Bad Trips and Unusual

    Unpleasant experiences, or bad trips, are relatively uncommon, but when they occur, they can be intense, frightening, and very disturbing. There are no reliable statistics, but it appears that bad marijuana experiences are becoming rarer each year, as marijuana becomes increasingly familiar as a recreational drug. Indeed, those smokers who recalled bad trips usually indicated that they had occurred some years previously. During the 19605, there were scattered instances of smokers seeking professional help during or immediately after a bad trip; today, such occurrences are virtually unknown.
    Most bad experiences on marijuana are directly related to the fears and insecurities of the user. For obvious reasons, the novice is especially susceptible. Bad trips can result from smoking too much marijuana or from unexpectedly potent material. Marijuana adulterated with other drugs can also produce a bad trip, although this occurs less frequently than is commonly believed.
    In describing their fears and anxieties, marijuana smokers inevitably speak of "paranoia," using the term to describe a wide range of emotional states from mild discomfort to terror. One of the most common negative feelings experienced by smokers is the suspicion that they are not really liked by other people who are present, or that, aware of their state, nonusers are looking down on them. Other smokers report that they sometimes feel vulnerable in busy places, such as restaurants or shopping centers. "People naturally look rushed and bitter and hostile in such places," observes Sarah, "and when I'm stoned, it's magnified many times." Most smokers who experience such feelings are careful to avoid situations where they might occur. But occasionally, as Jenny discovered, a bad trip cannot be anticipated:

We went to the Virgin Islands for our honeymoon. One night we got very stoned, and I couldn't stand up at dinner. I felt claustrophobic, as though I couldn't breathe. I wanted to get to a bright, open place. My fear was that I was going to die there, at the resort, and that nobody would know who I was because I was registered at the hotel under my new married name. How would they know I was really Jenny Smith from Queens? How would they know who I belonged to? I imagined annihilation. Of me. Destruction. The end.

    Jenny's bad trip was clearly related to her anxiety about her new identity as a married woman. But not all such experiences are so easily explained. Sandy can recall having only one bad marijuana experience, but it was memorable:

I had been smoking on and off all day with friends, and a few of us were sitting around listening to records. All of a sudden I became convinced that my breathing was going to stop at any moment, and I panicked. A friend talked me down, telling me to relax, that it was just the grass that made me feel that way. When I felt a little better, she and I went outside and sat on the steps for a few hours. It was very peaceful there, and after a while I felt fine.

    In recalling this experience, Sandy added that it had a positive result: if the same feelings were to recur, she knew that she would be able to talk herself down, having learned how from her friend. This talent was more often required during the 19605, when many novices experienced feelings of anxiety. Lenny recalls the procedure for talking somebody out of a bad trip:

The thing you wanted to do was to communicate directly and calmly with the person, to remind him as often as necessary that what he was going through was temporary, that it was a temporary bad reaction as a result of a drug. Sometimes it would help to move the person to another room, or even outdoors, and to focus his attention on some concrete and familiar object. The worst procedure was to take the person to a hospital or a doctor; in such cases, the anxiety would feed on itself, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    During their bad trips, both Jenny and Sandy believed they were going to die. In the following case, another smoker's fears of death were grounded in a feeling of paranoia with regard to strangers:

The only really bad pot experience I've had in twelve years of smoking was on a vacation in Jamaica, where I had some strong stuff in one of those huge joints called a spliff. I was with a group of people I didn't know very well. The insects and the rustling trees suddenly became unbearably loud; both they and the people I was with seemed to be scorning my worth as a person in both snickers and whispers. My whole body was agitated so as to be out of control. I thought I was going to die, and I wished I already had.