Experimenting With Smoking
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:52 PM

Mike is off to Russia for purely moral activity -- after all, it is International Women's Day -- so today's posting has fallen to moi.

The Guardian today features a collection of stories from some of their writers about their first experiences with such things as flying and high heels -- and smoking. Patrick Barkham had never smoked tobacco or marijuana, so at the age of 33 he went to Amsterdam to put his abstinent past behind him. His first smoke contained both tobacco and marijuana. Patrick's reluctance to inhale posed a barrier to achieving a high, but he eventually overcame that barrier, too. Some joints later, once the THC kicked in, Patrick became a slave to the drug, and he has not spent an unstoned moment since. Er, or maybe not:

I felt disappointed. Because I'd never done drugs, I had feared and expected everything - a spinning head, a creative mind, a hideous paranoia, a craven addiction and a desire to dance all night while dragons crossed the diamond sky with Lucy.

"It doesn't widen the doors of perception, it just slows you down enough to let you look in," I wrote [contemporaneously, in the notebook he had with him]. "This is what being stoned is about. I must get my bags from the hotel. Focus now. The end."

What an awful experience for Patrick. It is a good thing that the US arrests more than 700,000 folks per year for pot possession.

Labels: abstinence, arrests, Britain, marijuana