true than the reports about marijuana.
And so the novice smoker of the 1960s kept waiting for the cosmic
light show to begin, while back on earth there were more immediate and mundane
matters to deal with. Sarah, now a teacher, a mother, and a daily smoker, first
tried marijuana in 1968, while a student at Wellesley College. She was
introduced to marijuana by three male friends. "God," she recalls
thinking, "they must be so incredibly smart, smoking and talking at the
same time!" A few moments later, when she had to go to the bathroom, she
was afraid of not being able to get there. "I was worried that I wouldn't
be able to walk down the hall," she says, "but everyone assured me
that if you did things when you were high you would do them normally, even if
you didn't think you could." It turns out that going to the bathroom was
for many novices the first real test of whether they could function normally
after smoking marijuana; despite some initial nervousness, nobody reported
failure. Today, many of these same people think nothing of driving, going to
work, or even giving a lecture while they are stoned.
Many smokers can recall the exact moment they first realized they
were high. A Florida man recalls
being on the roof of an apartment building overlooking a city on a spring
night. A joint was circulating, and he asked to try it:
After
about seven tokes I noticed that the lights of the town were taking on a weird,
dazzling look. I had already cultivated the ability to see lights this way by
keeping my eyes motionless, so that the after-images built up. These images, I
had discovered, were an effective jumping-off point to fantasy worlds.
Marijuana, I decided, made this process a lot easier, and I was very pleased.
Later, walking back to my room, I was intrigued by the way things felt and
looked. I decided that I had discovered something pretty damn good.
Combined with this excitement there was also a measure of
disappointment for what marijuana did not represent:
For
the rest of that spring, I spent one or two evenings a week smoking with
friends and listening to music. I enjoyed this a great deal, but I did not find
what I was really after. I had been fascinated by the term "altered states
of consciousness," and I would stare into the light bulb on those stoned
nights, trying to penetrate the Veil through whatever opening the light bulb
might provide. No luck.
The images I was able to induce by closing my eyes were
entertaining, but none of it led anywhere. I was looking for something
much more intense. What I was really looking for, I now realize, was what I
received from LSD. But that's another story.
Some smokers recall that their first experience was more than
disappointing. A graduate student in Philadelphia reports that the first
time he smoked, it tasted like eating a combination of burning charcoal and hot
peanut butter A man who was in the navy, stationed on Hawaii in 1969, had
a very unpleasant first trip. Bad trips on marijuana are statistically
minuscule, but they do occur—especially the first time. The navy man was
driving with a friend one night and was talked into sharing a joint with him
while riding through the pineapple fields:
The
first thing I felt was a strange sort of numbness spreading up the back of my
head. I started to worry that I was going to black out. I kept driving, and
then I started worrying about whether I could keep the car on the road. I think
I was driving pretty well at the time, but I became terribly conscious of the
dangers involved, and terribly uneasy about whether or not I could cope with
these dangers while high. It got so bad that my companion offered to drive, and
I gladly let him. We drove back to the barracks, and I remember as we
approached the parking lot that I was scared to death that we would run into a
military cop who would know that we were high on grass, and not just drunk.
But the vast majority of first-time experiences are either
neutral or pleasant. Sometimes the first high is punctuated by unexpected and
inexplicable laughter and sometimes by a clear, new visual perception of
familiar objects. Both of these phenomena happened to a writer who works at a Washington think tank:
I
got a classic case of the giggles but unclassically, I found that I could stop
them by a sufficient effort of the will. If I did, however, the entire universe
tilted before my eyes to an incline of about forty-five degrees, and the only
way I could straighten out the world was to let go and laugh. This felt to me
like some weird kind of e=mc2; that is, emotional looseness had some kind of
relationship to spatial perception, structure, and the rightness of the world.
In other words, my world made sense only if I let myself go, especially in
laughter. I was a pretty square, uptight, antiwar liberal back then, not
interested in spiritual life, or in my own identity, or in laughing. It was a
major lesson for me.
A Montana man offers a more elaborate version of the
laughing experience during his first high:
I
walked out of the room and watched a tennis match. I turned to ask somebody
what the score was, and then I questioned what words I had used. I thought I
had said "Whjabbaja babjalla?" Then I remembered that I had gotten an
answer to my question, so perhaps I was wrong. I still hadn't attributed my
behavior to the pot. Finally, at dinner, someone said something funny, and I
couldn't stop laughing. I must have been a spectacle, but it was great. Then
and only then did I realize that the pot had hit me.
For other smokers, the first moment of stoned awareness is marked
by an unmistakable change in auditory or visual perception. A medical student
in San
Francisco
recalls:
I
didn't realize that I was stoned until I got home from a friend's house, turned
off the lights, and turned on "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by the Iron
Butterfly. I got incredibly freaked out by the music. At first, I was really
frightened, because I couldn't understand why I felt this way—until I
remembered that I had smoked.
