Cannabis is King
Five Reasons I Don’t Smoke Weed Anymore
And why I still love this amazing plant
For a good portion of my four and a half-decade life, I have travelled with my old companion, The Green Elf aka Jimmy Bakealot aka Bong Johnson aka Mary Jane Robinson aka The Psychedelic Chimp aka Hoomama 17.
Okay, so I made almost all of those up. But, you get the point.
I’m talking about Lando Cannabissian, aka Han smoko aka…
Get on with it, Frank, ya bastard.
WEED, you fuckers.
Have ya ever had that mate in ya life that’s so fun but just doesn’t align with what yer trying to do?
Yep, that mate that ya gradually give shorter answers to let ‘em know yer busy before eventually ignoring them altogether — which, by the way, is a lot more acceptable these days than it was twenty years ago.
That was me three years ago when I decided to ditch the green phantom, aka the…Ahem
I wanna make it clear that I’m not anti-weed. I also gave up tobacco over a decade ago, and I’m still not anti-tobacco either — although I am very much anti-tobacco COMPANY.
I’m not anti-weed for a few reasons.
- We parted on amicable terms
- It’s a more marvellous medicine than almost any money-making bullshit offered by demonic pharma companies.
- Hemp is the most significant potential disruption to many heavily guarded industries on this planet.
And, while it’s just not a part of my life anymore, I am all for the full legalisation of this beautiful plant.
So why did I give it up if it’s so damn cool?
1. I like it too much
If you have a history of abuse with a particular substance, it’s good advice to give it up.
When I say abuse, what I mean is that,
- You take more than the recommended dose
- You take it every waking moment
- It becomes the central focus of your life
- You can’t be without it
- You would sell your granny’s television to get some.
- It ceases to enhance your life but makes your life implode instead.
I know people that will smoke a joint to relax on a Friday night after work.
I’m not that person.
For me, if I have weed, I will smoke the shit out of it until it’s gone. Then I will buy more and do the same. This behaviour isn’t necessarily destructive in itself. If the addiction in question was related to exercise and carrot juice, it might be beneficial.
But I found that in living that lifestyle, The Green Elf took the primary spot at the forefront of my life, which meant everything else fell behind.
Sure, for the first half an hour after getting bent (stoned) in the morning, I might have some lucid insight into the nature of the universe or come up with a tremendously original idea for a screenplay. Weed is brilliant like that. It’s a creative tool.
But then, as the day rode on, I’d dissolve into some fuzzy gap between life and oblivion.
It’s a place where you can‘t hold down a conversation with anyone. Sometimes you even catch the ‘mutes’ — a total inability to have any discussion whatsoever.
When you have a job and a wife and people in your life, the mutes is not a helpful condition.
Is the fuzzy gap comfortable?
Sure, it’s blissful as hell. But if you are in the business of helping others and enhancing their lives, it can be more of an obstacle than anything else.
This all comes back to the fact that I love weed.
It is a beautiful friend that I have hung out with more times than I can count in my stupid little life.
I wish desperately that I could use it occasionally and be okay with that, but I’ve been through that pattern of reasoning too many times to know it’s bullshit.
I’m a fucking recovering weed addict, and for anyone who has ever had their life fall apart because of that, it is not necessarily something to take casually.
2. Weed is getting too strong.
There is a scene in the movie It’s Complicated where Meryl Streep’s character says,
I don’t know what they’ve done to pot in the last thirty years, but it rocks!
There is no doubt that your innocent homegrown outdoor plant has a vastly different smell, taste and experience to the buds we see emerging these days.
Of course, breeders are eagerly trying to develop the most potent strains in the world. They have managed to create some knockout weed with sky-high THC levels. Yet even this process wouldn’t explain a sudden ‘increase’ in potency. They are simply mixing two or more existing strains.
In 2017, High Times magazine wrote about Godfather OG, a strain with an incredible 34% THC. Just 20 years previously, weed had an average of 4% THC. Regardless of whether weed is more potent now, there is no question that the average American has more access to stronger marijuana than ever before. (Way of Leaf)
In Thailand in 2014, I bought weed from a local Estate Agent called Max.
The weed looked like dodgy leaf and was full of seeds, so I assumed Max had ripped me off.
That night I smoked an average-sized spliff and ended up flushing the whole lot down the toilet, convinced the entire thing was a setup by the cops.
I had watched enough Banged up Abroad to know I needed to stay out of Thai Prison. Little did I know that the local police ran the cannabis supply on that particular island.
The next day I went back to Max and bought more.
I rolled a large joint and kayaked out to a local island with a friend.
When we arrived, we sat in our kayaks to smoke the spliff since the island was a holiday hotspot for millions of ants.
Just as the weed kicked in, the sky turned grey, and the wind started to get up. We had planned to stay on the island for some time, but the locals had told us that the island gets flooded and disappears underwater when it storms.
So we had to kayak back on enormous waves, in the pissing rain, and high winds while very stoned. It was like some kind of fucked up movie. Obviously, we made it back to shore. Just.
I have smoked strains of weed that feel closer to a class A drug than cannabis.
One time I nearly burned down my house because I put a frozen pizza in the oven and then forgot I had put it in. I went out and got pizza, came back and halfway through eating it smelt the smoke.
That strain wasn’t even that strong.
Another time I was out at the petrol station standing at the counter and the attendant asked me if I was okay because I was standing there with a frying pan in my hand.
