The Last Stoner Standing

On the death of weed

Does no one want to split a joint anymore? Maybe you yourself are a reformed stoner, trading nights lost to YouTube for more respectable hobbies, or just like, cleaning your room.

One by one, my reliable blent girls have laid their weapons of choice to rest. Like abandoned Toy Story figurines, their bongs and bowls sit in a designated “I will never use this again… unless?” shoe box stashed under the bed. The murti, once sacred and given daily offerings of flower and fire, now rests in a coffin of old birthday cards and ointments used to combat a nasty case of athlete’s foot several years ago.

The death of weed might be a consequence of my generation’s wider sober curiosity, but this feels more urgent. Not an incremental return to wholesomeness, but a clean-cut cleaving – a no-contact breakup. When my ex-stoner friends talk about weed, their eyes widen like they are recalling a toxic ex: “We don’t get along,” they tell me, “she’s spooky.” They talk about recovering from their weed addiction like it's Xanax. Mind you, this conversation is happening in the Nowadays bathroom while they fish out a dime bag from the bottom of their purse. If you’ve heard of California sober, this is New York sober: everything but weed.

Credit to the hilarious @cool_artsy_chick

I don’t even blame them. I don’t have to ask why, either – it made them anxious and lethargic, they couldn’t get anything done, and they felt their life was passing them by. Bitch, trust.

I wish I were a Sexy Girl Stoner, a Whole Ass Vibe who smokes blunts with rose petals and lavender, never gets dry mouth or anxiety, and listens to Kehlani. But my truth is that I’ve been to the emergency room TWICE because an edible made me think I was having a heart attack. I was fully 22 years old the second time.

I’m familiar with the devil’s lettuce’s siren song. How she lures you in with promises of smooth brain giggles only to deliver hour-long doom loops: scrutinizing my social media profile, cringing at how hard I’m trying to be funny and/or hot; prying my eye open in the mirror and projecting my phone’s flashlight an inch from my face to inspect a dark spot I swear is intraocular melanoma (by this point, I’ve scoured enough Reddit threads to have graduate-level knowledge of the obscure terminal illness I’ve self-diagnosed;) reading too deeply into coworkers’ Slack messages and friends' texts, convinced I am annoying everyone and possibly fired.

So yeah, smoking weed is kinda like waterboarding yourself for fun. Then why do I keep coming back? Why can’t I put down the joint like my right-minded girlies?

Maybe it's the Mandela effect, but part of me thinks it wasn’t always this way. Now, weed is organic and hydroponic, sold in dispensaries that look like Apple stores. The flower has been genetically modified to contain enough THC to tranquillize a horse. Back then, it was whatever the dealer had – some strain called “Obama Runtz.” I didn’t know if it was hybrid, sativa, or indica, but I treated it like a precious metal.

I started smoking regularly in high school, buying Gs for $20 but telling people I paid $15 because I read on Twitter that $20 was a scam. The weed was ashy and seedy, tightly wound in saran wrap by a dealer off Snapchat who always posted stories holding a bottle of Pink Whitney in his sparsely furnished condo. My friends and I hotboxed our cars in construction sites and TJ Maxx parking lots after close. Every stoner forced to smoke in public surrounded by waspy Republicans in a highly illegal state deserves a Purple Heart.

One of my best friends was a straight boy who owned a sedan lined with neon LED lights. We would take geebs out of a murky water bottle until his car transformed into a spaceship hurtling through the cosmos. I felt everything and nothing, my smile lines creased from laughing so much. I became incapable of higher-order thinking beyond “bitch I’m so high.” Now, with every hit, I’m trying to get back to that.

Another reason I smoke is to create some bifurcation in my day. A reset. After work, my brain feels like a party balloon two days after the party – semi-deflated and wobbling in the corner of the living room. I trudge through the world like I’m wading through several feet of mud. My lips are chapped, I have a low-grade headache, and I really don’t want to do anything else: from big things, like starting a new creative project, to small things, like brushing my teeth. Making an elaborate meal is unfathomable, cleaning afterwards could bring me to tears. I’m really not trying to be the Sock roommate here (I do my dishes!), but too often, the hours of 6 PM - 9 PM are a purgatorial waste of zombified meandering, just waiting until an acceptable time to get in bed.

So why not at least meander purposefully? My sober laziness is so fraught with guilt that it isn’t even restful, sitting in the shadow of the knowledge that I could and should be doing more. Weed makes the laziness intentional and deserved – I’m choosing to sit on the couch and watch reruns of Real Housewives of Atlanta. My DoorDash order is valid because I’m too high to operate a stovetop. I’m allowed to play Fortnite for hours because video games and weed have a bond enshrined in Walmart t-shirts.

I have smoked weed religiously for almost a decade. It’s still fun sometimes, mostly with friends, but half the time, the high sends me into a dark place filled with anxiety and self-doubt. I’ve gone days and weeks without smoking, and don’t miss it terribly (nothing like quitting cigarettes, which was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done.) But I always return. I will probably smoke a bowl later today. Call it a habit, an addiction, whatever. I might come to my senses, or maybe, I’ll be the last stoner standing.