A teacher in Oregon recalls turning on her
best friend:
We
were in a group of people, and a joint was being passed around. She reached for
it—she had never smoked before—and I said, "Now you know you don't have to
if you don't want to." I was worried that she might feel pressured to
smoke. She said she knew what she was doing and proceeded to take three tokes.
She coughed a little, and after a while I saw her staring at the trees out of
the window. I said, "Kathy, what are you staring at?" She said she
never noticed how beautiful the trees were. I knew then she was high.
A woman in her late fifties who lives on a farm in Maine reports a
similar experience. The first time she smoked, nothing happened. Her two
daughters, who had encouraged her the first time, tried again a few weeks
later. Still no results.
Then,
the third time, I had a little more to smoke, and I noticed a piece of glass
sculpture on the windowsill that had caught the sun. And I found myself staring
at this sculpture, which was glowing. I had never noticed before how beautiful
it was. This was the first time I noticed any effect.
An elderly New York woman reports a
variation on this theme. She claims she was sent a package of seeds in an
envelope with a note saying, "Plant these for size." She did, and one
of her friends recognized the plant and rolled two cigarettes for her. "At
this point," she writes, "I would like to say I am on Medicare along
with most of my friends. I think we are considered little old ladies in
sneakers—which no doubt we are." She continues:
So
we smoked. Nothing happened except a deep sense of relaxation, which was nice.
Since I've never been able to drink, I understood why liquor was so much in
demand. I live on the thirty-first floor of my building, and there is a
drugstore off the lobby where I buy the evening paper. I rang for the elevator.
The trip down was endless, and the lobby was miles away. I got there, bought
the paper, wandered through the desert of the lobby for forty years, got on the
elevator and flew home.
I had left the radio on and it was playing the most heavenly
music I've ever heard. The pianist was making each note sound clear and rounded
and perfect. I was held until the record was over. Then the announcer said that
the pianist was Liberace and that strange and evocative music was
"Traumerei" by Schumann. I decided to get rid of the Mary Jane at
once.
As with many other facets of life, what a person brings to the
marijuana experience will largely determine what he gets out of it. Steve, now
a car salesman, first tried marijuana in his adolescence, when he was involved
in a quest for truth, meaning, and values:
For
me it was an intellectual thing. I'd ask a question, and I'd have to have the
answer to it. I wasn't smoking for fun. These were huge questions like: what is
the meaning and purpose of life? Here I was getting high, and saying to myself
that I've got to have the answer to the questions I was asking. Marijuana
didn't provide those answers, but it did help, and it stimulated more
questions.
Mark, who is married to Sarah from Wellesley, started
smoking ten years ago as a Harvard freshman. He works in the computer-design
field; back then, he smoked to better understand the workings of his own mind:
I
was a philosophy major. The fundamental question on my mind was what is beauty.
My roommate and I started smoking grass as an experiment; we would spend hours
getting stoned and taping ourselves being stoned and talking about it. I have
always been very interested in how people's heads work. What is this process
called thinking, and how does it work? My early experiences with drugs were
originally intended to understand what was going on in my own mind.
Some users become interested in the serious side of marijuana
even before trying it. Others come to it only after years of smoking, while
some users are simply not interested in using marijuana as a tool for exploring
their minds and hearts. Similarly, some first-time users begin smoking fairly
quickly, while others try marijuana after so lengthy a deliberation that their
first experience may be more a matter of "when" than
"whether." This caution was more typical of the 1960s. Looking back
on those years, David recalls that he wanted to try marijuana as a junior in
college but didn't actually take the plunge until after graduation:
I
had an older friend, Mel, who seemed to me very wise and full of good advice on
the business of life. I told him I wanted to try marijuana, and I asked him
what he thought. I knew he would be against it, but I wanted a reason for my
own opposition. He gave me one: "You'd be a shmuck to try it." Now
Mel and I had a fairly deep friendship, and he was often saying wise and pithy
things. His answer made sense to me at the time and served its purpose for
three years—until I finally realized it was bullshit and began to smoke.
Sometimes the initial marijuana experience can be planned and
prepared for. Mark tells of introducing a friend to grass by reading her
selected passages from the chapter on "Turning On" in Lester
Grinspoon's book Marihuana Reconsidered. Several smokers mentioned that
they did research on marijuana before taking their first toke. For others, the
experience was more spontaneous, as with a teacher from California who recalls:
I
remember thinking to myself, "Here goes." It was almost like losing
my virginity. Nothing happened for an hour. Then, walking along the beach with
friends, I suddenly began to notice that the whitecaps were rolling onto the
shore like angels of God sweeping in over some kind of grassy, wet meadow.
