I have a lot of personal experience with a plant known as marijuana. Being a long time smoker of pot, I have smoked and consumed weed in many different ways: nectar collectors, bong, dab rigs, edibles, joints/blunts, pipes, etc. Fuck man my brother made an orange into a pipe one time when he couldn’t find a can. Which is why I am sitting here, a little bit stoned (maybe a bit more than little bit), writing about my thoughts and feelings about the plant.
Starting off weed is addictive and habit forming. I have a marijuana addiction, I can admit that. According to the NIH, 30% of all marijuana users are addicted to the substance. Another shitty part about having this addiction is that we don’t even know the long term effects weed has on the body and brain. Anyway, I don’t recommend weed if you have a history of addiction or are under the age of 18, which can heighten the risk of being addicted. I mean I can’t stop anyone but I personally won’t be buying weed for MINORS, or at least not as young as I started smoking(14, aka 8th grade). I have an addiction, but not a dependence on the substance. Living in the state of Washington where it's legal, I see and know a lot of people with a SEVERE dependence to the substance. Weed is fucking expensive and not being able to drive or work without being high is awful. The positives of a weed addiction is that there has only been one singular case of an overdose on THC oil(they were smoking with a dab pen). And that death is debated on whether or not the death was caused by weed itself or some unknown outside factor because of the amount of smokers vs overdoses. If that makes sense. Now that's enough about addiction and statistics.
Let's begin with my personal history with weed. I first smoked weed off of a dab pen in the back of my mom’s deep red 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee. She and her (at the time) boyfriend’s 17 yr old son were passing it back and forth and decided to get me to smoke for the first time. This was back when my mom drove while high, now she refuses too, I was 14 and it was the end of the 8th grade school year almost. I can’t really remember how the high felt as it wasn’t really memorable compared to many of my other highs I’ve had over the 7 years I’ve been smoking weed. My second time ever smoking weed was a little (a lot) more memorable, and is one of my favorite weed stories to tell. It was the night before my catholic school 8th grade graduation, and my mom’s boyfriend, her, and his son were smoking diamonds from a dab rig. One of those huge gravity bong like things. If you don’t know what cannabis diamonds are, they are an extremely potent way to consume and smoke weed and are formed by a closed looped process of creating a sauce with solvent and flower, then turning that shit into a THCA crystalline structure with heat and pressure. (Information on diamonds found from burb’s A Guide to Cannabis Diamonds) Anyway, enough about what diamonds are, the point is, fourteen year old me’s second time smoking weed ever was with something that has 99.9% THC (when heated), which is…. a fuck ton of THC for a tiny 5’2, 120lb teenager. They had convinced me to smoke off of the dab rig, and I ended up coughing my lungs out for 40 fucking minutes while dry heaving. After that I laid in the bed with the rest of them unable to open my eyes I was so, so fucking high. After a little while, they made me go to bed to sleep it off, then I somehow stumbled down the stairs blind (still couldn’t open my eyes) and passed out. The next morning I woke up, and was still fucking high, because somehow those assholes forgot it was my eight grade graduation the next day, and I had to read outloud in front of the entire church for it. Their idea was to get me this massive coffee bc they read somewhere that coffee helps sober you up and I spilt some of it on my dress on the way to the practice/first part of the graduation. During the practice reading I ended up giggling a bit because it said something like Jesus is inside you and my teachers glared at me. Later that night during the ACTUAL graduation I was still a bit stoned but much more closer to sober than high, and changed out of my coffee stained dress to a different dress we had bought specifically for the actual graduation and I DIDN’T fuck up the reading this time. SOMEHOW my ass had also won an award for being a good Catholic girl and got a plaque plus $100. Which I was stoned, receiving lol.
When I was younger, I didn’t smoke that much, during the age of 14 I only smoked those two times if I am remembering correctly, and at 15 to 16 I only occasionally smoked, like roughly twice a month when I felt like it. My addiction didn’t really begin til I started college at 16 in junior year. I think it began due to stress, and I was using it for stress management like I do now. After my break up at 19 or even before that, I had voices telling me many things and frankly, THEY MAKE ME UPSET!!!! Weed is a very easy way to shut them up, or at least make me too stoned to even care about their existence for a little bit, depending on how bad the voices are that day. That is currently how I use and abuse weed, and I end up smoking at least once a day.
Since I’ve smoked weed for 7 years, I’ve had a few bad highs here and there. When I was about 17, my brother and I were walking home from dropping off my younger brother’s meds at one of his friend’s houses. During this walk back I saw a speed limit sign start walking towards me and I freaked out and ran home with my brother. Another time we were walking at night when we were like 18-19, we heard this mooing cow that sounded like a loud groaning and it scared the shit out of us. We were scared to walk back home since the cow was really close to our house, and we also ended up sprinting up the hill to our apartment. My most recent bad high was when I had a panic attack that my axolotl was going to die, shaking, crying, hyperventilating, the whole nine yards. Unfortunately panicked me was right because he died a day and a half later.
