“Ohh you smoke weed, right I see… no that’s fine”, she said as she grinned awkwardly.
First you have to ask by whom, are the stoners being respected or disrespected by. So lets break this down:
Fellow Stoners
What a great place to start, and well inevitably these people always will love you for you understand them and they understand you!! That moment a fellow weed smokers indentifies a fellow smoker there’s a kind of “we should have a spliff to celebrate this moment” that unofficially happens. The commonalities of weed smokers means that you’ll always get on with each other and thus the mutual respect is always there!!
RESPECT LEVEL OUT OF 10 = 10
Alcoholics
Assuming they’re non-weed smokers, they wont see the big attraction to it all. Of course they had a joint passed to them at some point at party somewhere but for whatever reason it did nothing to them. Not like drinking 10 pints!! They don’t see the big deal, or really understand how a person could truly be addicted to smoking the weed. Do they respect you? Yes & No… but swiftly reminded that they have the same problem involving a substance of their own they pipe down start being more respectful.
RESPECT LEVEL OUT OF 10 = 4
A Class Drug users : TYPE CRACK WHORE!
To them you’re the at the bottom of the drug tree!!! effectively it’s more or less smoking a cigarette in their eyes, for you haven’t tried smack, cocaine or heroine yet! Do they respect you, probably more so than the alcoholic for they once were where you are starting with weed, and will have stronger commonality to you. However weed not really being a drug to these guys, cos they’re crack whores and desperate as FUCK to get anything into their system, it doesn’t really matter. You can easily sit down and consume any drug on the table!
RESPECT LEVEL OUT OF 10 = 8
A Class Drug users : TYPE INVESTMENT BANKER
Remember this individual has lots and lots of money & his eighth cost him £400 just for the evening, now on reflection with your measly £20 spent for the equivalent weight the judging begins there. Do they respect you? Did you really need to ask? This type of individual wouldn’t respect you even if you didn’t smoke weed, and the fact that you do make you dirty, a lesser human! Lets not stereotype investment bankers, as I’m sure MANY of them smoke weed however the reputation lives strong among this trade for being a coke driven industry.RESPECT LEVEL OUT OF 10 = 2
Cigarette Smokers
Ironically addicts both from the smoking hierarchy family tree you’d assume that the respect would be in amplitude! Think again…. Cigarette smokers will try their hardest to disassociate themselves from their weed smoking counterparts as just to avoid the stigma attached to potheads. Secretly however many cigarette smokers given the opportunity have indulged themselves in smoking a FAT DUBEE, but only later reveal this only when the time right! As for the respect, FORGET IT! Their efforts to distance themselves from the STONER REPUTATION means they’ll speak ill of you even at your funeral!
RESPECT LEVEL OUT OF 10 = 3
Everybody Else.
Lets be honest many people have weed smoking as their guilty secret. It’s not secret the stigma and reputation that is associated to smoking weed! This is again evident when you look at Holland’s effort to ban the drug. The evidence collected over the last 30 years suggests that the dutch authorities have controlled the illegal market of growing weed and have a fantastic system for regulating it, keep it clean and green! Stats also show the only 15% of their population are regular weed smokers, and subsequently not high enough to be a concern. Amsterdam alone brings in 400 Million Euros a year in profit revenues for the sale of weed. SO WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?? Why are they trying to ban it from their country after all this time? A great question…. one that doesn’t have an official answer, or not one that makes sense anyway. The real speculation surrounds the political and diplomatic relations Holland has with it’s neighbours and …. drum roll…… THE STIGMA (Ridicule) TO RELAXED WEED POLICIES IN THE COUNTRY. So in other words, the Dutch don’t feel like people are taking them seriously as a nation due to them being the only country selling weed so openly to everybody. There you have it, spoken from the horses mouth… for some reason which i’ll have to examine for real reasons later Weed smoking is just heavily looked down upon and the efforts of Harold and Kumar and the likes to, lift the sinking reputation isn’t really effective.
RESPECT LEVEL OUT OF 10 = 2
Yeap that’s right people I openly confess to you all now, that this whole “
Sounds like a football team, doesn’t it? Strangely however it isn’t far from it…. i.e.the fanzine aspect. If you were a huge Aston Villa FC fan and you travelled the world and met another individual equally as passionate for your football club as you, while talking about your team you’d immediately bond and build rapport around these foundations. (I’m a massive football fan so I’m compelled to use this analogy but it’s still true for any club, or supported follower fanbased organisation) The same is true for weed smokers, i.e. all people that smoke cannabis really have a mutual appreciation of a certain lifestyle that they’d had to have lived. I’m hesitating from saying all weed smokers get along, cos this clearly not true!! I’m shying away from making blanket statements, but generally however it is true most weed smokers, given a fair unbiased platform, will generally get on quite seamlessly, based on the premise that they have SHHMOKING WEED in common!
Equilibrium and balance is fundamental law to our universe, where there is one there is another, where there is matter there is dark matter, where there is negative there is positive, and so on etc. This law also applies very much so to smoking and the quitting of weed! i.e. in precisely the same way that smoking weed can unite groups of all diversities and backgrounds, quitting has the equal and opposite effect. It’s now been 33 days, and I regretfully say that since I went off the smoking grid I no longer am on their grid. Those individuals whom once I’d see more frequently than my own family members that I’d be living with now no trace…with some cases phone calls just not being returned for weeks, and still counting!! I mean how many unreturned miss calls does it take with good friends till it starts getting awkward? I don’t take it personally for I know who (or what) is at blame here – the cannabis.
