He said reefer made him feel. Not a particular feeling, not euphoric or hyperattuned to what surrounded him, sad, calm or any other sensibility that he could name. It just made him feel. He said that word - feel - stretching the vowel and grinning.

As high-strung as I was in his eyes, he figured a little reefer would take the edge off, make my already big laugh even bigger, my goofy self that much goofier. He liked my silliness, so what finer theater was there than my performing, if you will, for him, a beloved audience of one? Him smoking weed and feeling it, and watching me take my very first toke?

Certain characteristics of the toke-taking community already held my attention. Some of my most colorful high school friends lit up with regularity and often in public. It expanded their horn-playing and guitar-strumming, they said, or raised their acting to Oscar-winning worthiness. If they obsessed less than I about the effects of weed-smoking on their brain cells and report cards, they seemed still so much more concerned and worldly, sputtering on about art, politics and sundry stuff with their reefer-influenced, teenage expertise. Probably some of the less cool kids were lighting up as well but keeping it undercover.

That amalgam of thoughts and images did not cross my mind in the moment of Michael's invitation in the Thunderbird. He pushed a hand-rolled doobie in my direction. In an experimental mood, I queried him on the fine points of drawing on a doobie, how to keep the smoke out of my eyes and what to do if the drawing made me cough. Even seasoned reefer-heads coughed and choked up as they smoked, their throats constricted, one eye bucked open, the other quivering and all but closed, them sucking ferociously on a doobie and sometimes standing on tip-toe - like a musician playing a horn - to hit the doobie just right. It was as if they had no control over these outward, physical manifestations of taking a toke.

Michael gave fast, brief instructions. I began the experiment, drawing into myself and down on the burning reefer. I tried to ignore Michael's fixation on me and prepare myself for that hyped high. I waited for my transcendence, a crossing over into that place of high-flying, floating and feeling. I waited some more. I never got high, if, indeed, I even figured out how a high should make me feel. I did, however, get one fat headache, which Michael attributed to that being my first time.

Once was enough. As I tend toward overzealousness in some areas, my failing at that one and only test was probably a good thing. The most addictive of ultra-addictive personalities, perhaps, are the very persons who graduated from a nickel bag of reefer to cocaine to crack and other recreational mixes abiding in a vast wasteland of drugs.

That is not to say there are no suitable uses for marijuana. When my mother was dying from ovarian cancer, unable to cut her pain with any of the prescribed pharmaceuticals for any reasonable period of time, a reefer-smoking sibling suggested marijuana as a palliative for her. On what was one in a series of my extended stays with my mother during her sickness, I transported the plastic bag of grass by airplane, never giving a thought to whether an airport cop would randomly single me out for a search.

Mama refused our offering. Marijuana is illegal, she said. With a kid of hers already clouded in all that smoke, she had no desire to be counted among those outlaws. Seeing that she was in so much pain, that placed her oddly on the wrong side of the issue.

Her response was rooted in the same illogic that had former President Bill Clinton insisting he didn't inhale. It has New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg - his first 100 days in office passing without a major snafu - squandering his time as a public servant defending and placing in new context his pronouncing that he, in fact, used to take pleasure in taking a toke.

NORML, the group that resurrected something Bloomberg said on the campaign trail and made him its current poster child, finds itself groping for ammunition. NORML, which stands for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Foundations, wants to make the trade and consumption of reefer legal. Which does not sound unreasonable. Marijuana springs from the earth and has been assigned some benefits - medicinal ones, for sure - by the same society that allows the legal sale of wine, beer, whiskey, vodka, Cognac, double-malt Scotch or other spirits the culture ingests in excess.

I tried reefer once. I didn't like it. I don't do it. But I'm not overly concerned that other people do. Perhaps we should get it over with, legalize the stuff and get on with matters that are far more important.

Source: Newsday (NY)
Author: Katti Gray, Staff Writer
Published: April 16, 2002
Copyright: 2002 Newsday Inc.
Contact: letters@newsday.com
Website: http://www.newsday.com/

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NORML
http://www.norml.org/

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http://freedomtoexhale.com/ad.htm

Regrets, They’ve Had a Few
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread12535.shtml

It's Time To Turn Tables On War On Drugs
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread12531.shtml

Mayoral Marijuana Martyrdom
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread12525.shtml

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As with all the opiates, the drug-dependent user builds up a tolerance to greater and greater amounts of the drug. Death from overdose is not common. It can happen, however, when a user who has withdrawn from the drug takes the same dosage to which he was accustomed before withdrawal. Overdose then results in stupor, coma and death.

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