How Smokers Know They

For some people, the change from "straight" to stoned comes gradually, and there is no distinct point where one sensibility yields to another. Other smokers find that marijuana hits them all at once: "Five brains open up in my head."[11]
    An Ohio woman notices that every time she smokes marijuana from a batch with which she is unfamiliar, she experiences a period of waiting and wondering, not knowing what exactly is going to happen, or even whether she is going to feel stoned. Smokers who have been high hundreds of times sometimes have a similar experience. David, a journalist for a Jewish magazine, describes smoking as involving a "leap of faith" and compares the process to that of climbing a ladder whose top step is missing. "You have to take a bit of a jump," he explains, "and if you don't make the effort, you won't get high. There's no free ride."
    Judy, a psychotherapist, often finds herself concerned that she won't get high after smoking; to compensate, she will have what she calls "an insurance toke." For example, if she has smoked with friends before going out to dinner, she may, upon arriving at the restaurant, remain in the car an extra moment for the insurance toke, to make sure she will remain high through the meal. The insurance toke serves another purpose; generally, the most interesting and energetic parts of the high occur within a few minutes of smoking, and to achieve the best results, some users prefer to smoke smaller quantities of marijuana spread over several hours, rather than a larger amount all at once.
    One way that smokers know they are stoned is that they begin to experience a certain distance between themselves and the rest of the world, which they often describe as similar to the relationship between a film or a play and its audience. Some smokers report that they see themselves as the audience; others feel like the actors. "I find myself making dramatic gestures as though somebody's watching me, even though nobody is" is how one woman describes it.
    Similarly, many smokers experience the world around them in staged or dramatic terms. One person calls it "the capital letters syndrome," explaining, "When I'm high, the person I'm with is not just standing around the kitchen making cookies, but is instead Standing Around the Kitchen Making Cookies. The actions seem more important, more deliberate, and more meaningful." David makes a similar point, saying that when he is stoned, he notices that his friends become an exaggerated extension of themselves:

It's very different from the effects of alcohol, which seems to change people in a different way. On marijuana, sloppy people get sloppier, tidy people are continually emptying ashtrays, witty people become even more clever, and funny people are a riot. Unfortunately, boring people become excruciatingly boring, although they are often easier to tolerate because I too am stoned, and I'm usually more flexible and less uptight.
    My friends become so very much more themselves, almost to the point of being self-parodies. I think to myself: here is Joel becoming so Joel, Eva being the essential Eva, and Leora as a caricature of herself.

    Some smokers feel this way about themselves, as well. Laurence McKinney, a Boston writer and educator, explains why:

There are parts of you—in fact, 95 percent of you—that are like everybody else. Physically, you're almost exactly like everybody else. But your personality is different. How you view things, your likes and dislikes, the various elements which make up who you are, these are different as well. This has to do with the higher cortical centers in your brain. Now here comes marijuana, which is suddenly going to speed up the entire operation, like pouring grease onto a fire. So for about an hour and a half, you are going to be very much yourself. Every person becomes much more themselves. And the things that particularly interest you normally will become fascinating when you're stoned.

    There appears to be no standard way in which people experience and identify the moment wherein they know for sure that they are stoned, and not all smokers experience that moment consciously. For some, it may be a physical sensation in the body, or a certain familiar mental process. For a Wisconsin teacher, it is a series of perceptual changes that she describes:

Within a few seconds of taking a toke or two, the show gets on the road. If the marijuana is good, I can tell right away. Little visual scenes, like the arrangement of the salt and pepper shakers on the table, or the linoleum patterns, will start to hint at inner meaning. Across the room, the sparkle of an aluminum pot becomes a sly wink. The radio music from the hall starts to manifest itself with a new clarity, as though the radio and I were the last living things in the world.
    When I get up, my motions feel exaggerated, goofy, entrancing. Somebody comes into the room and we get into a conversation. All attention is on the subject at hand. At some point I might mention that I'm stoned; the other person says she hasn't noticed, and I wonder how that could be.