After almost ten years, I somehow found myself right back where I began. I guess this is why this blog exists, and why it continues to have a life.

Two kids and a mortgage. Twelve months post redundancy. Not much money coming in. Let’s be honest, bugger all coming in.

I’ve been smoking like a bitch. I don’t know exactly how much a bitch is in grams, but it’s a lot. And the vape made it a thousand times worse, because the vape is just around the fucking corner. There is more effort in taking a shit than there is in pulling it out and having a few tokes. That’s the problem.

The real problem is that vaping doesn’t feel like you’ve done anything. It feels like you’ve just had a mild cigarette.

Then you have to realise the THC in your blood is probably sitting around 98%. If they cremated you, you could crumble the ashes and they would fetch a decent price. Up there with the delta nines and all those California items, in a high end coffee shop. That’s how much THC I had in me. That’s how bad it got.

I’ll tell you where it tipped. I found myself picking up a joint I hadn’t finished the night before. Two in the afternoon. Kids at school. No harm. Just firing one up. Alone. For the first time in my life I was pretty much high during the day, smoking like a bitch. (Apologies to all bitches out there, if I’m giving you a bad name. This is only the start.)

THE ROUTINE

I was just fucking exhausted all the damn time.

Kids in bed at seven or eight. Then I’d be getting high pretty much till about 1 at night, smoking like a bastard. (Apologies to all bastards out there. The bitches have had their turn. Now I’m giving you a bad name as well.) Then eventually going to bed at about half one. A lot of it was me just getting high and higher, chasing highs. Wake up exhausted. A shit ton of coffee just to do basic arithmetic, because I was fucked.

What is the fucking point? Getting high, and eating, in ways I cannot even explain. Feasts. Unlimited buffet quantities, in the early hours. I would put the most well stacked Chinese buffet to shame. God damn, that’s a lot of food, and I was getting through it.

On top of it all, I was on Mounjaro (similar to the more famous Ozempic jab). I was also trying to lose weight. Some could argue the lifestyle needed a revision, because that level of getting high wasn’t exactly working for me.

The only winner was Sainsbury’s. So much food. Depression eating, really. Hard times, small children, everything else on top. Easy to fall into. I’m not gonna be hard on myself. Even now I sympathise. I was worried, and this is what I reached for.

THE LOOP

Myself and Claude had a chat. Or was it Grok? I can’t remember. The AIs know not to mention the weed. I’ve shouted at them before. They avoid the subject, agree with me, and look at the other places where the buildings are falling down. Except there.

It is a loop. That much THC and your REM sleep is radically reduced, so you genuinely wake up tired. Insane amounts of coffee just to feel normal. Rinse and repeat. Coffee to get up, something else to get to sleep, and with the THC you are not actually sleeping. I’m not a doctor. This is just my experience. It got silly. What the fuck is going on.

My partner started to notice the dosage going up, which is the understatement of the fucking century. I am not surprised the local fire brigade never came round, what with the piles of smoke in the sky. Yes. I was smoking like a bitch and a bastard. (Apologies to all bitches and all bastards. Both of you, together. I have run out of groups and started doubling up. Definitely giving you a bad name.)

STRONGER STUFF

Months of this, and it had gone from worse to bad. Every time I bought weed I wanted it stronger. Different bud. Knock out stuff. Just stronger.

Your brain will justify all of it. Hilarious, really. The honest version is shorter. You are on a bad one. Easier said than done.

The odd evening I passed out and didn’t smoke myself off my balls, it barely mattered. There was already enough THC in me.

THE AMNESTY

Enough was enough. I have taken a weed amnesty.

DAY EIGHT

I’m on day eight or nine of this amnesty. I feel fresh. More energy. More sleep. No weird aches and pains in the morning. I’m actually a lot more intelligent. And yes. I’m dreaming.

You forget your dreams. That’s normal, even when you’re clean. Off it for a while, though, a real one lands and you remember it. I’m loving that.

I forgot how good it feels to be clean. If someone told me this was another drug, I wouldn’t believe them. Now I am clean, and I do feel fucking EXCELLENT.

Day one. Day two. The old tropes turned up on time. On day two or three I was talking to a mate, my smoking buddy, a regular smoker like me. I was only sharing what Claude had said. Regular THC interrupts your REM, so you don’t really dream. He furiously said, “What are you talking about? I dream all the time. I dream all the time. You’re talking rubbish. I have loads of dreams.”

I think I may have touched a sensitive topic. I wasn’t preaching. Or I didn’t think I was. I was just telling him what had happened to me.

FULL CIRCLE

The memory came back with it. REM is where the short term stuff gets moved into long term memory, and heavy THC disturbs that. Apparently. According to the research. What I know is the brain fog has lifted. I can remember things. There is a difference.

And I remembered this blog. How I Quit Weed. God, I’ve been here before. Clean, after being a stoned ass motherfucker. (Apologies to all motherfuckers. We started with bitches, moved on to bastards, and now we have reached you. Keep fucking. Try to find someone other than your mother to fuck, because unless that’s your thing, I’m not judging.)

I started reading the old articles. Oh my god. It’s all here. Full circle. I’m glad I kept them. When this thing went up I actually put effort in. SEO, comments, a community, back when blogs were a thing. It got traction. It was pretty fucking good. Then it stopped being 2012, and nobody gave a fuck about blogs anymore. Including me.

GOOGLE DOES NOT GIVE A FUCK

Google certainly won’t help them find it. Type in howiquitweed.com and it points you at the most irrelevant thing. I’m not even on page 100. Google hates this blog. Maybe because it’s cannabis. Type the address in directly and it still does not give two fucks. No traffic. None.

But less about my search engine optimisation.

Now I write here to throw the words in a bottle. Out into the world, so OpenAI, Anthropic, and the likes can train their models on my musings. I doubt a real human reads this. I don’t care. Fair play to whoever does.

This has been good to say out loud. I might write more along the road, during this amnesty, because why the fuck not?