The last thing I remembered was cooking eggs at home.
I watch videos of people doing dabs these days and wonder what that would be like. Pretty strong I imagine.
I like to watch people getting stoned.
Shows like ‘Getting Doug with High’ do it for me.
It’s a kind of therapy that fills the gap a bit.
It’s like how I watch Man v Food when I am fasting. It helps.
3. My lungs can’t take it.
I cant take edibles. They make me paranoid.
I have always preferred smoking weed because I like to control my dose. It’s the old situation of inexperienced people eating the second brownie before waiting the entire three hours or whatever. I know I would never do that, but it still bothers me. And, I have had too many extreme experiences to enjoy edibles.
I once made some very strong cannabis oil. I estimated the dose was about a third of a small dropper, which would be suitable for severe pain. For non-users, the quantity was more like 2–3 drops.
One day I came home from work and, for some reason, filled a bottle lid with the oil and drank it. I had casually figured that the lid of the hemp bottle I kept the oil in would be about a dropper max, and I wanted a full experience.
About half an hour in, I started to feel very wasted. I went back to the fridge, filled a lid and grabbed a dropper to suck out the oil and see how much was in there.
One dropper, two droppers, three droppers, four droppers…
I stared at the cap, realising that I had taken about twelve to fourteen times the usual dose.
It’s not a very nice feeling.
And when you take weed through the stomach, it’s a much stronger experience.
Physically I survived. People always do. But it put me off.
I only smoked after that, but still, it was fucking my lungs.
I started reading about vaping and liked the idea of inhaling ‘vapour’ rather than smoke.
The first vape I bought was a Stormz and Bickel Mighty. I loved it and I still have it. Ya know, just in case 😉. It looks like a bloody spaceship.
I also purchased a Pax 3.
For a while, I loved vaping.
But I realised that you chug through weed a lot quicker, and rather than being like steam, it is more like a low-level smoke. Sure it’s a lower temperature but it is still SMOKE. It still fucks your lungs and I am not sure if it fucks them less than smoke. I definitely coughed a lot more from vaping than smoking.
I got to a point where I just didn’t wanna fuck my lungs anymore, and that kind of meant I had run out of options.
4. It’s fucking expensive.
At the height of my smoking, I would go through about an ounce of weed in a week by myself, sometimes more.
In the bland illegal Australian market, that meant $250 a week at least. For someone working a full-time job, it’s fine, and if you are working full time, the weed might last you longer.
But not for Frank, who gradually starts smoking before work and then at work and after work before finally quitting…work.
You can tell the weed smokers in a workplace. They are the ones who look like fucking zombies all the time. They also take more sickies than most. And I’m not talking about casual smokers. I mean the full-time smokers.
You can’t fucking smoke that much and wake up at 7 am to get to work.
If you do, it is impossible to sustain it for a long time. Full-time smokers feel absolutely wrecked in the morning.
Getting up for work is a fucking nightmare.
I mean, maybe you can, but I couldn’t.
It wouldn’t be long before I would quit full-time work and take up smoking full time instead — sitting in parks, looking at the sky, having strange conversations, eating snacks, watching movies, reading, writing.
Ah, I miss those days.
5. I need my driver’s license.
Ronald Regan’s war on drugs was a criminal act that fucked a lot of people for doing nothing.
If you want to know why it happened, read this:
And we are still living with the hangover of it all.
Thanks to a divide between the federal and state levels, America is now one of the countries leading the world in cannabis legalisation.
As usual in Australia, we are still living in the 1970s.
Despite cannabis being legalised in the ACT — conveniently the state where all the politicians live — the poxy leader of the Victorian government has stated that he wishes Victoria to become the ‘cannabis bowl’ of the world.
And yet, the same man not long ago blocked a move to legalise the plant for Victorian residents.
So we can grow it and sell it to everyone else but we cant have it ourselves.
No surprise, just another government prick looking after their own needs.
A big issue here is cannabis users being free to drive
A friend of mine recently got banned from driving for six months because he had THC in his blood.
The trouble with this is that THC can stay in the bloodstream for up to a week after use.
And authorities cannot measure the actual level of THC. Victoria Police can only measure its presence. It’s a binary test.
Is it present? — YES or NO.
For my friend, it was a YES, so he lost his license. And granted, he was very stoned at the time. But that’s not always the case.
Suppose I smoke cannabis at a party and get pulled over four days later. I am not stoned, but I will lose my license if any THC is present.
Of course, the government decided to use the inefficient technology and adopt a no-tolerance policy anyway.
You can use medical cannabis here with a license.
You can use it to manage painful conditions. But it will cost you twice as much as the street value, and it means you cant drive.
There is no talk of tolerance or whether someone is actually impaired. Since it stays in yer blood for a week yer just fucked.
For me, I can’t risk it. I need my car. It is too important, so it’s just another reason I can’t smoke.
I want you to know that I miss cannabis, but I will probably never smoke it again.
I have to treat it like alcoholism because, for me personally, it’s not something I can control and being a full-time smoker again is just too likely to reap havoc on my life. I’m forty-five and I have other shit going on. It would be different if I was twenty.
But still, I get angry about governments that sell massive amounts of it overseas yet still hold up policies that ban their citizens from using it.
And just because I will probably never use it again doesnt mean I don’t believe that every motherfucker in this world should have the right to access this amazing plant in whatever way they need.
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