I have found myself in complex conversations that end up in heated debates with Pot smokers about weed. At the crux of the arguement I always without fail interject 'This! What were doing, this is why weed is bad.' Were fighting about drugs! You are justifying using them! Is that not insane to you? And without fail my adversary doesn't get it, and another of my points is made...You smoke weed, you don't get it. Simple things, common sense things escape you.
A factual account:
One Janurary night my friend 'Kookla' called me and wanted to know if I wanted to come over and watch movies. It was maybe 6pm. He said he'd come by and pick me up. This was back when I had no car. I lived mabye 20 blocks away so it was a short jaunt back to his apartment. He and his roomate had cooked dinner and they proceeded to get very stoned, smoking pot nearly the entire 6 hours I was there. By about 1am, I was ready to go home and I asked Kookla if he'd drop me home. He proceeded to whine and give a hundred excuses why he wouldn't give me a ride. The most irritating one was that he'd lose his parking space in front of the building if he did. The chances of someone coming by at 1am on a Tuesday night to snake his space were limited but he'd rather not take the chance. Then just plain 'I don't feel like it' came out. So stoned he couldn't move made I don't feel like it an understatement, I walked home in the cold so mad I could barely see. Kookla had been a cool person, and now was a mere shell of his former funny charming self.
We never spoke after that.
It was almost inevitable that any guy remotely interesting in my then town of Seattle was a pot smoker. It was unavoidable in an environment of counter cultural, neo hippie, psudo intellectual rock star wanna beez. It went with the territory. I went to work for an internet company briefly, and met Janus- an a typical white dread head white boy that overran the hill back in those days. He worked in the IT department and I worked in customer service. One night (I worked grave) I locked myself out and he was kind enough to crawl over the door to let me in. After that when things got slow, we'd IM eachother. We got to be cool with eachother, and I found I had a teensy crush on the guy. Naturally he smoked weed, which then was like saying you were left handed, no big deal. Janus left the company but we still stayed in touch and he still IM'd me. He hadn't worked in a few weeks and I guess began to spiral into a depression. He friends said that he didn't do anything but smoke pot. He didn't even bathe anymore. I talked to him on the phone and he seemed unglued but fine with it. I thought maybe if he got out of the house it would make him feel better. We made a date to hang and the night we were supposed to meet, he called and said he couldn't come because there were cops outside. "You mean outside your apartment?" I wondered. "They're everywhere and they're going to get me." Janus was clearly paranoid.He began to rant about how they knew he was high and they would take him to jail, so he couldn't leave the apartment. There was no coaxing, or convincing, he'd simply lost touch. But weed is harmless.
Don't twist me. I'm not some sheltered suburban child who got straight A's, was a cheerleader, loves her parents, went to church and never did a bad thing in her life. Much the opposit. I have smoked pot myself in the past. Believe it or not I didn't grow up in the ghetto at all, but I was offered my first joint at the age of 7. I didn't smoke it, and got a beat down because I didn't. The thing was that the person offering it to me was a loser, and I didn't want to be anything like her, so I suppose that was my reasoning at the time. I sincerely doubt if someone I admired had offered I'd done it either: I may have just been spared the beat down. Kids in high school (now grade school) get offered pot, and want to fit in so they get high. If they're lucky they try it once and never do it again. They may smoke all through high school and stop senior year. But, my idea is that if you are still smoking after high school, you are officially a drug user. I never smoked pot in high school because I lived with my mom and she already thought the worst of me, I didn't need to give her ammo. But again, all the kids inour neighborhood were getting high morning noon and night. Butt rocker beavis and butthead types and their shaggy haired Pat Benatar lovin slutty girlfriends. And then me. The black girl who's into Prince, has a Frohawk (A mowhawk that is a short afro on the sides instead of bald) and loves punk and new wave. I got called a weirdo and a freak constantly but I enjoyed making people wonder why I wasn't what they saw on television. I moved out of my mom's house and went to college at 17. I smoked pot in college with the wild bunch I hung with. About 20 or so kids who had formed a tight knit counter society that always knew where the others were. On the weekends we all came together and went to one house and hung out for the whole weekend. A club opened and we all would go there and dance. We were all heavily into music and movies and art. Drugs were a side thing, not the only thing. People would smoke and write, paint or listen to music. We had trips into the mountians to play in the woods, and to the beach. It was about discovery and being together, and there was never any static about it.
When I turned 19 I moved to Seattle and became a club kid so to speak. All the kids with no real support all found eachother and always ended up at the clubs hanging out. At 20 I met James. He was a friend of a club friend, who thought we'd be cute together. He lived a block from me. He was a very handsome brown skinned guy who was nerdy as they come. He couldn't dance to save his life and had zero style. But he was in a rock band and that was something. He and his friends were non dancin, beer drinking, pot smokin Green River lovin band doods that I couldn't relate to at all. But they were nice people. James smoked every day. He band/roomate developed a severe allergy to the dust in the old house they lived in and moved out, so I moved in. The more time I spent with James the more I disliked him. I didn't make enough money to live on my own or even share a place with anyone, so I stayed. He'd offer me pot and I'd say no and we'd end up in an arguement. When I smoked pot there was no arguement. I'd get sleep and want to eat, I'd eat and go into a food coma. It was an ugly cycle that was not me. James' father was a hard core drug user, and had used herion for close to 20 years by then. His father hung with all sorts of low life and would bring shopping bags full of 'shake' to the house for James and his friends. It wasn't buds but it still worked. I often wondered if James and his father had bonded over drugs? I started to freak out. It took me 2 years to get free of James and all his crap. next page