Legal Marijuana Blues

I used to love weed. That is I used to love marijuana when it was NOT legal. I loved that Moroccan hashish we got, at best a thick brown crumbly solid, you had to heat up just a little to crumble it into a spliff filled with tobacco. We didn’t smoke it like the Americans did, who filled their joints with grass and didn’t mix it with the innards of marlboro lights or Drum lose shredded tobacco.

At its worst it was ebony colored and hard as a rock, resisting all attempts to crumble it or break it up, and it burnt through the papers falling in hot rocks onto your best Sex Pistols tee-shirt and burning your skin. I still have the scars of combined smoking of old rock hard hash and hard opiate use rendering me both burnt and too numb and uncaring to pull off the rocks, instead letting them burn small deep wounds where ever they fell. I disliked the sickly scent of grass, I didn’t much enjoy the grass high either I think mostly because I did not like how it tasted, instead buying my teenths and eighths of hash but never being able to afford a quarter, from a guy who sold weed outside a market in a bad part of town. He always had the best stuff.

It used to make me giggle. It used to make me feel like I was chasing some smoke tainted dream inhabited by souk dwellers and silk road traders, silk road purveyors and Mata Hari’s aged uncle who would pass me books of poetry by Rimbaud and Albert Camus’ complete works. It was dreamy gentle stuff. Mildly sedating, vaguely entertaining, it was something you could smoke all day in huge quantities and it just take the edge off life and make it fluffier. It would soften the edges to to incipient withdrawal rattles from the H and make the wait to the next bag a tiny bit more bearable. I would wake up, and hit my homemade bong, cobbled together from a cola bottle, blue-tac and a few pieces of copper plumbing lined with a cup made out of aluminum foil with pin prick holes punched through it.

Then they ruined it. They made it legal. They messed it up. The scientists and freaks who do such things tinkered with its genetic code, bred it and inbred it and made it something else. More psychedelic but also more dysphoric. This new marijuana is a beast to be tamed, reined in, watched carefully to make sure it doesn’t run away with you into some netherworld of trippy THC horror.

I suppose to be fair the new pot is a lot stronger, but that doesn’t seem to be just it. It is also mainly grass, not hash, but that isn’t it either. I try landrace strains only to be once again trapped in some dystopian dreamworld where I cannot stop crying, weeping, curling up into a small ball feeling like the very earth itself is about to crash and burn. I had minor success with indica strains for a while, but they just made me sad and lazy, I tried pure sativa to only find the tears and horrorshow just accompanied by the energy with which to actively pace my way up and down until the high faded thankfully away.

I went to my local pot shop, asked for something that might work to ease my legal marijuana blues, they gave me blue dream, and the worst drug experience of my life. Forget pcp, say sayonara lsd, blue dream takes the crown. I smoked a hit in my fancy silicone bong with a surgical steel non poisonous bowl, and my heart started racing out of my chest. I thought I was going to fucking die. I stood up like a woman facing the end on her feet, and staggered out the door, then fell to my knees in tears. It felt like every bit of sadness of the world around me, the world to me, hit me in one feather pillow thud of misery whilst trying to squeeze the life out of my heart and circulatory system.

The only vaguely decent time was when someone gave me some jet fuel laced with heaven knows what kinda research chemical legal mess, and left me flying comfortably in my hammock. It was ok because it was not marijuana.

No, I thought, there must be something wrong with me. Something has gone awry. Perhaps it is the total lack of other drugs in my system, no opiates to take the sharpness away. I wonder if I’m in some alternative reality where I simply do not like being high. The idea horrifies me. Since when I did I turn into one of them! A brief relapse sojourn into legally prescribed opiates and booze after a nasty injury reassured me that that wasn’t the case. No, it was the damn weed. It was a horse too wild to ride for me, and tantalizingly, wonderfully legal. The bastards ruined my high.

I’ve come to an uneasy peace with the whole deal. I’ve eaten it, I’ve vaped, I’ve smoked it and regretted it. I’ve tried every hybrid percentage, and hit every close to pure landrace I can find. I just cant smoke it. So here I am, I don’t drink, don’t smoke, and sure as heck don’t touch anything else. I am officially old. I am officially boring. Past it. Put out to pasture without any grass, watching other people kill themselves slowly with booze, or get happily toasted on legal weed. Everyone’s getting high except me…

I’m starting to think someone must have laid a curse on me. Thou shalt never be comfortably stoned again. Great

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