Late teens, with a few “backslides” in my early 20s. It was boring and it bothered my lungs, the last few instances I would feel as if I had trouble breathing afterward. And now I know why, I’ve had chronic bronchitis (probably initially caused by a severe 6 week long illness I had as a young teen), most of my adult life.
I am now 52, but I am still pro-legalization, just because I no longer care for it, doesn’t mean I think it’s the evil weed from “Reefer Madness”. 
I moved to Japan. Smoking (wacky tobaccy) here is a big no-no. If caught I’d lose my visa and get kicked out of the country, if not worse. Not to mention the damage that I’d do to the reputation of the foreigners in my part of Japan. I enjoyed the occasional usage back in the states, but it’s totally not worth it now.
How often does this really happen? I think everyone has heard the story about pot being laced with some other substance, but I’m a bit skeptical of this happening with any sort of frequency. Why would anyone lace weed with anything but filler? Is there any economic sense to do so (unless it’s being specifically sold as laced weed.)
With my experience, the suspect-able laced weed came from someone who had already “moved past the gateway drug” and I didn’t know… Gave me the first panic attack I’ve had, but I can’t prove it was laced and even if the group I was with said it was, I never call guilty until proven innocent if you understand what I’m saying…
I don’t know. I hadn’t smoked enough pot to know for sure that what I experienced was unusual. It was different from what I’d felt previous times, but for all I knew, that could happen. The folks I was smoking with smoked A LOT, and they said it was laced. All I know is, I didn’t want to experience that again. Ugh.
I quit just before my twin granddaughters were born almost 15 years ago. Haven’t missed it a bit.
I quit because our source was my wife’s cousin and of course, he wasn’t going to have anything to do with me when we divorced.
I had been a major league pothead for 25 years. Too much so. I was fully functional and made a good living in IT, but in retrospect, my personal life entirely revolved around marijuana, and that was not a good thing. It damaged some personal relationships because I just HAD to smoke up in some inappropriate situations that made life uncomfortable for friends and friends of friends.
Since then, I just haven’t been able to afford it, or find it. I’m sure I’ll smoke again some day, but right now it just isn’t in the cards. All in all though, I don’t mourn that. The long (7.5 years) drought of not using it has given me a different perspective on things.
I quit as soon as I discovered LSD (in 2008). So 419 (aka Bicycle Day) is my holiday now.
Not that I even had a habit…I tried smoking it a couple times, and I would just feel sick and not high (I’m very sensitive to smoke) and I baked it into food a couple of times, which was fun, but didn’t give me the desired effects which made it worthwhile.
And now that I’m in the running for a job which starts with a mandatory drug test as well as random ones in the future, I won’t touch it again. I still have a vial of weed SOMEWHERE in my house if I ever change my mind.
As far as I can tell, it’s just like any other drug (or drug cocktail, since marijuana has quite a few psychoactive compounds). Different people experience it differently, and what one person experiences as a side effect is not the same as what someone else does. Just like you and booze, I guess. Booze makes me pleasantly conversational, and then gives me one hell of a case of dehydration. It makes some people mean. I dunno.
I stopped when I started learning to fly. I figured the two were incompatible and I also went through a complete change in friends. Since then I think I’ve smoked on two occasions. The prevalence of random drug testing by the civil aviation safety authority means I will never smoke again.
Pfft. Who needs a plane when you’ve got this funky dank right here?
I quit because I lost interest and because I got married (to a pothead) and we had kids. I got really irritated with her over time being careless about smoking it in the house and reeking the place up (you never know when someone is going to come to the door) so I made her switch to the fake stuff and I started partaking with her a little here and there.
I wonder if the the apparent increase in paranoia and panic attacks is related to the apparent increase in the average potency of the pot over the last 25 or so years.
When I started smoking, 25 years ago, the heavy, “skunky” hot-house-grown weed was pretty well unknown. Now it is pretty common, and so, seemingly, are the number of adverse reactions.
Now, both of those data points (increase in potency, increase in reactions) are purely anecdotal on my part, I just wonder if (a) they hold water and (b) if there is a relationship.
Hm, I don’t know. When I smoked I smoked the strongest weed there was, pretty much (I was getting it from major potheads and dealers who had been smoking so long and so much that they pretty much needed the concentrated stuff to get high) and I had no bad experiences…and none of my pothead friends had a tendency to get paranoid either. Of course if they did, I guess they wouldn’t have smoked constantly.
I have some younger friends who don’t smoke cause it makes them paranoid, but I’ve also spoken with plenty of people who smoked weed in the 60s and 70s when it was much less potent, and a lot of them had problems with anxiety etc.
I quit almost as soon as I started because of the aforementioned “batshit paranoia”.
In answer to the question “what were you paranoid about ?” allow me to quote Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones: “Whaddayuh got ?”
Quit smoking it due to nearly all reasons cited above. Many years later, I read about “sacred use”. You take a tiny bit, just a few strands, and eat it straight. No burning it, no heating it, no vaporizer, yes, of course it is “unactivated” but I tried it this way and found it has wonderful effects indeed. Not psychoactive, I don’t get stoned, don’t feel anything dramatic, don’t get paranoid, no munchies or headache or sleepiness, just a low level sense of well being. Try it and let me know what you think.
I quit in '99. That was when I stopped working on the gold mines and moved back to Cape Town and my then-GF (now wife). Didn’t really need the high after that.
I quit after using for several years in high school, and didn’t smoke throughout almost my entire ride in college. I dated a 40-year-old stoner for the better part of a year, and smoked most days with him, then basically nothing since then. I do have a job that offers random drug testing now, so it’s not that big of a deal.
I’ve always enjoyed the feeling, although if I go out in public like that, I feel like everyone KNOWS and is staring at me. And I can’t smoke significant quantities if I’m drinking, because I’ll throw up every time.
All that, plus fatherhood for my reasons. Basically, I grew up.
I didn’t stop smoking for any particular reason - mostly cause it wasn’t that fun, and it’s not that good for you.
I didn’t exactly quit but I gradually went from every day to a few times a year. I just stopped liking it as much as I did before.