Revenge of the Gamer

Disclaimer: Yes, I smoked marijuana.  However, for the last several years I did so legally with a doctor’s prescription.  I no longer smoke, but wanted it clear that when I did I broke no laws.  I know there are a lot of jokes about people faking ailments to get a prescription, but in my case I had a very valid reason.  I used Marijuana as an anti-depressant, because it worked where prozac and zoloft failed. 

I spent much of my youth growing up in upstate New York, which has the most rabid anti-drug propaganda I have ever seen.  I remember watching a video in my seventh grade health class that claimed all drugs were as addictive as heroin.  One puff of a joint and you’d go from an upstanding citizen to a degenerate junky. 

We even watched that old Reefer Madness film put out in 1936.  In a nutshell it taught us that marijuana would cause you to commit rape, murder and/or go insane.  I accepted this as fact, because no other views were presented.  The sum total of my drug knowledge came from outdated and innacurate propaganda designed to frighten children into obedience.

At first this tactic worked perfectly.  I was terrified of drugs, and the last thing I would ever do was try marijuana.  The problem with this approach is that it was based on lies.  Smoking marijuana will not cause you to rape women.  Nor will it cause you to commit murder or go insane.  Mostly it results in you sitting on the couch and eating a lot of junk food while watching Beavis & Butthead.

I didn’t know that of course.  When I was twelve I’d sooner have chopped off a limb than smoked a joint.  This fear lasted for two years, when my father was arrested for possession of marijuana and methamphetamines.  It rocked my entire world, because I idolized him.  If he used drugs, I reasoned, how bad could they be?

My father held a prestigious position as a controller for a large company.  He was the president of the school board.  He was married and raising three children.  How was that possible if he’d been using drugs?  Everything I’d been taught suggested that he should be broke, peniless and alone.  Drugs were evil.  Weren’t they?

I was very logical at a young age, and the logic here was inescapable.  My father was living proof that drugs couldn’t do what I’d been taught.  Obviously I was being lied to.  The question I kept asking myself was why?  Why would my school lie about drugs?  This led to a natural curiousity about what drugs were really like.

I didn’t act on this curiousity until I was sixteen, because of what happened to my father.  He lost his position as the president of the school board, and was on the front page of the local paper.  Everyone, and I mean everyone in our town knew what he’d done.  Suddenly my friends weren’t allowed to hang out with me anymore.  Our family was ostracized.  Drugs seemed to carry a steep cost, and I had no desire to go down the same road.

Because of my father’s arrest life became so bad for my family that we decided to move.  This was something we did every couple of years, so it didn’t surprise me.  We picked up and crossed the country, landing in sunny northern California.

I quickly learned that California has a much different attitude towards marijuana.  In New York it was a crime akin to rape, and people never openly admitted to drug use.  In California just about everyone I knew smoked weed.  Many of my friends even smoked it with their parents.  I’d moved to the land where hippies go to die, and it had a vey noticable effect on the culture.  Even those that didn’t smoke were usually ok with it, and only a bare handful had the rabid anti-drug stance I’d been taught back home.

When I was sixteen one of my new friends, a jovial guy by the name of Jacob Merriman, loved to smoke.  We organized a camping trip and he brought along some marijuana.  That was the first time I ever smoked, and I had an absolute blast.  Getting high was more fun than I ever could have imagined, and the best part was that I didn’t notice any side effects.

I wasn’t addicted.  I didn’t crave marijuana after smoking, though it was so much fun I looked forward to an opportunity to do it again.  The experience was so positive that it shattered my confidence in the system.  It confirmed the lies I’d been told in New York, and destroyed any respect I had for authority.  

As a toddler I’d been lied to about Santa Claus.  Now as a teen I was being lied to about drugs.  It established a pattern that I didn’t like, and I quite rightly assumed that I was being lied to about other things as well.  I became an anti-establishment pro-hippy rebel, with the full support of my father who’d long espoused the same views.

As the years passed I smoked off and on.  Marijuana is expensive, and while it was fun to smoke it wasn’t as much fun as having money to buy roleplaying games.  I often had to make a choice between weed and the latest gaming book, and gaming almost always won.

By the time I graduated high school I smoked almost every weekend, usually at parties.  My parents decided to move yet again, and this time when they headed down to San Diego I stayed behind in Santa Rosa.  The next few years were a smoke filled haze. 

During that time I took a number of trips down to see my family, and on one of them I realized my father was still smoking.  I confronted him about it, and he denied it until I admitted that I was smoking too.  For the first time in my life I had something to bond with my father over.  He was overjoyed, and I thought the idea of smoking with him was officially the coolest thing ever.  My mother knew nothing about it of course.

Then my father ran into problems with his connection.  His solution?  He asked me to get it for him.  My (ex)wife was understandably leery, but in the end she agreed.  So we drove three hundred miles to the town of Buttonwillow in central California to meet my father.  It was the midway point between Santa Rosa and San Diego, which seemed like the logical place to meet.  I made the exchange, and my father told me how proud of me he was. 

Before I go any further I need to stress how important this was to me.  My father wasn’t proud when I was offered a full scholarship to Annapolis (which requires the sponsorship of a congressman), or when I got a 1390 on the SATs.  When I had my first article published in the local paper at age fourteen he told me it could have been written by a five year old.  When I hit the high honor roll I was given a grudging nod of respect, but instead of telling me he was proud he threatened to ground me if I got a single ‘C’ on my report card.

