i smoked pot daily, several times a day, sometimes for hours straight for 15 years. when i finally stopped, i was shocked at how many problems came from it, problems i thought were just a part of me...but weren't.
when i stopped, so did these problems:
1. frustration levels reaching a critical point (i.e. red face, high blood pressure, tears) very quickly.
2. UNBELIEVABLE menstrual pain. rolling around, fetal position pain. pain so bad, i couldn't get out of bed to get pain medication that wasn't strong enough anyway.
3. waking up in the middle of the night. every night, for hours.
4. watching movies three times in order to remember what i've seen (ok, i knew this was because of the pot)
5. inability to write. words not flowing. like constipation.
6. social abilities down, anxiety up
7. easily bored. easily boring.
8. violent PMS. i would regularly bash stuff with any given object, sometimes an umbrella, sometimes my walkman.
this is just a sampling of the many problems that i got from so much pot.
recently i've been smoking again. not sure why...but i'm stopping it. i'm starting to have these problems again. chiefly, the inability to write, which is my most favorite thing. i haven't been excited about anything i've written since smoking again.
this isn't some grand profound lesson. this is something simple: anything good in excess can become something bad.
3 comments:
You are so right - I quit after thirty years and noticed so much of what I had gone through counseling for was exacerbated through pot addiction. I am glad I stumbled on to your site to remind me of what would happen if I went back to it. It is hard sometimes.
Well, congrats. But now you're going to make me wonder if there is ANYTHING good out there that doesn't become bad when it's used to excess...I'll spend the rest of the day thinking about this mystery...Grrrrr-ate...
Hmmm... What if you didn't use it to excess? I stumbled on your blog, as was looking for a Terry Gilliam reference while I surfed. I find him to be a historic figure of alternative thought for the 20th/21st Century, yet as it turns out, there are too many writers, directors, artists, professors, scientists, normal people and their audience, to say only negative things about drugs. Kind of like guns, religion, cars, and spoons (guns don’t kill people, people kill people; religions don’t call jihad or inquisitions…, driver’s licenses don’t crash cars, and spoons don’t make fat people…). With all this strange controversy, that does extol the "virtues" of marijuana, I had to learn more about it. So many of the most creative people of the last few hundred years, (Freud, Edison, Leary, Shelly, Dickens, Burroughs, etc, among the harder drug users) have been pro-pot, leading personal lives below the radar, while professionally, above, they shine, that I have to wonder, and ask you... why is there a disconnect between the positive benefits of something like this, overwhelmed by the negative. As excessive users, you knew you were doing it the wrong way, but yet, when you wanted control back, you seemed to exercise then what would have prevented the downside in the first place? I often speculate how many poets, scientists, thinkers, might have been, if they had not not succumbed to the dark side of the pull of the underground underneath of "drug stigma," or the commonality of public education and coercion. And yet, we, enjoying the results and fruits of labor of such similar stories as being of a persecuted religion, or an alternative sex, or a reasonable, legal but questionable practice, continue to follow the same pathways as the rigid criticality that we all rebel against, but should have been smarter to deal with properly.
Besides which should be considered illegal or questionable, the open minded contributor to society’s progress, or the church that still tries to force the views that told the world it was flat, and that we couldn’t have come from an evolving life form, as we still evolve intellectually…? Questions only really, but, what was it that made excess, excess for you instead of just moderation and upside?
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