Once again, many people were able to write earnestly and at great length about their undeniable weed-smoking (or ingesting) problems. What used to be for anxiety, relaxation, or pain has suddenly become an additional anchor for them. But how to stop? Like anything that we love so much, even if it hurts us, it seems impossible. Our contributors today are taking a big step and finally saying out loud what they’ve secretly known for longer than they’d care to admit.

This is our third installment of “What It’s Like to Be Addicted to Weed,” and I’m sure another one is forthcoming. Stay tuned. —AJD

And Again, and Again, and Again

By The Small Bow Family Orchestra

I hated even getting the weed callout because my brain went, mmm, pot, and then there I was, imagining sitting on the porch in fading summer evening light, joint in hand, smoke spiraling out beyond the veranda, and my toddler sleeping peacefully in his bed. It’s romantic. I think maybe writing about even the worst things makes them romantic. There’s something about prose that just does that, which is why reading about weed addiction — vital to my survival — is also a dangerous game for me.

I wrote in to the last callout. I was the mother delightedly talking about how I was newly pregnant and how that pregnancy (9 months) and breastfeeding (at least a few more months), would take my sturdy-feeling 5 months sober and make it a more robust number. Spoiler: It didn’t. 

I miscarried. I smoked the night I found out, chain-smoking joints through tears until I fell into bed, and I didn’t stop smoking for two months. And then I stopped for a few months, and then I started again, and on and on it went and maybe on it still goes (I have been, knock on wood, sober since mid-April).

I am one of those alcoholics who thought weed was a fine substitute until it wasn’t. Until I was spending more at the dispensary than I was on daycare — sometimes almost even double. 

Sometimes I think one of the only things that’s keeping me from smoking right now is my burning desire to have another child. I can’t afford double daycare and a costly pre-roll habit — one that sometimes turns into a costly grinding/rolling-my own habit that is also messy and leaves my fingers sticky and me feeling somehow worse . . . like I’ve devolved into my stoner university boyfriend, who I thought was so hot until I realized that he was a kind of illiterate that dried me right up. I feel dried right up now, but I did it to myself.

I don’t want to always be stopping and starting and stopping and starting, but the idea of saying I’m done for good feels impossible. So for now, I try to focus on my other goals. I try to focus on being a better parent to the kid who is already here. I try to focus on my professional ambitions and on tending to my garden. I try to read only as many addiction memoirs as I need to feel human, but not so many that I find myself saying a slip or two or 10 is normal.

I’m a 62-year-old church wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother who loves a hit of weed with my morning first cup of coffee. I love the hybrid type. It makes me happy, energetic and full of love and optimism. A very perfect way to start my day as an in-home child daycare provider. I hide it well or so I think. I’ve been smoking every day for the last 30 years. I will take hits throughout my day during breaks. I enjoy the feeling it gives me. I’m creative artistically, playfully physical, and love to dance with the kids. I think I should quit, though. I’m 1 year 8 months sober from alcohol on July 11! I read that I’m in recovery, not sober, because I still use a substance to alter my brain — the weed. I want to be completely sober, so maybe I should quit. I’ve been thinking about it. Some mornings, I decide to put my paraphernalia away after my first hit to try to quit throughout the day. Most days it’s hard to stop, though. Oh what to do? I’m still thinking about it.

I stopped drinking in 2018, a few years after weed became legal in my state. Pot was my first drug, smoked out of apples, tin cans, and poorly rolled joints when I was starting high school. We called it ditch weed in Appalachia. That shit that grew on the side of the road. You didn’t need to convince an older sibling or friend with a fake ID to get it. 

I would smoke and habla espanol in first period. But since it was illegal, and college happened, I became an alcoholic for 20 years instead. When I quit drinking, I thought of pot as my way to still “be fun” at a party, though even then I should have realized a problem was growing. I would sneak away from others to smoke, to get away from the anxiety of socializing. And then, well, for a long time I told myself everything is just a bit better stoned (parenting, replying to emails, doing the dishes, cooking). I think a lot of people become addicted to weed to mask their problems with depression and maybe my years on antidepressants had led me to think they weren’t enough anymore.

It’s been 8 years. I’ve twice had vomiting episodes that lasted 24-48 hours and scared my family. I’ve stopped trying to lie to my kids and admit that I “smoke” and they shouldn’t. I procrastinate everything even the slightest bit difficult and disappear on a haze of smoke. It makes me sad. 

