Sparking Up - JT's Tales From The Trail

I smoked my first joint with a boy from my street named Rodney. He was older than me but was a long-time member of my neighborhood playing outside gang. Rodney was excited about smoking his B.C. Bud, which he explained was way better than the Skunk Weed the other boys had.

Rodney was a skeevy fourteen-year-old, and I was thirteen when he smoked me up that first time. I did it because I had a crush on him. The week before, my friend phoned and ask him if he liked me while I listened on the other line, with my hand over the mouthpiece. He said I had a nice ass, and I was thrilled.

I don't remember how I started smoking pot regularly, but it happened in high school. I never bought weed and never learned to roll a joint, but nonetheless, by grade ten, smoking weed was a regular habit.

It was a time when I’d achieved coolness for the first time by integrating myself into a clique of girls called the Ioco Gang. We used curling irons to feather our hair and coated our eyes in thick blue eyeshadow and dark black liquid eyeliner. We wore our pants so tight we had to use a fork to pull up our zippers, and we clipped roach clips decorated with brightly colored feathers to our jean jackets. 

We ruled our school. 

The Ioco Gang took pride in doing poorly academically, and we spent our weekends looking for parties. Older boys from the next town over drove us to bush parties in souped-up cars, where we shared “two-fours” of stubby brown bottles of Labatts Blue while taking turns sitting on the beer case to prevent theft. The owners of these cars happily supplied us with weed.

It was heaven, but like all things adolescent, it was also hell. By the middle of grade eleven, I was doubting my lifestyle choices. Graduation was a year away, and I didn’t have a plan, so I made the deeply subconscious decision to be an asshole. I argued with my mom until living together became unbearable, and it was decided that I would go live with my dad in Toronto. 

My dad wasn’t thrilled, but I didn't care because it was my only available out. Shortly after I left, my mom sold my bedroom furniture and then moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Vancouver with my sister, so there was no going back. 

Moving to Toronto to finish high school was one of my life's best decisions. I stopped smoking weed because, in the big city, there were so many other more exciting things to do. Plus, my new friends studied on weeknights to ready themselves for university and considered potheads to be dumbasses.

Except on very rare occasions, I didn't get high again until cannabis was legalized in Canada in 2018, and my twenty-seven-year-old daughter introduced me to gummies. I took an instant liking to gummies, and with my nest empty, it was easy to make indulging a daily joy.

Now I like to work until late afternoon, then take a gummy and go for a very long walk, and later sleep like a teenager again. It's a routine I've come to enjoy, but I don't know if this habit is good, bad, or neutral.

It's strange territory to navigate the availability of legal marijuana, slickly packaged for consumer consumption. In Canadian cities, the ubiquitous corner stores where our parents bought their cigarettes have been replaced with weed dispensaries.

Only two countries have legalized cannabis in the world - Canada and Uruguay. In other places like Florida, weed can be prescribed by a doctor. Like many things in Florida, this is an outrageous racket with doctors scheduling patients in ten-minute increments, each paying $250 for a weed card that is inevitably delivered without a meaningful medical examination.

I remember my first trip to a weed dispensary in Vancouver. Overwhelmed with choice, I asked the “budtender” for advice; he asked do you want to "get off your gourd giggly or ease aches and pains and get a good night's sleep?” I responded, “Yes, please,” and left with a bag of blackberry amaretto-scented edibles curated by a James Beard award-winning chef. The distribution of cannabis has changed a lot since the time when we all worried about discovering oregano in our dime bags.

I hope that weed isn’t the current-day equivalent of our parents thinking tobacco was mostly benign. Scientists are only just beginning to study the long-term impacts of regular cannabis use, and most of the content one discovers online is written by enthusiastic potheads. 

My personal experience is that cannabis impacts people differently and that eating and smoking are two very different experiences. I dislike smoking, and my husband will not eat it. 

Some people claim weed provides them health benefits, clarity, and focus or makes them more creative. While others think it makes them paranoid, unmotivated, anxious, and stupid.

My husband claims people only don’t like getting high because they inadvertently take too much. Your tolerance for cannabis increases the more you use it, so taking dosage advice from a daily user comes with peril for newbies. But who knows, maybe some people don't like how it makes them feel. 

I also know that THC can have a terrible impact on a developing young brain, especially in boys, potentially triggering serious mental health issues.

However, personally, I've noticed more benefits than drawbacks. THC eases my anxiety and improves my focus and creativity. It heightens my emotional intelligence, probably by making me slow down enough to notice other people's feelings. It has made me less ambitious, which is a good thing at this point in my life. My ambition is eternally exhausting. 

I also think weed has made it easier for me to stay present in the moment and to let go of the past and fears for the future. Best of all, it has made me love walking! These are benefits I feel all the time, not just when I enjoy a gummy.

One negative I've noticed is that I am less articulate, possibly dummer. Words and phrases more often elude me. This could be menopause, though.

I'm not alone in discovering a new or renewed love of the wacky tobacky. Recent epidemiological research suggests that older adults have increased their use of cannabis at astounding rates. 

With 100% of Canadians and 68% of Americans having access to legal weed, many are using it to treat conditions like chronic pain, stress, anxiety, depression, insomnia, headaches, and the adverse effects of chemotherapy. Whether these claims have a scientific basis is yet to be determined. Still, you have to search the internet pretty hard to find reports of the downsides of regular cannabis use. 

I think many in our generation are rediscovering that they enjoy being high, and now that we don’t have kids in the house and we can buy our dope in a stylish boutique, we are more apt to indulge. I, for one, am happy to be no longer dependent on older boys, motivated by a desire to get into my pants, to get stoned. If nothing else, that is a win.

Do any of you brave Sole Sisters want to share your experiences with cannabis? Has legalization impacted your habits? We'd love to hear about it in the comments.

READ MORE > JT'S Tales From the Trail, Rambler Cafe Blog.

The Age of Cannabis Has Arrived: Issues for Older Adults, Psychiatric Times

Older adults and medical marijuana: Reduced stigma and increased use, Harvard Medical School