Yet me bringing him drugs made him proud.  Looking back now I am filled with disgust whenever I think of my father, but at the time I would have done anything to hear those five little words.

My father smoked about two ounces a month.  For those not familiar with marijuana that’s enough to supply your average fraternity for the same length of time.  All of my friends put together would have been hard pressed to burn through that much weed.  The idea that one person could smoke it was mind boggling.

As I’d now become my father’s source he expected me to drive down once a month to make the exchange.  He lied to my mother, of course, so she had no idea what he was asking me to do.  Darlene and I quickly decided these trips weren’t worth it, but my father worked me over emotionally.  He all but begged, and told me that if I was a dutiful son I’d find a way to get it to him.

In the end he suggested I mail it.  He wanted me to ship marijuana through UPS, even though he’d been busted for doing exactly the same thing ten years earlier.  I knew it was a bad idea, but I did it anyway.  I did it because I didn’t want to lose my father’s respect, and he made it clear it was at stake.  My entire life could have been ruined, but he didn’t care so long as he got what he wanted.

This soured my desire to smoke so I quit for a while when I was twenty-three.  That lasted two years until I divorced Darlene, which sent me into a spiral of depression.  To be honest I needed something to dull the pain.  I started smoking again, and buried myself beneath a haze of smoke because it made the pain of day to day life tolerable.

For the first time I wasn’t using marijuana as a recreational drug.  I was using it as medication.  Was it the best anti-depressant?  I don’t know as I only ever tried Zoloft and Prosac, but it was definitely better than those.  It balanced me out, and pushed away the depression.

Not long after that I lost my job and moved in with my family in San Diego.  Being that close to my father showed me the man in a way I’d never seen him.  I realized how toxic he was, and how much damage he’d done to me over the years.  I didn’t care if I had his approval anymore.  I just wanted to get away from him, so I moved in with my then girlfriend Brandy up in Los Angeles.

Moving took away my access to marijuana, which was fine because I’d decided I didn’t need it anymore.  Instead of drugs I used success to stave off the depression.  I had a meteoric rise through the mortgage industry, and within a couple of years was making even more money than I had as a software engineer.  For five years I didn’t touch marijuana, except for my annual trips back to Santa Rosa to see Trevor, Jeff and Saul.

During my final year living in Los Angeles my best friend Jeff moved down and ended up in the same apartment complex.  We smoked occasionally and I found that I really missed getting high.  Sitting around passing a bong back and forth while discussing life was a hell of a lot of fun, and we really enjoyed it.  I told myself I’d  smoke moderately, and for a long time I did.

Then we moved back to Santa Rosa.  Suddenly I reconnected with all my high school and college friends, all of whom still smoked.  Much to my amusement most were still sitting in the same spot on the couch as when I’d left six years before.  Having escaped the vortex of L.A. I told myself I’d earned a break, and decided to join them. 

For the next several months  Jeff and I lived in a haze of marijuana and World of Warcraft.  It was an amazing amount of fun, at least at first.  Like everything done to excess eventually smoking lost some of its appeal.  I neglected many things in my life including my weight and appearance.  Before I knew it I was wallowing in depression.  Instead of helping me marijuana had become part of the problem.

For the two and a half years I smoked nearly every day, because I was caught in a vicious cycle.  My life was painful, and the marijuana dulled that pain.  Unfortunately a lot of the reason my life was painful was because I was high all the time.  I hardly ever left the house unless it was to go to work, and pretty much became a hermit because of the massive social anxiety I felt at the thought of being around other people.

I began smoking less, and when Jeff and I moved out on our own we really cut down.  I started taking week long breaks, and found I was able to accomplish a lot when I wasn’t smoking.  The problem was that without the weed the full weight of the world came crashing down on me.  All the pain and depression came flooding back, and each time it happened I quickly fled back into a smoke filled haze.

On one of these breaks I took a damn good look at myself.  I was fifty pounds overweight, and even though I live in one of the most beautiful places in the world I didn’t ever see it.  I was trapped in my house, and never got out to see the redwoods, wine country or the northern California coast.

My life snapped into razor sharp focus.  I realized that while marijuana might help me deal with my depression the side effects simply weren’t worth it.  The paranoia, social anxiety and loss of short term memory were hampering me too much.  So was the fact that I was spending $250 a month on my medication.

In mid December I looked at what I’d accomplished in 2009 while smoking.  I wrote a pair of novels, many short stories, got promoted at work and had a whole host of other victories.  What could I accomplish if I gave up weed?  How much better would the quality of my life be?

Here I am a few weeks later.  I don’t miss marijuana at all, nor do I plan on going back to it any time soon.  I’m losing weight and am more clear headed than I’ve been in years.  Life is looking up, and while I wrestle with the depression now that I’ve stopped smoking I still think its worth it.

I used the new raise and the money I’ve saved from not smoking to invest in a new camera.  Over the last few weeks I’ve taken it to Armstrong Woods, Sugarloaf Mountain and Goat Rock.  I’ve had a blast hiking and taking pictures, and am finally losing the weight I’ve been trying to get rid of for so long.

I miss smoking, but I don’t miss what it did to my life.  It’s time to face reality head on, and if I occasionally stumble because of the depression as least I have friends and family to help pull me out.