The worst part. I was proud of stopping drinking but I can hardly call myself sober and recognize the same pattern of dependency and so often feel powerless to combat it. Last detail and I sort of word-vomit here: I remember trying to stop smoking, I would buy a pack and regret it, throw it out, return to the trash to get it back, douse the cigarettes in water, and I found myself doing the same with the pre-rolls I smoked. Only sometimes I’d dry them back out. Because the day had been hard. Because it was sunny outside and the garden needed work. Because my kid wanted to do some art and I didn’t want to be crabby. 

I don’t know how/where to end this or where this ends. But I’m thankful for TSB and that you’ve given a space for people to share stories like this.

I’ve never written before about my addiction to weed, or even spoken about it out loud too much, because when I have, everyone has told me that it really isn’t that bad. Or they worry about me, which I also don’t like. When everyone else tells you it isn’t that bad, including your therapist and your doctor, it makes it easy to believe that it isn’t. But the relationship is unhealthy and I know it. The physical dependence is manageable — I feel low, and anxious the following day, but have enough going on in my life that I could conceivably be feeling low and anxious for another reason. I spent years smoking a couple of puffs of a joint every night after work. I would roll my own, tried to grow my own (terrible), then eventually shifted to pre-rolls. I loved it. It was legal, easy to get. It chilled me out. It helped me disconnect from my “stressful life” (I actually have an incredible life that is, objectively, really not that stressful). I am a social worker who works in community mental health. My job can be hard, and I worry a lot; I’ve had some traumatic experiences there but have learned from them. I love it, and think I do it pretty well. I don’t have kids. I have an awesome dog who barks a lot. I recently broke up with my partner of ten years because I needed to experience living my one guaranteed lifetime on my own for a while. We got together when we were 21. I’m 32 now. I live alone. He’s still my best friend and we still hang — he has a new girlfriend now, who I’m meeting tonight. I’m dating, but everyone is pretty annoying. I know I’m young, but my friends are getting married and having babies and I am further from that future track than I’ve ever been. Weed helps me socialize, helps me not observe myself so closely, helps me be more present (except actually, the opposite is true). Weed helped my partner and I relax and get silly together, instead of me worrying about whether or not he was my soulmate and getting annoyed at him for not doing the dishes (even though I wasn’t doing them either). I told myself it helped me play music and write and get creative (although actually, all I wanted to do was scroll on my phone). It helps me chat more easily to my mom, be more patient and loving in helping her navigate her neuroses. It also makes me forget my life. It makes my singing voice raspy and my hayfever flare. I get this epic cough after a week of not smoking. I joke about having ADHD, but I don’t. I go days without smoking now, but rarely weeks. When I do go weeks, I pat myself on the back and tell myself I deserve to walk around the block with a joint and get a little high before going to trivia or a dinner party with friends. I’ll be more fun. I’ll have more fun. Then I’ll have half a joint to smoke tomorrow down by the river with my dog and guitar. Then I’ll flush the rest down the toilet, mad at myself for falling for the old trick again. And again, and again, and again.

It’s ruining my life. It really is. No motivation, no happiness, no love, no feelings. From wake till sleep. I can feel my grasp on my career and family slowly slipping through my fingers and I’m just not doing anything about it except hitting this fucking vape. Years of diligent fitness wasted – muscles have turned to fat. UberEats sending me cold, awful, fat brown meals. Taking unnecessary risks once a month — “smuggling” a cart or two across a border, going into the sketchy, unlicensed dispo in case they have something I haven’t heard of? Wtf am I doing. Reminds me of when I started driving just a little drunk, towards the end of some triumphant alcoholism, before cancer and chemo and tumors forced me to stop drinking forever. I don’t see a way out till something bad happens. This shit is just too accessible, too easy to escape into. Fuck it [15 seconds of vape hiss] . . . 

I got drunk for the first time at age 12. I felt horrible and I vowed never to do it again. (I did it again.)

A year later, I got high on cannabis for the first time. I wanted to feel that way forever.

I got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous at age 30, and by then my drug of choice was definitely alcohol. But I loved weed. If the circumstances had been different, weed might have destroyed my life, not alcohol.

Different how? I was an adolescent in the 1980s. Back then cannabis was illegal everywhere in the U.S. You could acquire it only by performing an act of criminality with one or more other criminals.

But for a teenager that actually was perfect. Pot was much easier for me to get than alcohol. Buying alcohol at that age meant messing around with fake IDs or other ruses of sometimes enormous complexity. Buying pot meant calling a guy.

And so when I was a teenager I smoked a lot of pot. Nights and weekends. Sometimes before school. Like an idiot, I smoked it while driving around. A lot.

