I was riding to school one morning with a guy I didn’t particularly like but who had a nearly new Pontiac Catalina and liked to drive it fast and deep into the night along the endless roads of the barren coastal plains. I had never even heard of the stuff until 1968 when it first came to my high school, which was located in a self-righteous, God-fearing conservative town on the Texas coast. I first smoked marijuana in the spring of 1970, when I was seventeen. And if you’re an experienced head, it’s easy to fool most people into thinking you’re stone-cold sober. I seldom smoked at parties because I was already plenty stoned from the day’s smoking and because mixing pot and booze made me dizzy and nauseated. For that amount I could buy enough pot to stay stoned for a week.įew people, including my closest friends, were aware of my pot dependency. But I rationalized that any sort of night out on the town would set me back at least twenty bills. During my smoking years I grossed about $8000 annually, which means that more than 10 per cent of my income went up in smoke. Most writers are poor, and I am no exception. Each month I spent between $80 and $90 for an ounce to an ounce and a half of pot, which may not sound impressive to other potheads, but I was an efficient user. My daily dosage was the equivalent of about four or five fat joints, though that quantity varied with what I was doing. I mostly smoked from a bong (a type of water pipe) because it’s less wasteful. The first high would be followed by another an hour or so later and so forth, until evening rolled around and I was as stoned as I wanted to get for the day. Once I was back home, I halfheartedly tried to postpone my first smoke of the day till noon, but before long I was back to my old habits.įor several years preceding that Mexico trip and for nearly a year afterward, a typical day ran something like this: I would wake up around seven-thirty, drink three or four cups of coffee, and get stoned by nine or ten, which was about the time I started working. It was nice to sleep again, though I wasn’t pleased that I needed pot to do it. ![]() I repeated the process the next three nights with the same restful results. The high felt great, and I slept well that night. I bought a little onyx pipe at one of those shops for turistas on Avenida Juárez, and when my interviews for the day were over, I locked myself in my hotel bathroom and smoked a couple of hits of hash. Anxiety or despondency wasn’t keeping me up-I was having a great time-my mind just wouldn’t turn off at bedtime.īy the ninth day I was in Juárez and by myself at last. But the same sleeplessness occurred the next night, the night after that, and so on. What little sleep I got the rest of the night was fitful I attributed that to the excitement of being in Mexico and to the village roosters, which started crowing at about three in the morning. A couple of hours after I finally did drift off, I was wide awake again. I did not fall asleep easily that first night in Mexico, even though I was just on the shy side of bed-spinning drunk. I hadn’t abstained for more than a day or two in over two years, often smoking for months without letup. Laying off pot for a few weeks would be good for me. I pooh-poohed his paranoia but secretly half-welcomed it. It had been his idea to go to Mexico drug-free-he was afraid of being caught. But I took no pot on this trip, just a pea-size lump of hashish wrapped up and taped inside the tip of my shoe I would not smoke it until my photographer and I parted ways at the end of the first week. Mexican cops seldom search you unless they are provoked. ![]() I usually carried a pot stash into Mexico, prerolled into joints, triple-wrapped in plastic, and stuffed into a sock or my underwear. I first realized that I was addicted to marijuana in the fall of 1984, when I went to Mexico to work on a couple of stories. And it is the least understood-and most misunderstood-popular drug today. After tobacco and alcohol, marijuana is the most frequently used psychoactive drug in the United States. Don’t let anybody kid you-marijuana is addictive. Such is the nature of chemical dependency. So in a sense I am a recovering addict, something I will be for the rest of my life. After smoking pot for fifteen years, with four years of dedicated abuse, I quit cold last year. ![]() ![]() I am a marijuana addict, the way other people are alcoholics or cokeheads. Read more here about our archive digitization project. We have left it as it was originally published, without updating, to maintain a clear historical record. This story is from Texas Monthly ’s archives.
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