The northlondonhippy

It was exactly 25 years ago this month that I began my career as a daily cannabis smoker.

I didn’t first try it then; my first expe­ri­ence with weed was around 2 years before that. I smoked it once, or rather tried to and didn’t get even slightly high. While I count this expe­ri­ence as my first, it is prac­ti­cally unre­lated to my con­tin­ued use of my beloved dope.

In June 2001, at the age of 18, I prop­erly smoked it for the first time, get­ting that sweet smoke deep into my lungs and get­ting right­eously stoned to the gills! I was at a party and a friend of mine took the time to teach me how to smoke.

That may sound silly, but I wasn’t a smoker at the time. I didn’t really know how to get the smoke into my lungs with­out cough­ing it back up. If it weren’t for my friend’s patience, I might never have dis­cov­ered how won­der­ful weed could be!

Get­ting high for the first time was a rev­e­la­tion to me; it opened my mind up to all sorts of thoughts and feel­ings. More than that; it was as if I dis­cov­ered a part of me that was miss­ing for my entire life.

Mar­i­juana made me feel complete.

I know that’s a bold state­ment, but I gen­uinely believe it is true. I’ve often joked that I was miss­ing a gland to secrete THC into my blood­stream and my con­stant dope smok­ing was sim­ply me fill­ing that gap.

Some peo­ple might say it’s a form of self-medication and I don’t know that I would dis­agree. At var­i­ous times in my life, weed has helped me with depres­sion, anx­i­ety and a host of other neu­ro­sis that per­co­late in my brain.

Yes, I’m biased when it comes to cannabis.

After that first night at the party, when I got prop­erly stoned, I knew I needed to learn more about dope. I started hang­ing around with heavy-duty dope smok­ers and I got to know some dealers.

Back then, the weed I was get­ting came from Colom­bia; it was brown and com­pressed and tasted like shit. It was also cheap, a whole ounce cost­ing less than an 1/8th of an ounce of skunk weed does today.

We called it dirt weed, but it got you high. It was loaded with seeds and stems and clean­ing them out on a double-album cover took ages.

I smoked noth­ing but dirt weed for a cou­ple of years and then I met a brand new dealer who had some­thing he called “indica”, which we now know as skunk. It had been grown hydro­pon­i­cally and looked liked bright green stalks of cau­li­flower, the size of baby’s fists.

This was the first time I ever saw proper buds and it would have been 1983 I think.

This “indica” was in a dif­fer­ent class from the dirt weed I was used to; it tasted sweet and pun­gent and was much stronger. It took my dope smok­ing to a dif­fer­ent level and this new guy had it all the time.

At one point, around the same period, he had some­thing he called “choco­late Thai weed”, which had a slight taste of choco­late about it and pro­duced a dif­fer­ent high to the “indica”.

The “Thai weed” was more of a body high and it glued you to the sofa in front of the tv for hours. The “indica” was more cere­bral and you could func­tion and get on with your life.

Nat­u­rally, I enjoyed both.

At one point, I decided I would try to deal a bit myself; the only time I’ve ever attempted this. I bought a quar­ter pound of the “choco­late Thai”, with the clever idea of sell­ing three ounces, thus mak­ing the fourth one free. This is a com­mon pric­ing plan with drugs.

Except I didn’t sell any of it, I smoked it all myself. And I never bought that much in one go ever again. I learned my les­son; some peo­ple can deal with deal­ing and some peo­ple can’t. I can’t; I love the stuff too much.

When I moved away from that area to the big city, my dope habit moved right along with me. The big city was NYC and the year was 1985.

I started out by buy­ing my dope in a local park that I passed through every day. Not the smartest way to score, but being new in town and going to uni­ver­sity, it was the done thing.

At first scor­ing weed on the street was easy; deal­ers were scat­tered all over the park, hiss­ing the word “sensi” at all passers-by.

It was sim­ply mat­ter of swap­ping ten dol­lars for a small bag of weed as quickly as pos­si­ble, then walk­ing away. My grand­mother could have done it.

And then it all changed.

You can’t men­tion drugs on the streets of NYC in the mid-to-late 80’s with­out talk­ing about the arrival of crack cocaine. Crack changed everything.

The first change was that the guys who used to say “sensi” changed their mantra to “crack it up”. Then the “sensi” changed; I got ripped off for the first time. I was sold “wack weed”.