I smoked before movies. I smoked while watching TV and listening to music. I somehow learned to keep it together when talking to parents, teachers, even cops, while stoned out of my mind.

I graduated from college. I still smoked pot. I read Infinite Jest, the 1,000-page David Foster Wallace novel that defined the 1990s for a generation of self-conscious men in their 20s. There’s a chapter about a man who plans a cannabis binge. He lays in just the right combination of junk food, junk movies and paraphernalia, and he calls in sick to work. He takes steps to make himself unreachable. The chapter resonated with me powerfully. That was me, home alone, smoking weed, avoiding calls, avoiding people.

Weed “had long since stopped being a release or relief or fun,” Wallace writes. That resonated with me too. For years I had been trying to feel the way I felt when I first smoked pot at age 13. I never did.

By my mid 20s I was drinking more and smoking weed less. The illegality bothered me more than it did when I was a teenager. I hated scoring from dealers. I hated having to go to some dude’s sad apartment in a grim apartment complex and pretend to socialize. I got heavily into bourbon, up to a liter a day before I stopped.

Meanwhile, 24 years after I got sober, cannabis culture has changed. It’s legal in many places. It’s mainstream. When I drive by a dispensary, I feel . . . not triggered, exactly? I’ve been sober long enough that I don’t worry about relapsing. But I feel a certain longing, a curiosity. What would using cannabis look like for me if I could legally buy as much as I want? Spoiler: It wouldn’t end well.

I love it, but I’m not sure it loves me back. I mean, how can it? It’s my brain’s endocannabinoids shrieking back at me, magnified, amplified, diminished, contorted. What’s not to love? The anticipation of losing the crutch was worse than the day after quitting. Leading up to it, I was clicking the hideously satisfying tactile switch of my Plenty five times a day. If there’s a small amount in there, it’s not as bad, right, I asked? Nobody answered back.

I don’t miss measuring my time by it. Need to leave for a party by noon, make sure you have time to hit the Plenty. About a half hour to bed, gotta build in time for it to heat up and cool down so that I don’t perseverate about a house fire before I sleep. Wake up — do I make breakfast or do I pack a leisurely bowl first? The ritual became too much of a ritual and started to feel like penance, or an obligation to an unknown deity. 

I don’t miss tracking it — that’s how I got myself, the data, the metrics, the provenance, if you’re feeling fancy. Where’s the newest best dispo? Who has the most primo genetics? It all goes in the spreadsheet. The nagging knowledge that chasing these strains wouldn't lead to any revelation or magic perfect combination of THC that would feel completely better. 161 strains and $4k spent since 2020, and nothing to show for it but observation and good times.

I don’t know if I’m done done, but I know that it’s not going to fly during pregnancy. Hard stop. I dream about smoking it or taking an edible and I wake up seized with fear that I’ve done something bad. Sometimes my friends reassure me that it’s okay, that if the nausea is really bad, I can take an edible. Emily Oster says a glass or two of wine each trimester isn’t likely to cause harm. We’re in a new era, right? But my brain screeches at me, a dark and a light side to OCD. It won’t let me do it. The strictness soothes me, like a mommy dominatrix. I need the structure of no to cautiously test the waters of a yes someday, if that ever comes. Still doesn’t stop me from sniffing extra hard when someone drives by and reeks of fresh bud. God, I miss that smell.

My relationship was flawed, and right now, it’s an ex’s number in my phone, and I know if I want it, I’ll have to reach out. It’ll have to be me. I don't know if I’ll find the time between healing postpartum and going back to work and getting to know our new baby and learning what it means to be a dad, and it’s okay. The number’s still there. It’s never going away (unless we inexplicably repeal it on our fucking ballot this year, please go out and vote) but I need to redefine my relationship with it in a way that doesn’t eke resources from me anymore, if at all. I need to put myself before the ritual.

Continuously free of alcohol (and cocaine, which was less of a problem but often followed the alcohol in the way a cloud of dust followed Pigpen) for four years now. I use weed (mostly edibles and weed sodas). Sometimes I debate with myself about whether I use weed “alcoholically.” I’m sure any AA sponsor (I am not an AA person and don’t have one, so this is pure conjecture) would say yes and to leave it alone.

Despite the lack of AA, I have gotten pretty good at introspection and personal-inventory taking during my years of (Californian) sobriety, and on the question of “is your weed use at all reminiscent of your drinking?” I think I’ve landed on “maybe a little bit, but: so what.”