While actual hallucinations are rare with marijuana, it is common
for a smoker to experience an altered perception, to be struck by a
particularly forceful and vivid image. The California teacher
didn't claim to see angels of God, although under LSD he might have.
With marijuana, he is far more likely to be struck by a concrete image such as
"this is what angels of God might look like."
Naturally, a particular challenge for the novice smoker is to
determine exactly where subjective change ends and objective "normal"
reality begins. In other words, he must answer the implicit question:
"Which world should I believe in when the two realities tell me different
things?" The new user frequently wants to know if he looks
different when he is stoned and often goes off to seek the answer in the
nearest mirror. A college student in Baltimore who first got stoned at
a medieval festival in New York, recalls: "I had
the strong feeling that I looked different, I was nervous, and afraid that
everyone knew I was stoned." She had taken a camera with her, and she
asked her friends to take some pictures so that she could see, later on, how
she had actually looked that day. I asked her how the pictures turned out, and
she looked at me as though the question made no sense. Indeed, by the time I
asked, it probably didn't. "They turned out absolutely normal," she
replied. "I simply looked happy. I guess the changes were all
inside."
Another mark of the first-time experience are feelings of
happiness and confidence. A young man who, like several other users here,
smoked his first joint on a hill behind his high school, recalls:
At
first I was thinking that there was no reaction, no effect. "This isn't
working," I thought. And then suddenly I stopped and said, "Dave, I
feel funny." And I started looking at everything differently. Things
seemed funnier. And I became much less inhibited, and I started running down
the hill toward the school, yelling "BANZAI!"
Sometimes the initial experience is very dramatic, much more so
than subsequent smoking. An occupational therapist who had smoked several times
without getting high found herself in an encounter group that celebrated its
final session with a party. She evidently had smoked a good deal, finding
herself at one point passing two pipes at once and holding a third one between
her teeth:
I
was having a fine time and wasn't really thinking about being stoned until
suddenly I had the sensation that I was simultaneously blacking out and yet was
completely aware of everything around me. I was teetering between oblivion and
total consciousness. It was an incredible experience. I don't think I
recognized what was happening until I attempted to call out a phone message,
which was dissolved in laughter; I knew then I was no longer in control of
things.
What followed was a long evening of wide-eyed amazement as I
found myself in a new dimension of time: the absolute present. There was no
past moment and no future moment—at least, none that was connected to any sense
of reality. There was only the very, very immediate present which changed with
every fraction of a second, and I had total control of it.
Every passing moment dissipated, and I entered a new state of
oblivion. The only time this feeling has ever been duplicated for me was when I
had to give a lecture to a group of students. Panic-stricken, I spoke each word
automatically and enthusiastically, not knowing how I had started each
sentence, or how on earth I intended to finish it.
For many first-time smokers, the experience stands as a
life-changing event. Joining the company of fellow-smokers can represent a
major change, which has implications for other events and other decisions. A Vermont man in his
mid-twenties recalls his first experience, which occurred while he was in high
school:
Weeks
of thought had gone into that decision, and starting to smoke was for me the
end of a long internal debate between two very different world-views.
According to one, life was basically simple: all that needed to
be done was to choose a path and then follow it with little deviation, and all
would be well; problems would be resolved even before they appeared. If I did
well in school, decided on a professional career, became active with the right
crowd and didn't knock against the surface of things, then life would be, well,
life. This path, in other words, would not represent a struggle for the
person who chose it. On the contrary: it would reflect the substance and the
personality of the chooser. The actual choice would occur unconsciously, like
the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
The trouble arose for me when I realized that there lay within me
another world-view, one that would not go away even when I wanted it to, and
one that had to be contended with. It said that the surface of things was not
always an accurate gauge of the way things really were, that people who seemed
to fit into their prepared niches were not inherently better or smarter than
those who were still searching. The world was different than what you were told
it would be, and the voice of authority was not always in possession of the
best or wisest way to be—or to behave. If you held a complex view of things,
like this second world-view, you could never pretend to have a simple view, and
life, far from becoming simpler and more knowable as you got older, became
instead more complicated, more complex and entangled. There would be other
choices to make.
Deciding to smoke marijuana put me squarely in the second camp,
and I knew it. The undramatic first episode did not signal any change of heart,
any turning back. The decision had been made to become a smoker and to accept
the ambiguity of the smoking world, not to mention its dangers—these were the
days of jail sentences for possession, not to mention the popular belief that
marijuana led to heroin—and not to mention the defiance of parents, teachers,
and society at large.
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