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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
  • 8. Marijuana and the

    Mind


    The story is told of three men who were traveling across the desert on their way to the great city. The first was a drinker of wine, the second a user of opium, and the third a smoker of ganja. When they finally arrived at the city, it was midnight, and the gates had been locked. The drinker of wine drank mightily from his sheepskin; he beat against the gates of the city, and finally fell down in a slumber. The man who favored opium smoked some of it, looked up dreamily at the sky, and then fell asleep by the side of the gate. The smoker of ganja inhaled deeply on his pipe, went up to the gate, and put his eye up to the keyhole. "Behold," he cried, "we are already in the city!"

    — traditional folk story

     

    Time

    Over the centuries, researchers, writers, and smokers have all agreed that one of the most constant effects of marijuana is its tendency to alter the user's awareness of time. Smokers routinely find that events seem to take longer when they are stoned and that time itself seems to pass more slowly. One side of a record album can last for over an hour—or so the user imagines—while a simple walk of two blocks may seem like a long hike.
        This slowing down of time has at least two advantages for the smoker. First, it prolongs the stoned experience. "When I'm high," claims Carol, "I can spend three good hours between half-past ten and
    midnight." In addition, marijuana usually relaxes the user, and this too is connected with an expanded sense of time, as Mezz Mezzrow vividly describes:

    You know how jittery, got-to-be-moving people in the city always get up in the subway train two minutes before they arrive at the station? Their nerves are on edge; they're watching the clock, thinking about schedules, full of that high-powered mile-a-minute jive. Well, when you've picked up some gauge that clock just stretches its arms, yawns, and dozes off. The whole world slows down and gets drowsy. You wait until the train stops dead and the doors slide open, then you get up and stroll out in slow motion, like a sleepwalker with a long night ahead of him and no appointments to keep. You've got all the time in the world. What's the rush, buddy? Take-it-easy, that's the play, it's bound to sweeten it all the way.[1]


        Marijuana smokers occasionally speak of being aware of two different kinds of time: objective, geophysical time, as measured by the clock, and subjective "inner" or personal time.
    [2] Anybody who has ever sat through a boring meeting has had a similar sensation: time is moving more quickly on the personal scale than it is on the clock. A jazz musician speaks of this double awareness in these terms:

    When I began smoking, the elongation of time was very prominent. It was the first occasion I realized that I had a sense of time. It made me feel like a fish in water, who normally isn't conscious of the ocean all around him. Similarly, I had never really been conscious of time, except when I looked at a clock. I had always assumed that the clock was time.
        The fish, who is contentedly swimming in the ocean, one day bumps up against a rock. And one day I became aware of a new substance, which had something to do with the roots of my consciousness, where time and space originate in the first place. I didn't think about all of this when it first occurred; I just had the experience, and the ideas filled in later.


        For some smokers, the regular sense of time, as measured by the clock, becomes suspended rather than replaced; these users find that smoking makes it easier for them to become totally immersed in the activity at hand, during which they are simply unaware of the passage of time. For this group, words like "timeless" take on a new meaning, and if one is religiously inclined, certain religious concepts having to do with time and space may become more meaningful.
        Why does time pass more slowly for the smoker? Some users speculate that it would otherwise be difficult to imagine how so many interesting events and ideas could have taken place in so short a period. Lenny elaborates on this idea:

    Remember how long time took to pass when you were a child? So much of what you do as an adult is ordinary, whereas to a child it is new and interesting. With marijuana, you tend to be so fascinated with things that you're much more interested in what's going on and you think, gosh, I must have been here for an hour and a half, when really it's only been thirty-five minutes.
        We are used to judging time in terms of important events. When you're high, everything is important, so you assume that a lot of things have happened. Well, a lot of things have happened, but if you weren't stoned, most of them would not have seemed very interesting.

     

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