I was married to Marijuana
What’s your relationship to drugs?
In my 23 years of life (soon to be 24), I’ve only ever had one relationship: to a lady named Mary Jane.
I can remember the start of that relationship like it was yesterday. I was outside in the cold at my cousin’s house at 15 years old, giving this whole smoking weed thing a try. I couldn’t understand why it was causing me to cough so much, and oh, what’s that smell? I didn’t know how exactly one smoked Marijuana, but I definitely wasn’t doing it correctly. Offput by the experience as a whole — I was NEVER built for the cold, to begin with — the next time I would try smoking weed again was that summer. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school, however, that the habit became a daily one, and I became known as a pothead.
Since a young age, I’ve always tried to do everything in my power to go against black “stereotypes,” which is one of the reasons why I think that I didn’t get into smoking on a daily basis earlier on (thank you, God). But was I right about weed being a “black thing,” or was that just society painting black people as drug users and abusers? In reflecting back on this experience, I needed the facts, as to not propagate more false information into the internet stratosphere. In Farai Chideya’s book Don’t Believe The Hype, she explores the cultural misinformation that is spread about African-Americans, so naturally, I found some of her points notable to share.
Why is it that blacks are seen as being the drug users/abusers in the first place, anyway?
From the television images of black youths arrested for street dealing to photographs of black men and women smoking crack, coverage of drug issues in America leads Americans to believe that this national problem is a black problem. News organizations do not show the other side — that over 70 percent of American drug users are white. In addition, the drug use which does occur in the black community often is linked simply to race, as if African-Americans are inherently drug abusers, when socioeconomics is a far more important factor.¹
Aha! So that’s why I always had this impression that black people were the drug users/abusers, even though that’s clearly not the case at all. I didn’t want to be stigmatized by my race (which in a recent post we found out isn’t real), and yet I was partaking in an activity that all black people do (lol).
Growing up in a middle-class suburban area, where most of my immediate peers were white, the people who actually used drugs, were much different from who I thought would be the drug users. “Young whites are more likely to use drugs than young African-Americans. In addition, white high school seniors are almost three times as likely to be binge drinkers than blacks: 33 percent versus 12 percent.”¹ In an effort to fit in with my white counterparts, I started to engage in both drinking and smoking, in an effort to be seen as cool. So I dropped my name as being the awkward one and became known as the pothead (ok, I was still known as being awkward, but now I was an awkward pothead).
Now, as an almost 24-year-old, I no longer smoke marijuana — I have no interest whatsoever. Once I got in touch with God and myself, I realized that smoking weed was never me, it was me trying to conform to the world around me.
I’ve never really been much of a conformist, though.
All my life, people have always told me how crazy I was for not giving a fuck, when in actuality I’ve pretty much always been scared shitless and played it off by turning things into jokes — I was my own comedic relief. Due to my prior deep-rooted self-hatred, I tried not only weed, but Cocaine, Acid, Shrooms, Xanax, Molly, Ecstasy, Speed, Vicodin, Adderall, and Vyvanse, in search of some experience that would ultimately help me feel better about myself — and make me seem cool to other people. Thankfully, nothing ever stuck, but the drug-fueled experiences I had in the course of 4 years definitely had an effect on the way in which I think about the world, and how I look at how the world fits a person like me.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
-George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
When I tell people about my past drug experiences, generally their first comments are that I am so lucky to have not gotten hooked onto anything. In my mind, I’ve always known that I was meant for bigger and better things, and somehow, these experiences were really just experiments that I needed to undertake in order to get to where I am today. I was responsible (lol); I always spaced experiences out, out of fear of becoming dependent on them. When all of these experiences occurred, it was during my college years; I finished college in 4 years, with a major in economics and a minor in philosophy from Smith College (my GPA wasn’t the greatest, but it also wasn’t terrible). I was elected Secretary of the Honor Board for my junior year, which turned into Chair during my senior year, also getting involved in other activities on campus, and managing to make it to multiple networking events in professions I thought I wanted to pursue. During my senior spring, I sold weed for some extra cash and was always the go-to person amongst my friends for where to find drugs. I was definitely not your typical student, and yet most people had no idea who I really was, or what I was really about. To be quite honest… neither did I.
To me, doing things the way everyone else had done it seemed like a shortcut to my grave. It’s only now that I’m beginning to see that I’ve always been original, a non-conformist:
…psychologists discovered that there are two routes to achievement: conformity and originality. Conformity means following the crowd down conventional paths and maintaining the status quo. Originality is taking the road less traveled, championing a set of novel ideas that go against the grain but ultimately make things better.²
Even as I sit here typing this now, I’m doing so in my parents’ house, two years post-grad, broke, my cell phone turned off, utilizing my undying love for writing, to share my truth. Most people would say “screw it,” and go get a job, but for some reason, I’m sitting here sharing this message on Medium.
I’ve always felt this whole “go to grade school for 12 years, then get your bachelor’s, and work for the rest of your life for a corporation” thing has been a farce, but I never thought that I’d be adamantly rejecting it. “The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists.”² I thought that when I was choosing to be a “productive pothead” that I was being different, but it’s only since I’ve divorced marijuana, that I really feel myself differing from the crowd.
As I kept smoking, nothing really seemed to change; I had vuja de. “Vuja de is the reverse (of deja vu) — we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems.”² I finally realized that my marriage to marijuana was holding me back, and clouding up my brain. As I type this, I can already hear the voices saying “but weed helps me be more creative in my work,” and while that may be true for some, I know it isn’t true for me. “Advocating for new systems often requires demolishing the old way of doing things, and we hold back for fear of rocking the boat.”² It’s hard to be original, in a world full of conformists.
My past experimental drug use is actually in line with some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, so if people say you have no hope, hit them with these facts:
Across all three studies, the people who become successful entrepreneurs were more likely to have teenage histories of defying their parents, staying out past curfews, skipping school, shoplifting, gambling, drinking alcohol, and smoking marijuana.²
If you’re in your teens and experimenting around, you could be the next successful entrepreneur — to be clear, I’m not advocating that you experiment with drugs here, just that your behavior doesn’t mean you’re doomed as others might lead you to believe.
I may have previously avoided drugs as to not be stigmatized by my race, and then did them to be seen as cool, but now, I just want to be myself. I’m happy to boast that I’ve since divorced from my first real relationship, to focus on the most important one: the relationship I have with myself.
¹ “16.” Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation about African Americans, by Farai Chideya, Plume, 1995, pp. 209–214.
² “1.” Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, by Adam M. Grant and Sheryl Sandberg, Viking, 2016, pp. 1–29.