Now this conversation happens, it does.. but the variations of the conversation all depend on who talking about it. For you’ll hear from almost everyone everywhere, unless you’re YOUNG and naive and it hasn’t quite yet dawned on you that most 24/7 regular weed smokers don’t really achieve much in life – quite simply cos they’re high and can’t be bothered to! Sorry guys, trust me I didn’t like hearing that either and rest assure I fought that argument like I was one of the Spartans from 300 till I realised I was deep denial!…I really hope and pray that one day you too come to this eye opening realisation, because it takes a really stupid person to actually believe that weed makes them cleverer!! or smoking dope is good for you!! yeap, well done!! 😀
“Hey you should really give that up, CAN’T YOU SEE what it’s doing to you?” at this point, you shuffle and avoid the conversation for you will lose – BADLY!! They’ve got you by the balls, and there isn’t a room for manoeuvring! My advice would be to RUN, and if that isn’t an option try and blank out their words with calming peaceful oceanic noises! This conversation every weed smoker out there has had to deal with at some point or another, and I’m sure there are numerous ways of seeing another day, smoking another spliff. To some this day marks a sign, almost a ritual that you can firmly announce yourself in the brotherhood of ADDICT congratulations you’ve done it!! However this day really marks the sign of disparity and distance that is now being created between you those that do smoke and those who don’t, & it’s a club that only club smokers are qualified to talk about else you’ll completely reject what they say.
“Dude, we should like really try quitting man.. just for little bit or something cos I can’t remember the last time I didn’t smoke a spliff!” .. “yeahhhhh” the other guy unconvincingly slurs out. Weed smokers will hear “the speech” internally from within their own circles and peers, and this conversation will usually be more detailed & truthful, and very closely resembles the honesty and frankness of those within weed quitting support groups! CATCH 22, the problem really is people have their internal natural callings to quit this addiction at different times! Now what this means is that only one out of the group of 5 weed smokers will want to quit at this particular time! Resulting in that isolated guy completely cracking, and caving in as nobody else has quit, and he knows a fat spliff is only a phone call away!! Additionally it’s interesting to note, when the person who’s caved in does re-join the collective, everybody will completely ignore the fact the previous day this fine gentlemen was exclaiming “That’s IT GUYS, i’m DONE, NOOO MORE WEED FOR ME!! HELL NO!!!! i can’t do this anymore!” This is quietly forgotten and not brought up in following conversations, almost as if it didn’t happen! as to why? well think of it like this… you never know when it’s your turn.
I remember when I was young, having my first experience of smoking weed it was fucking great!! I remember my friend and I doing a couple of lungs in some makeshift bottle-bag/bucket sawn off coke-bottle thing?? coughing our nuts off as we weren’t cigarette smokers..and then waiting for 20-30minutes we’d be pretty messed up, having tunnel vision, experiencing the rushes and joys of listening to music while high, and laughing our ASSES off! Good times, being happy and loving life – and weed was great man, it actually made us get HIGH! So surely that’s the definition of being “high”then, i.e. a drug that makes you happy… so HIGH meaning HAPPY makes sense grammatically!!
OK today was my friend’s girlfriend’s younger brother’s surprise birthday, phhhooo that was a mouthful. So we all went to their home and to be honest I didn’t really think about it before going as to many other things were on my mind at the time. Alright outside on their lovely balcony just chilling with some guys and everybody was smoking cigarettes and weed as you do .. Now one of the Birthday boys friends, from up north whom i didn’t know but had been talking to throughout the evening, just randomly passed me the spliff…
During this time, i saw kilos and kilos pass through this business with different types of weed strands every time. Each weed being stronger and more fucked up than the next! On reflection this part of my life was messed up, the amounts I was smoking was wrong!! Additionally I had just gone and imported like a stupid amount of weed fair enough only down the country, but this was some serious shit now…. not like getting caught smoking a spliff or with a bit of weed on you by a policeman. NAh i remember we wrapped this over and over and over with cling film but it still STANK OUT the whole frigging car – a nervous trip down the M1 I assure you. Even though I was popular that summer lol, to call me a BAD INFLUENCE would had been an understatement. I sometimes wonder how different it would had been had these events not happened.
as humans travel the worlds to enrich our minds with deep experiences but ultimately isn’t it all just chemistry & electricity inside our brains! Hence I ask what’s the difference between finding pure harmony onlooking a beautiful waterfall or taking a few toaks from a spliff passed to you by your buddy on a gloomy afternoon on quiet street corner? Quite simply, one of them would wow your friends & family on Facebook while the other option tends to lead to introvertedness and ultimately walk the plank or path of slow death. Too extreme? Now at this point I must make a distinction and clarify that I don’t believe that smoking weed is a problem, it’s the fucking addiction part that’s the problem!
back to first principles, after all what’s the need to step into the Delorean accelerate to 88 MPH to go back in time, are the answers really there? By going back there will I learn anything useful that would help me quit this addiction bringing myself in line with everyone else? Maybe…. we’ll see…