Now onto every way I’ve tried weed and how’d I rank them. I’m using an SABCD tier list here so S is the highest with D being the lowest rank. Starting in the D tier, I dislike the nectar collector the most. The only times I smoke with a nectar collector are to smoke dabs with my manager, and I hate every second of using it. IT MAKES YOU COUGH SO FUCKING MUCH, and it hurts like hell. Like I can’t overexaggerate how much it makes you cough, if you are actually sucking up the dab with the straw. It still smokes when you don’t suck up dab but if ur not getting anything you don’t really cough I have noticed. I also hate how you have to use a butane torch to actually heat the thing up. It scares me to actually use the torch so I always make other people heat up the straw for me, which makes it suck even more cuz I have to rely on someone when I want to take a dab.
The only thing in C tier is the dab rig, as you can tell I’m not a huge fan of dabs. I hate this less than the nectar collector cuz it feels more like a bong when smoking and I loveeeeeeee the bong the most. I still hate the process of heating it up so I need someone to heat it up for me before I hit it.
The B tier, I smoke these simi regularly but I don’t really like them. The infamous dab pen, the high school sweetheart. I don’t buy these personally, but I’ll take hits from a dab pen if it's the only thing available for me. My brother buys them and I basically steal half the pen, but we steal and share weed all the time. If I smoke too much from a dab pen, my chest starts to hurt and it hurts to breathe for a little while, so I try to prefer real flower products. The other thing in the B tier is a pipe, it's my least favorite way to smoke flower. Sometimes when you’re smoking it, a piece of bud will fly through the pipe and smack the back of your throat and it burns, which fucking SUCKS.
THEEEEEE A TIER!!!!!!!! The only thing here is the humble blunt. I remember smoking and rolling a lot of these when I was like 16-17. My mom taught me how to roll a blunt and I pretty much mastered it by the time I realized buying prerolls was easier. I have so many memories of just talking with my brother while we showed each other music in our old garage. I kinda miss it, unaware of how shitty adulthood would still be in my early 20s. We’d talk about moving out while ranting to each other about how bad the day was or how shitty my mom was. We still do the same thing, complaining in the apartment this time, semi living on our own, it's weird how everything has changed yet our relationship has remained.
Tier S, the awesome sauce tier. The best ways to smoke weed according to the Khepmaster. The beautiful prerolled joint, only like four to five dollars and lasts my brother and I multiple smoke sessions. Easy to smoke and quick to set up, just pop the tube open and she’s there for you. I remember one time I was enjoying a joint in the hammock outside my house while I could hear arguing inside my house. I was so happy I wasn’t involved and it wasn’t loud enough the neighbors could hear. Weird memory. MYYYYYY ALL TIME FAVORITE WAY TO SMOKE IS THE BONG, the water vapors make it gentle on your throat, and it goes a longer way for the same amount of weed as a pipe. The downside to a bong is having to grind the weed and shit but that’s a part of the fun for me. That’s prime conversation and music sharing time. Smoking a bong is a very social occasion for me, when I was 15 the only time I would smoke weed was if they were smoking with a bong and it was with my friends or family. Nowadays the joint and a bong are the main ways I smoke weed. I use this massive like foot and a half long yellow Rick and Morty bong. I’ve had it since I was like 16 maybe even 15, being the surviving bong of a family that broke many.
I also have a lot more feelings about weed, specifically regarding its effects and my reliance on it. Weed gives you this very floaty high feeling, and makes every single thought in your head just go away. For me, weed also makes me get a 2 hour burst of energy (when smoking sativa) that makes me get really tired and pass out. When you're laying down, it can make the entire world spin which is fun til you get nauseous. These effects are fun and kill boredom, and I crave them. I want to get high when I wake up in the mornings on my days off, I get high as soon as I get home from work on days I work. I can work on projects, cleaning, etc whenever I’m high because I’m almost always high on my days off. My pets recognize when I’m stoned and what that means (more pets but with a lot of kisses). When my dog was still alive, grinding weed or saying the word weed would make him immediately start waiting by the door because he would always come outside with us when we smoked. It’s crazy that we had conditioned our dog that the word weed would equal outside, or bathroom
I feel so conflicted about my usage of this plant. I love smoking weed, I love the effects weed has, I love the social time I get with my family when we smoke together. However, I hate the addiction, the immediately waking up and wanting it. I can’t call it a craving cuz it's an urge I can control, as I refuse to get high before work. I wish I could take a tolerance break without it affecting my stress management. Everytime I smoke weed my thoughts before the high hit are what am I doing, why am I doing this, I need to quit. But if I quit, how to I deal with my shitty fucking life without it, the week the dog died me and my brother smoked an entire half ounce, and that was because off all the stressful as shit things that were happening that week. I would’ve lost my fucking mind without weed, and that knowledge fucking sucks. It shows that I really have some sort of dependence on this substance.