For close to 20 years I inhaled leaf, tip, buds, bush heads, hydro, chocolate buddha, sinsemilla, Mexican dirt weed, power skunk, Maui wowie, black hash, brown hash, green hash, hash oil, the putty out of downpipes, I've even ground up seeds and stems and smoked them.
I've grown it, stolen in, given it away, traded it for a wetsuit, even pretended it was parsley when selling it.
So, please don't tell me I'm anti-dope; I just reckon it's time that people, in an attempt to sound enlightened, stop telling the world that marijuana is harmless, when anyone who's been around it for long enough knows that's not true ...
I dunno whether you've ever heard voices after taking drugs but I have, several times, and it used to be what I paid good money for. The problem was, as my drug career deepened and lengthened, those pesky head noises would appear after just one cone of hydro; and there's the rub.
Hydro, or hydroponically-grown marijuana is everywhere nowadays; it's the dope of choice for younger smokers, because nothing else delivers the punch and the value for money.
If you've ever seen a hydro set-up, you'll know they get hot and humid and are a magnet for every type of bug and insect within a kilometre; which is why a lot of growers hit their plants with a cocktail of pesticides and fungicides that make Agent Orange look like Ventolin.
This means the plants, and the buds kids smoke, are also chock full of those pesticides, as well as fertilisers chosen by growers whose knowledge of chemicals and their effect on the human brain is limited to "this shit hammers you".
My generation is the first to have had a widespread and prolonged exposure to hydro and as we get older, I can tell you, the human wreckage isn't pretty.
The link between marijuana use and mental problems has been written about many times before, but there's still a persistent mindset among a lot of younger users I talk to that dope is natural, "it's a herb" and it's "better for you than tobacco", which is just not the case with hydro.
The problem with writing something like this is it's only the people who've been there and smoked it who really understand; a 14-year-old just getting into mulling isn't gonna take notice of a term as prosaic as "mental health".
Yes, choofin' can be a lot of fun, you'll get no argument from me, but if you're going to have the odd joint or cone, stick with naturally grown weed - and stop when the voices start.
It was always the case that it was what they cut it with, in the case of acid and the like and in the case of grass, it was what how they'd grown it - the chemicals they'd sprayed it with.
As for mental illness, my eccentricity might simply be down to just too much tea. You have to watch that
The article is, as you say, fascinating and well written. Yes, the problem has always been what they cut it with - and where they got it, as these people invariably were selling harder stuff too. I'm just going to have a cup of tea now!
ReplyDeleteI think he has just made a case for licensing it.
ReplyDeletesome of those chinese teas, one sip can keep you awake for 12 hours!
ReplyDeleteI didn't know it was called "hydro." Here we always just called it "dro." The regular kind we called "commercial." Nobody smokes the regular kind anymore, if they can help it. It's not considered to be worth the money.
ReplyDeleteI'm willing to admit that I smoked a lot of weed when I was (slightly) younger. I didn't think it was harmless then, and I don't think it's harmless now.
Aside from all the other negative effects it has, marijuana smoke isn't filtered. We smoked it in blunts and joints and bowls, thick, totally unfiltered and terrible for our lungs. I talked to one of my friends who still smokes the other day-- she's retained that sickening, hacking cough. Gross.