I do look forward to using weed. I do look for days when it’s “okay” to use weed (like not during work hours) and so far have stuck to that (not something I was great at during the last year of drinking). I don’t crave weed the way I craved wine. Most importantly, the outcomes and consequences are very, very different.

Wine made me use more, and more, and more, and I had no limit (other than running out or losing consciousness). Weed is one dose and no more. Wine made me careless of my body, mind, surroundings, and boundaries. Weed makes me introspective, makes me feel like writing, doing yoga, drawing, or walking in nature. I’ve never once kissed anyone I am not supposed to on THC.

A goodbye love letter to weed.

Thank you for taking away the pain. You “fixed” so many problems for me that I don’t know how to take care of myself without you. You have held me through every hangover, headache, sickness, death in the family, and anxiety attack. You’ve always brought me down to earth and slowed my thoughts. You have always been there for me — my medicine for 15 years . . . 

My medicine is now hurting me. Remember that brutal sore throat that lasted weeks? Remember CHS where my mouth would fill with saliva and my stomach would churn?

When I am sober, I just want to be high, but when I am high, I’m always planning how and when to quit. What part of me is crying out to be free after I used the thing I thought I wanted? Why do I smoke weed and then have caffeine just to reach a quasi-baseline?

I have quit countless times, gotten through a week of irritability, nausea, anxiety and night sweats. Gotten through the days where I was suffering and my brain was screaming “I KNOW HOW TO FIX THIS” only to believe yet again that I can moderate this time. It feels amazing in the beginning — I can be motivated and energized and fun. Once a day morphs into 3 times a day and it doesn’t feel amazing anymore. I feel owned. I feel like I need it to feel normal, to parent my kids, to enjoy my weekend, to live. You were a tool that helped me survive but now you’re an anvil tied to my middle, dragging me down into the hazy depths. You’ve been my ride or die and as such I’ve drifted from my husband, my friends, and anyone that doesn’t want to smoke with me, which is basically everyone.

How do I raise kids to say no to drugs when I am saying yes, every day? How do I help with homework when I’m hazy and slow. How will I connect with my husband in our empty nest if I have not really tried for 20 years . . . I can see myself smoking at 85 and how sad will that be. That’s what my whole life will have amounted to . . . I feel so much shame for loving you, for the danger I’ve put myself in, and the lies I’ve told to have you.

I think I will always love you, but I don’t love me with you anymore. This season of having kids where I am their whole world is fleeting and I can’t miss it. I can’t be high the whole time, I’ll never forgive myself. The relationship and memories I can have with my family are down one path of a forked road. A vibrant, sober, real, healthy, and present life. Down the other path — weed.

I know my whole perception will change when I am not under your thumb anymore. Please universe, give me strength.

I quit weed a little over ten months ago, and I’m so glad I did. Let me preface this by saying I am constantly appalled at how little respect or bare-minimum tolerance our society has for drug users and people with substance use disorders; I am very pro-drug, pro-safe-supply, and I think everyone everywhere should carry Narcan and know how to use it. That said, I think the addictive/compulsive part of me latched onto this exact set of values to tell me I couldn’t possibly be really addicted to weed (what was I, a cop??), and honey, I was. 

Weed can be an incredible thing, and I often miss the way popping an edible let me go on a kind of “brain vacation” or intensify already-cool experiences, but by the time I realized I had a problem, I was exhausted from smoking and stopping and smoking and telling myself I’d stop and smoking and wondering if I was even getting high and smoking and taking tolerance breaks and smoking and spending money on weed and smoking and driving (!) and generally feeling like more of my life than I wanted was wrapped up in the project management of My Relationship With Weed.

I went to a few Marijuana Anonymous Zoom meetings during those hard first few days of my weed abstinence, and I didn’t find them unhelpful, but what’s helped the most in allowing me to alter my weed dependency is compelling myself to “play the tape forward” and remind myself of the likely outcome of a cheeky preroll or an innocent 10mg gummy: binge eating, mindless spending, social withdrawal, self-gaslighting (did I really dislike how someone had spoken to me, or was I just high?), lack of ambition, lack of consistency, lack of desire to sit still with my feelings.

I know people who smoke as much as I used to and don’t seem to notice adverse effects, but because the cultural conversation around weed addiction is still evolving, let me say this: If you feel like your use of weed is a problem or even if you’re just curious about what your life would be like without weed, try stopping. It doesn’t have to be forever (I hope I can smoke in moderation again someday), but for now, it’s for me.

fin

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MORE WEED STORIES:

ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN