Ever been so stoned you lose executive functions and motor skills, then think the CIA is listening to your internal monologue? I have, all the time, and it’s brutal. It usually only takes half a joint or blunt. This meme exists for a reason:
There’s always been a strangely macho element to smoking weed in a lot of social circles. Peer pressure becomes less about getting someone to light up for the first time, and more about trying to get people uncomfortably high after they have.
The trope that ‘weed makes people chill’ doesn’t square with my reality once I’ve had one puff too many, which is generally two puffs; I become an uptight, anxious and neurotic basketcase unable to process basic cerebral signals and pick up on social cues.
As an extroverted friend of mine would say about why he didn’t want to smoke at parties, “It takes away my ability to talk” – though to be honest, some people could benefit from shutting the hell up every now and then.
When I’m sober or under the influence of alcohol and even ‘party doses’ of mushrooms (Half gram to 1.5 grams of Golden Teachers for me depending on the setting), being sociable and adaptive to the environment is second nature. I feel comfortable in pretty much any group setting – but when anything more than a literal teaspoon of cannabis is introduced into the equation, I fall into an endless pit of mental quicksand and struggle against the scenario.
All of the stereotypes and tropes about weed making people ‘chill’ and ‘easing anxiety’ are completely flipped on their heads for me if I take even one large toke – let alone smoke an entire blunt or seven. I become panicky, highly sensitive to social queues yet unable to assess and respond to them in real time. Music becomes too loud, or not loud enough.
Stories that effortlessly roll off my tongue and captivate audiences become jumbled mismatches of forgotten details and rambling incoherence. I think I recognize strangers, and fail to recognize acquaintances when I’m out in public – and I’m blatantly paranoid the entire time.
“Do I know that person? Is that my 10th grade history teacher?”
“Oh shit, the cops are going to pull us over for sure – and we’re in Alabama, this can’t be a good idea.”
In other words, it’s completely unenjoyable.
It turns out I’m not alone in regards to the potentially unsavory effects of cannabis overconsumption –
A recent study published in JAMA highlights the potential link between ‘cannabis overuse’ and the triggering of psychosis and schizophrenia.
Before you go crying ‘Reefer Madness’ and labeling me a propagandist, please know that I still love cannabis and use it daily – just in much smaller amounts than I previously did when I was a young stoner. I hear this change in consumption pattern behavior from stoner peers of mine quite often; whatever the complex combination of social, environmental and individual factors might be, it seems that quite a few cannabis advocates and enthusiasts I know have significantly scaled back their consumption with age.
Obviously not everyone, but a growing number of people may benefit from this rather than swearing off weed entirely – which people definitely do as these types of potential effects start to impede their adult lifestyles.
I went to a stoner college in the heart of San Francisco, steps away from the famed Haight-Ashbury district. This was in 2007, before weed was recreationally legal in California and when even medical cannabis shops were in relatively short supply – yet weed was extremely socially acceptable to the point where students smoked with professors, consumption was permitted inside select public venues such as independent cinemas and bookstores, and people paid you for favors or services in weed.
I remember once testing my theory that weed was effectively as good as cash when going out on the town, bringing a couple grams of fire in my pocket and no money out to a night of bar hopping in the Mission District. It probably didn’t hurt that I was out with people I knew, but no one turned down the offer of a nug in exchange for a beer or burrito throughout the evening.
During this period of time, I remember a college peer of mine rolling joint after joint from our endless supply of herb and proclaiming that ‘As soon as you stop smoking, the high starts to wear off – so I say one should be continuously smoking’. At that point, I was in no position to disagree and gladly joined in on the festivities.
I also remember another friend in our circle cautioning us to ‘let the high settle in a bit, so as not to be overindulgent’; the friend offering the word of caution is now a therapist, while the blunt roller is probably still rolling blunts (and that’s a reasonable lifestyle choice in my book).
Over the years I’ve tried every imaginable permutation of cannabis and cannabis products. After I hit my 20’s, the potent weed and constant consumption left me feeling far more burned out than it did uplifted, yet my social conditioning and identity as a stoner led me to believe that I simply had to keep consuming regardless of how cannabis in large doses actually made me feel.
The irony is that while I’ve long been a proponent of the ‘legacy market’ and outlaw culture, legal and labeled cannabis products have been a game changer for me. Being able to confidently know how much THC I’m consuming – clearly there’s more to the story in terms of minor cannabinoid profiles beyond THC, but it’s still a very helpful baseline to make decisions with – has definitively empowered me with the knowledge that my sweet spot is 5 to 10 milligrams of THC.
Before legal cannabis, it was anyone’s guess how potent the edibles were. I remember eating two brownies that Philip K. Dick’s grandson gave me that actually sucked me into a dystopian science fiction reality, such was the potency of the edibles he consumed personally. For all I know, there was 1000 mg of cannabis concentrate each in those brownies.
Back to the good stuff here – I’m pleased to report that despite recent research emerging linking cannabis overconsumption to potential schizophrenia and the lobbying of policy groups like SAM and the ramblings of Kavein Sabet, I don’t believe we need to ping pong between radically pro and anti-cannabis messaging. Cannabis has definitely triggered adverse effects for me at various points, but the benefits still far outweigh the drawbacks in my own personal life.
What we really need are impartial, reasonable perspectives that search out middle ground in the road to cannabis mainstreaming. I don’t wake and bake anymore (though power to you if you do), and weed hasn’t killed my ambition – far from it, it’s actually helped empower me with the vision necessary to be a high achiever (pun intended!) and to develop the discipline to go get what I aspire to accomplish in my life; even if that discipline requires cutting back on weed consumption.
Dennis Walker is a satirist and multimedia producer with a long and robust relationship to psychedelics. He is the host of the Mycopreneur Podcast, a platform that spotlights and supports fungi entrepreneurs from around the world. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Forbes, and High Times among many other platforms.
Check out more of Dennis Walker’s work here at Beard Bros.
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