I just listened to the Michael Savage episode that you were on recently. Your story made me cry and your bravery makes me proud. I’m a 70 year old man who smoked marijuana for a year from early 1975 to early 1976. I’ll never forget the first time I got high and how much fun (I thought) I was having. I was HOOKED immediately and knew I’d be going back to Mrs. Mary Jane. I smoked almost daily for an entire year and as that year progressed I occasionally felt like I was going crazy at times while I was high, but I’d go back again the next day. One night in early 1976 my life changed forever. I, along with about eight or nine other people smoked a couple of joints. Almost immediately I begin to hallucinate and saw the road going up the sky and while running across a busy street I turned around and I saw me (times six). The first thing I thought of was the marijuana must have been laced with something, but everyone that smoked with me were doing fine.
I made it to the house I was living at and for the next five hours I was in a living hell knowing that I had lost my mind permanently. Before I could think one thought another run entered my head and I have no doubt I was having a psychotic episode. I would have lucid moments also and I remember during one of them I begged God to let me get back to normal and I’d never touch marijuana again. I finally fell asleep after hours of insanity and when I woke up the next morning I was back to my normal self. I thanked God for allowing that and I NEVER touched that poison or any other drug again. I’m also thankful to God for allowing that to happen to me because it cured me from what I know would have bee a life-time of drug abuse and more than likely an overdose because I had such an addictive personality at that time.
I caught the last year of the draft in 1972 and spent two years in the army and after my psychotic episode from smoking pot in 1976 I attended a small college in Winter Haven, Florida. I went to the library one day looking for books on marijuana and I found one titled: Marijuana-Deceptive Weed by Gabriel G. Nahas and that changed my life even more. The book was replete with stories similar to mine and that was long before the potency of marijuana got to the level it is today.
I have been openly anti-marijuana since that night in March of 1976 and I have been on the receiving end of derision from many people including many in my own family. I personally think Marijuana is more harmful than alcohol and one of the many reasons is that people who smoke pot will NEVER say it’s bad for you and to them it’s the panacea of panacea’s. That being said I haven’t talked to too many alcoholics who say that alcohol is good for them and in fact most alcoholics know what they’re doing is bad for them physically and mentally and openly admit it unlike a pot-head.
I commend you for your work and keep up the good fight! My deepest condolences on the loss of your son and I know that could have been me if I hadn’t taken that nightmare trip to hell. I will keep you, your work and family in prayer along with every other family out there facing the same thing. May God bless you and don’t worry about the keyboard warriors who say the things they do to you behind the anonymity of the internet.
Yep, I caught the Savage podcast the other day and can say he’s right. The so called weed of yesterday is just as bad. I wasted my 20s smoking the stuff before I gradually phased it out of my life in my 30s as I realized I didn’t really enjoy the way the stuff made me feel. This was 30 years back when it wasn’t as strong as it is now. There are these two “big” twenty something girls in the two apartments on the second floor above me and I don’t know what they are smoking, but I smell it constantly even down the stairs. I hear bongs bubbling through the thin ceiling at 8 in the morning so I know they are both completely hooked on the stuff. It smells sort of like weed, but WAY STRONGER, and sickly sweet. Not the burnt type smell I remember you could barely detect coming from a college dorm room hallway where they had the wet towel under the door to try to prevent the smell. This must be these “dabs” that I read about here.
I was forced to go to college by high school councilor and parents, I wanted to take shop in high school but they made me go. I had no experience drinking or with drugs before college and by chance my roommate assigned to me in the dorms was a pothead. I of course made the bad decision of trying it too as I was very angry with the world for not providing me with the fun freewheeling life like the kids in the 80s teen movies lived which I felt entitled too. So anything the old folks were against, I was for. It was only occasionally the first semester, but my roommate got some local connections the second semester and soon it was a daily thing. When the year was over I went home, used to nightly use, but had no connections back home. Wow was my body physically hooked on the habit. I could not sleep well for a week, no sleep period the first night. My emotions were all out of control, I was angry, snapping at my parents, irritable. It took about 10 days for me to feel normal again so no way can any of these stoners tell me the lie that “it’s not addictive.” What? Compared to heroin? These people always put up the straw man of heroin or alcohol to compare it too. Well, yes alcohol is bad, but very few drinkers actually become like skid row bums drinking as soon as they wake up, all day long. It’s very frequent for pot users however to be using constantly. I foolishly kept messing with it through my twenties and noticed eventually my lungs and bronchia also got inflamed too, so the “it’s not as bad as tobacco” crap they say is also not true. It just had a negative affect on my ambitions and made me feel anxious and bummed out and I just lost interest in the crap as I got older thankfully but ruined my formative years.
Now these days I see all these young guys at work with these anger issues, anxiety, depression, emotional outbursts and I strongly suspect they are caused by cannabis abuse. A lot of them are “gamers” so I can imagine they are also smoking weed while playing their obsessive video games. I’ve heard talk from others that “yes, so in so is a big smoker” so am probably correct in my hunch. Furthermore, with these heavy smokers their brains become dependent on the stuff to calm down, the abuse causes their neurons to stop making the natural substances and rely on THC instead to calm down and when they don’t get their usual hit in time they are emotionally out of control. Probably a big cause of the violence epidemic. How much weed did that Uvalde guy use? These robberies gone bad? Are the thieves out of weed money and starting to go into withdrawal? The way I was just flipping out at my parents when I went home on break cold turkey makes me suspect so. Of course the media is full of potheads too so they will not want to ask these questions that should be. It’s all going to end bad.