I’ve smoked it – back in the early-'80s at parties. The first time I did it, it scared the hell out of me. One second I was fine, and the next I was seriously high. (That time wasn’t at a party, but at a friend’s house.) I partook a few times over the next few years, but I’m well within the ‘15 times limit’ recently announced by some government agency or another (FBI?). I just didn’t like it. Made me think too much. When I think too much I get depressed. What fun is that? And I got my pilot’s certificate. That was something I’d looked forward to all of my life, and there’s no way I wanted to endanger it. Not to mention that I was getting a security clearance. (Yes, I admitted it in the interview for the clearance and it’s in my dossier.) Bottom line: I didn’t enjoy it, and I had too much to lose. So I swore it off. I don’t miss it a bit. Of course I have no worries with other people who choose to use it, and I’m used to the strange looks I get when I decline an offer. People quickly understand that I’m not interested and stop asking.
But I’ve known people who smoke it fairly regularly. A couple claimed, without asking them to, they ‘had to’ just to ‘be normal’. Most just do without explanation.
Though I don’t really care why people choose to smoke pot, and I’ve never asked anyone why they do, the other thread has made me curious. Why do you smoke pot?
Remember that this is a public message board if you answer.
I tried it back in the '70s I didn’t like it on many levels, so never did it again. I think the the thing that put me off the most, was the smoking part. I’ve never smoked, and for some reason I’m horrified by it. Go figure.
After some thought and discussion, I have decided to reopen this thread.
I DO NOT want to see advocacy of smoking pot (advocacy of changing the law is OK), or how-to instructions of any sort. If such occurs, there may be warnings, or I may close the thread again.
Also, as always, please remember that what you post here is here forever.
You might as well ask why anyone does anything: drink, smoke cigarettes, fly airplanes. Because they enjoy it. Obviously it gives them sensations it does not give you.
Old coot checking in…back in the 60’s, smoking pot was as common as having dip with chips. I didn’t know a single person who didn’t smoke it…granted, some more than others, but nobody I knew didn’t smoke pot at least occasionally.
But I haven’t in over 20 years. I suppose if it were legal and I could go down to Walmart and buy a pack on sale, I would give it another try.
Didn’t stop for any particular reason…I guess because it wasn’t readily available where I was living at the time, and it was never something I had to do to function. One thing I will say in favor - I never saw pot smokers get into a brawl or have an argument more serious than ding dongs vs ho ho’s. Pretty peaceful, docile folk.
Yep. What DMark said. I used to smoke a lot in my 20s. Never let it interfere with work or school, and never needed it. When I went back for my teaching credential, that was one of the things I had to give up for good. I miss it sometimes, but I find that a good single-barrel bourbon is just as nice.
But I have noticed that Cheech & Chong aren’t really funny…
I tried it originally as part of breaking out of a pontificatingly squeaky-clean Major Frank Burns / Little Lord Fauntleroy kind of previous self. (As I got closer and closer to adulthood my respect and adulation for adult authority went down the tubes).
I kept smoking occasionally because nothing happened and I thought it was the coolest greatest in-joke. The Establishment is having a cow because we’re smoking stuff that doesn’t even do anything and they’re making it sound like it’s the most dangerous thing since Russian roulette.
Then, when I finally got stoned, as with Johnny L. A., it scared the hell out of me. Mostly because we were headed for school and therefore I had to “maintain” and pass for coherent my first time wasted to the gills. And of course I was too stoned to work out the relative merits of skipping class versus showing up like this, so I went and got called on to give a report I hadn’t prepared for.
Tried it more cautiously in more favorable settings. What I liked about it was the same thing that ultimately ruined it for me: it peeled me out of layers of defensiveness and attitudes and made me open and vulnerable to the here-and-now, immediate sensory screened through far fewer preformed attitude and knowledge, constantly seeing the same things new as a consequence of suppressed short-term memory retention.
I think it did pry loose spontaneity and a long-forgotten understanding of how to just be, in the immediacy of what I was feeling, and openness / receptivity to things.
On the other hand, what ended up happening was that on a handful of unpleasantly memorable occasions some guys at parties set me up in various ways, picked on me, attacked me physically and psychologically when I was vulnerable and all opened up from the marijuana. And the culmination of these events taught me to fear the mental sensationof being stoned on pot, because now I associated it with bad things happening that I could not be wary of and defend myself against.