“Wack weed” was fake herbal cannabis, pur­chased in a head­shop for sig­nif­i­cantly less than actual weed. It was meant to be a sub­sti­tute for the real thing, much like today’s herbal smok­ing mix­tures. The main dif­fer­ence being that “wack weed” was shaped like buds and visu­ally you couldn’t tell the difference.

The only dis­tinc­tion between the two could be dis­cerned by smelling them, which is a time con­sum­ing and very telling thing to do when try­ing to do a quick and dirty drug deal on the street. But needs must, so now every­one was smelling the lit­tle baggy to make sure it had the real thing inside.

The crack­heads got wise to this quickly and adapted their game. They began to put a tiny pinch of skunk on top of the “wack weed”, so that when you smelled it, you really thought you were get­ting what you needed. It was only when you got home and went to roll a spliff that you’d dis­cover you’d been ripped off, again!

It was time to take my busi­ness else­where; luck­ily my younger brother was hav­ing bet­ter luck than I was and he hooked me up with a middled-aged Euro­pean woman who qui­etly dealt from her Man­hat­tan flat. I shopped with her for around 6 years, until I moved to London.

Dur­ing that time, other sources would occa­sion­ally become avail­able and they were any­thing from a store­front in lower Man­hat­tan that sold it over the counter, until the queues of stockbroker-types on a Fri­day night got so long that the cops got hip to it, right through to a high-end deliv­ery ser­vice, stock­ing gourmet vari­eties at a pre­mium price. Now those were the good old days!

My Euro­pean friend was very reg­u­lar as well and droughts with her were few and very far between. I was well-served with decent weed until I arrived in Lon­don in the early 90s.

Back then, all you could get in Lon­don was hash; black rocky or some­times Lebanese red. Nei­ther was par­tic­u­larly pleas­ant to smoke, but it was bet­ter than noth­ing. Rocky has an espe­cially deserved rep­u­ta­tion for being nasty and is rumoured to con­tain any­thing from shoe pol­ish to camel shit. Yum.

My semi-regular vis­its to Ams­ter­dam were the only times I got to enjoy decent weed for the first few years I lived in Lon­don and some of the weed I had there was the best I’d ever smoked…until I grew my own.

About 13 years ago, I had a small indoor gar­den along with 2 friends of mine. We split the costs, the work and the weed and that freshly grown skunk was unbe­liev­ably good! We only turned 2 crops around before we had to give it up due to the loss of the location.

The main prob­lem with grow­ing skunk weed is the stench, if you think it smelly badly sit­ting in a plas­tic bag, imag­ine what its like when its alive and breath­ing on the vine!

I haven’t had the oppor­tu­nity to grow any myself since then, but do dream of the day when I have the space and can be fully self-sufficient.

Lucky for me, other peo­ple all over Lon­don took up the man­tle and fresh skunky weed has never been more plen­ti­ful. I had a mate who was par­tic­u­larly help­ful on that score for many, many years, but he’s now retired and hung up his hydroponics.

These days, I know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy, so it’s not as straight for­ward as I would like it to be, but still I’m nearly never with­out, touch wood.

For most peo­ple, cannabis is a bit of recre­ational fun, but for oth­ers, like me, it’s a lifestyle, a reli­gion, and a rea­son to feel good all the time.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t psy­cho­log­i­cally depen­dent on mar­i­juana, but I’m not addicted to it.

I am addicted to tobacco, so I can tell the dif­fer­ence. I can go with­out weed and do when­ever I travel, whereas I can’t go more than a cou­ple of hours with­out a cigarette.

I’m not say­ing that being depen­dent on it is a good thing for every­one, but it is cer­tainly a good thing for me.

If it weren’t for smok­ing dope every day, I can’t hon­estly say to you I would be sit­ting here right now, spew­ing my spe­cial brand of dri­vel to an ever-increasing audi­ence of appre­cia­tive hippyfans.

I can’t say that I would be here at all.

I do mean that. Weed has saved my life more than once and prob­a­bly will again in the future.

With the excep­tion of a cou­ple of brief gaps, I’ve been employed full­time for most of my adult life, I’m con­sci­en­tious and hard work­ing. I pay my taxes and mainly break only one law; I’m excep­tion­ally respon­si­ble and moral and in all of my actions. Even my car is envi­ron­men­tally friendly.

I’m a good per­son, I just choose to smoke mar­i­juana in the pri­vacy of my own home; a choice that as an adult, should be mine to make.

Remem­ber, I speak from expe­ri­ence, twenty-five years of it. Maybe its time some­one should lis­ten to me!

Decrim­i­nalise cannabis now! We’re doing noth­ing wrong!