Experimentations with weed.

Written on 3rd/4th August on the plane home from California.

The weed laws in California are wrong. Whatever your position on the drug debate, they are wrong. Because, as it stands now, you can only get weed as prescription medication. But you can buy a prescription, perfectly, legally, in a shop on the street, so, essentially, weed is entirely legally accessible to anyone with the money, but, because it is “medicinal” it is not taxable, and if it were, it would greatly help California’s financial situation. Either we decide that weed is a dangerous substance that people should not be allowed to consume, and thus should make it more inaccessible to people, or we decide it’s safe enough/people have a right to choose, and make it entirely legal, in order to bring in tax revenue; right now, in California, weed is entirely the wrong amount of legal.*

Though I may think that the current California policy on weed is flawed, none the less it made California a good place for me to try the stuff for the first time. As an asthmatic, I chose a lollypop over smoking, and over pills, as I thought with a lollypop it would be easier to regulate the amount I was taking.
I went through the standard “I don’t feel anything” phase, before it started to feel kind of nice. I felt…floaty, and happy. I tried to move my arm and found that, despite the floaty feeling, my arm had actually turned into a piece of lead. But that was OK. I felt relaxed. That was good. Then I found myself getting sleepy, partly because of the weed, I’m sure, but also because I was just really, really tired. There was some Red Bull on the table, so I drank that, and with it came a burst of energy, which found me tap dancing in the middle of the room, to the amusement of my friend.

This was followed by a sudden craving for tea…and while I was sitting there waiting for the water to boil, I started to feel strange.

It was like there was a…duality in my thinking; like whatever facet of my brain takes in my surroundings and controls my basic functioning was high. It was relaxed and sluggish and only somewhat aware of what was going on. But behind that, another part of my brain, I guess whichever part thinks about things deeply and solves problems and things like that, was functioning far more normally.

And so I started to feel trapped.
My inner thinking self was caught inside my high exterior. And what got increasingly clear was that I couldn’t just shake it off. When I’m drunk, I know that I’ll pretty much always be able to sober up, at least somewhat, in an emergency. With weed, I didn’t think I would be able to.

This reminds me of somewhat of Evanna Lynch’s blog post for the HPA about how being trapped in a body bind is her greatest fear. I would probably say my greatest fear is more about being totally out of control of whatever situation I’m in; but the idea of being trapped in a body bind would fall into that category.

And that’s sort of how I felt on weed. I felt that if something bad happened, I would be helpless. And even though there was no reason something bad would happen…I just felt trapped, because I could see no way to get out of the state I was in.

So then I started to panic. Except that I couldn’t really panic, not fully, because my body would do nothing but just sit there. So it was just this one part of my brain struggling to panic by itself, with the rest of my body and some of my mind refusing to join in. This was not helped by the realisation that my friend was also high; I mean, clearly, I knew he would be, but I suddenly started to really notice it in his behaviour, and then it occurred to me he was probably as helpless as me…so he wasn’t, well, as there to look out for me as normal (this, I should point out, was in my mind; he was no where near as high as me, and largely still competent...he was high enough to be strangely facinated by a small patch of spilt tea on the floor, but yeah; no where near the place that I was. But in the state of mind I was in, his amusement at the tea was a cause for alarm).

Not that there would be any need for him to look out for me, even then I did know that, but still, right then…I was scared.
I had some tea before going to take my make up off. I wanted to sleep. If I slept, I’d wake up the next day feeling normal. I wanted that. Seeing myself in the mirror, I realised that my eyes were red. It looked pretty horrible. As did I. I’m not the vainest person you will ever meet, but I certainly have a vain streak. I don’t like seeing myself looking bad, but normally I would just shrug it off. Right then, it disgusted me.

One thing I’ve discovered about weed, or at least me on weed, is that I can’t tell how far away sound is coming from, so I could heard voices, from presumably outside in the street, buy it seemed to me like they were in the room. I knew that they weren’t really, but it was a bizarre experience.

I was also really, really tired. I was taking long blinks, and Everytime I blinked I’d fall asleep for maybe half a second, before waking up. It was insanely disorienting. The real world around me was becoming increasingly dreamlike too, and not in a good way. Everything seemed surreal and angular and distorted.
I got into bed. I slept. I woke up feeling completely exhausted and spent the day with whatever the weed equivalent is to a hang over.

I’m glad I tried it, for everything. It wasn’t, mostly, a good experience, but it was an interesting one; I was curious, and now I’ve somewhat satisfied my curiosity. It’s not had, like, a lasting negative impact, and I look back on it mostly with interest rather than negative feelings.

I’m still pro the legalisation of weed, and people being able to use it if they want to. But I’m not sure if I’m pro me using it. Maybe I just took too much. I’m a small person, and there was a lot of stuff in that lollypop. It was nice at first, after all. But a similar nice effect could probably be achieved with alcohol. So for a bit, at least, I think I’m going to stay away from weed. My eyes look best when they are blue, black and white.


*My friend pointed out that I was somewhat wrong about this:

"although it's true that marijuana isn't taxed in the way alcohol and tobacco are (although it should be), it IS charged sales tax when it's sold medicinally. So there is SOME state revenue generated this way that wouldn't be if it were still illegal."