I did it because it was fun. I quit because I am trying to find a job (I never did it really regularly, mainly socially, but I did hang out with a lot of pot-heads). In high school I remember many nights sitting over at my friend’s apartment, getting stoned, playing Uno and Lunch Money, chain smoking cigarettes and just laughing. I never had a bad experience. But I also never let it rule my life.
I know a lot of very regular users, and after a certain point it seems they need to be high to feel normal because they get high so much. I worked with many of these people in high school, and my brother is one of them. Overall they are intelligent, normal people with decent steady jobs but they HAVE to get high multiple times a day. I already smoke cigarettes, I cant afford to buy that much pot too.
It’s the only diversion from sobriety that I have ever enjoyed. Plus, I was a musician in the '70s and '80s. I hardly knew anyone who didn’t smoke.
I’ve experienced numerous other sensations, but that one was the only one I liked. I don’t get all weirded out by it, I don’t get incapacitated by it, when it’s gone I don’t need to get more or else crash. I can’t afford to get messed up on it. Even if I could, I wouldn’t. I do the equivalent of a few beers now and then. Except I don’t get stupid, I don’t have to hang out in bars, and I don’t throw up. And I don’t get the munchies, either!
I did it because somebody stuck a joint in my face, and, thought I, why not?
The shit makes me paranoid. What can I do? I want to like it, tried to like it a few times, but don’t seem to be able to like it. What I find totally bizarre is psilocybin, for me, is sheer bliss compared to THC, whilst many a stoner has told me shrooms freak them right out in a bad, bad way.
Different strokes for different synapses, I guess.
Pot is…well not legal in the Netherlands, but moderate private use isn’t prosecuted either.
I tried it about fifteen times myself in my teens and twenties. Apart from doing something excitingly forbidden, nothing interesting happened. I just hung in a chair without much need, or energy to get up and do anything but keep hanging in same chair. I thought it a waste of time, really. The only reason I tried it fourteen times more was because I kept hearing of other peoples interesting experiences.
I once ate spacecake and felt disoriented, like waking up from a nightmare and not being quite able to shake it off. Not pleasant.
My ex-BF was a serious pot-head. Three small joints an evening, pretty much every evening. He thought it helped him relax and unwind. Besides, in his circles, it was the social thing to do, like drinking beer is to some people, or drinking coffee to others.
What I saw, from my outsiders perspective, was that it *did *relax him. It effectively took his miond of his many problems. (so he wouldn’t concentraten on resolving them). Being high dulled his conversation, increased his tobacco-addiction, made him slightly more paranoid, and cost him about 120 dollars a month he couldn’t really afford.
I don’t anymore, and haven’t touched it but once or twice in the past 8 years or so.
Those last couple of times, I didn’t at all enjoy the sensation. As I’ve gotten older I tend to feel very uncomfortable when I’m not in full control of my facilities. I don’t drink but lightly and socially anymore either.
There was a point in my late teens-early twenties where getting stoned was pretty much a given. It was an all day, every day thing. We actually convinced ourselves that we couldn’t function without it, and that it helped us do everything better. In my circle of friends it was generally accepted that the question, “What do you want to do tonight?” already took into account toking up, and we went to great lengths to acquire it when the local area was dry.
In the end, I met a girl who had children and didn’t want that influence around them, and I wholeheartedly agreed. I gave it up without a fuss and never really looked back. I realize now that, to me at least, smoking “dope” (as my father calls it), makes it seem fun to have no motivation… and I’m pretty heavily self-motivationally impaired as it is.
I smoked pot in my mid-late teens. Buy the time I was 19-20 the fun wore off. I was at a party with friends around 1991 and thought I’d take them up on the offer to smoke some. All it did for me is make me stupid and want to sleep.
Mostly I smoke if I feel a migraine coming on, or if I’m too wound up to go to sleep. Sometimes I smoke recreationally, like when I want to really, really enjoy watching Finding Nemo;). I really dislike the way alcohol makes me feel–out of control of fine motor skills and that sloppy, slurry feeling, but a pot buzz is very nice. I smoke pot the way others have a beer once in a while.
I guess I should add that Mr. Armadillo and I are in our early 20s, and don’t have kids yet. We’re thinking about it in the next few years, and I’ll stop smoking a year or so before we really start trying, to make sure it’s out of my system completely, and will likely never touch it again… at least not until the kids move out .
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