5. A housewife, 26, in

Like most people, I began to smoke marijuana out of curiosity. The various news media bombarded me almost daily with conflicting information about marijuana and other drugs, and I decided that the only way to find out about the marijuana experience was to try it, so I did. That was about four and a half years ago. Today I am a fairly heavy user.
    In the beginning, I felt thrilled that I could actually find the courage to do something illegal and get away with it. (Pot has been decriminalized here in Ohio, but it was still totally illegal when I started.) Having grown up under rather isolated conditions (rural, lower class), I was also thrilled that this group of people accepted me and even seemed to like me. That is where my education began.
    The thrill of illegality soon wore off, but since I enjoyed being high from the beginning, I could see no reason to stop. My self-image didn't suffer from what I was doing, either. On the contrary; it began to improve. I felt good when I was high, and one day it soaked through my thick skull that if I could function effectively among people when I was stoned, then I ought to be able to do the same when I wasn't. So I tried. I geared up what little courage had survived my childhood years, and I tried talking to somebody without being totally bombed. It worked! From then on I became increasingly conscious of the effects that smoking was having on me.
    My favorite time for smoking was while making the hour-long drive to the college I was attending. One day, instead of a useless stream of facts parading through my befogged brain, those facts started connecting themselves in a sensible manner. Specifically, I was ruminating over things I had learned in anatomy and physiology, and with a flash I understood how all of the different things we learned were relevant to each other. I realized what it meant to apply the things that were retained in my mind. All through my life I had thought learning meant memorizing a bunch of facts to answer back to the teachers on tests. I was so overwhelmed by this discovery that I had to pull off the road in order to give it the serious attention it deserved. I've never forgotten that lesson. It helped me start pulling myself up from my unhappy childhood and warped adolescence. (I'm still climbing, but I've come far enough now to know that I'm going to make it.)
    I am now able to use marijuana casually instead of needily. I no longer smoke to find the courage to do things. In fact, I find that when I feel shaky in the knees before a new encounter, a joint may prevent the experience from being fulfilling.
    Currently, I smoke almost every day, usually only if I'm feeling chipper. Marijuana is a mood-enhancer for me, rather than a mood-changer, and it's a lousy experience if I smoke pot when I'm grumpy or ill at ease. If I'm about to undertake something that could turn out to be either a good or a bad experience, I find that if I concentrate on the possibility of a pleasant time, and get a good buzz on, it seldom turns out badly.
    It goes almost without saying that getting high during an already pleasant experience increases the pleasure many times. But the reverse is also true, and a bad experience is made worse by smoking. I don't smoke in places where I feel uncomfortable, or with people I don't feel at ease with. I've wasted too many years being depressed, so I've learned how to smoke in order to exaggerate the good things in life and minimize the bad. I call it survival.
    At the same time, I don't have to smoke pot in order to function. Every couple of weeks I will go through a period, usually from one to three days, during which I have no desire to get high. These times really cheer me too, for they are the signals that let me know that I can function without artificial aid. 'These abstinence periods also enable me to more thoroughly enjoy it when I resume smoking. They are also useful in that I don't harbor a half-buried fear that the Establishment is right and that I'll be hooked for the rest of my life. Less guilt equals more fun. (If I'm hooked on anything, it's food, not pot.)
    I'm not a physically inclined person, but even physical activities are enhanced by smoking. When stoned, I become aware of almost every bone and muscle in my body, and can follow their alignment with each other, receiving an anatomy lesson far superior to anything I learned in my three semesters of high school biology. I experience the ability to actually feel the parts of my body functioning together as one smoothly working unit. I've been trying to extend this awareness consciously to include the involuntary systems and parts of my body; so far, the success has been small, but enough to know that in time, with serious effort, I will develop that ability as well.
    The way in which I appreciate music has changed since I began smoking. I used to listen to music, or rather to the Iyrics of songs, almost as an addiction, finding in them a reason or justification for almost everything I thought or did. Now, I hardly know more than a few words of my favorite songs; instead, I listen to the music and understand that music is a series of connected sounds and that they are connected by memory; if you can't remember the previous note, the next one won't have much meaning.