I heard on the radio that this afternoon after school is out, all over the country, kids will be toking up at 4:20 PM.  The reporter suggested that because of the unofficial holiday many young people who had never tried marijuana would be smoking for the first time. This thought scares a lot of people.  It doesn’t exactly thrill me, but I can’t honestly say that it worries me, either.

For one thing, I tend not to worry about things I can’t control.  I can control my own behavior, however, and after over three decades of growing and smoking Cannabis, I quit almost eight years ago. That doesn’t mean I’ve gone over to the hysterical anti-marijuana camp.  I don’t think the fields should be poisoned with herbicides.  That’s bad for the environment.  I don’t think growers, dealers and/or users should be imprisoned.  The socioeconomic costs of this are unreasonable.  It should not be viewed as a criminal justice problem.  If it is a problem at all, it is a public health matter.

One of the persistent myths about Cannabis is that it is a gateway drug: that it leads to the use of stronger drugs.  All the extant research of which I’m aware indicates that most of those for whom marijuana became a step on the way to cocaine, heroin or some other hard drug, had used alcohol and/or nicotine first.  If Cannabis leads to the use of illicit drugs it is not because of any inherent quality in the herb, but because of its being illicit, bringing the user into contact with the illegal drug trade.

I’m not aware of any research that focused on whether refined sugar came before the booze and tobacco, but I’d bet the farm on it.  It is in the nature of the unbalanced brain chemistry of addiction that one drug leads to another.  With continued use, most drugs will eventually stop providing a euphoric high and will at best only relieve the pain of withdrawal.  That is when most users either go into toxic overindulgence or begin seeking something that can bring back that good old feeling.

The issue of whether weed is addictive is controversial.  Users disagree, as do those who have investigated the matter scientifically. My own experience and anecdotal research agrees with the opinion of orthomolecular medicine: the addictive character of Cannabis (as well as that of alcohol) depends on individual brain chemistry.

In 1935, when Alcoholics Anonymous was founded, they called the mysterious difference between the social drinker and the hopeless drunk the “X-factor”.   Since then, researchers have identified some factors in brain chemistry such as prostaglandins and essential fatty acids, that account for the addiction, and orthomolecular medicine has found ways to treat the imbalances nutritionally.

Orthomolecular medicine acknowledges that Cannabis affects some people differently than others.  Some of us are stimulated by weed, while for others it acts as a relaxant or sedative.  I have known people who had once used pot for stimulation to help them get going in the morning or to facilitate their creativity as artists, writers or musicians, who later found that it was spacing them out or putting them to sleep and they could no longer work under its influence.  Most of them blamed the weed, saying that the new stuff was getting “sleepier.”  I don’t think so.

Weed has a stimulant effect on those whose neurotransmitter balance is relatively high in serotonin and low in catecholamines.  A high level of catecholamine and low level of serotonin makes pot act as a sedative, putting the user to sleep.  Anecdotal evidence and personal experience suggest that when a person experiences a change in the way the weed affects him, it usually goes from being stimulating to being relaxing, and not the other way round.

Anecdotal evidence and personal experience also suggest that those for whom the weed is stimulating do not tend to become addicted to it.  This group includes me.  I was always a morning smoker.  Most days, one doobie or a good bong hit would get me going and I wouldn’t want any more until the mid-afternoon blood sugar slump.

During the decades that I used pot, there were three periods of about a year each when I abstained totally.  At no time did I experience physical withdrawal symptoms, no cravings for weed, no drive to smoke.  The only thing I missed was the companionable feeling of smoking with my friends. Each time I resumed smoking it was as part of the social bonding ritual, the pass – the – pipe – and – party togetherness thing.

My husband calls us the Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat of marijuana. I was always of the Gallagher school of dope-smokers.  The wild physical comic said, “Kids! Don’t smoke dope… after you’re already stoned.”  For me, toking up in the evening was a waste of good weed.  After I got together with Greyfox, we wasted a lot of dope.  He was one for whom the herb was a sedative, and he did most of his smoking alone.  He always tried to get his important work done before he got loaded because after he toked up… forget it.

When he’d smoke with me in the mornings, it would wreck his whole day.  If I got down with him in the evening, it wrecked me totally.  I didn’t like the feeling of getting too loaded.  The stuff stays in the body so long that I spent years uncomfortably stoned, spaced out, with raging munchies all the time, just because when he smoked, I smoked with him.

When Greyfox got clean, there was no question of my continuing to smoke dope or to grow it.  Quitting wasn’t just easy.  It was a relief.  No munchies making it more difficult to adhere to my healthy diet and avoid food allergies, no more paranoia about the law, none of the itchy red rash on hands and arms from handling the resinous plants… and this leads into my theory about the addictive quality of Cannabis.

I have talked to a lot of dope smokers and former smokers.  The ones who consider it an addictive drug also say that, like Greyfox, for them it was a way to unwind and relax.  The ones like me, who used it to get going and enhance their imagination and creativity, don’t consider it addictive.  If they quit, they had less difficulty quitting than did those for whom it was a relaxant or sedative.  Many of those who acknowledged having been addicted to it, recalled that in the early years of their use, it had at first been more stimulating and then had become “sleepy” for them.  This suggests to me that some part of the serotonin cycle is responsible for Cannabis addiction.

Up to about eight years ago, through thirty-some years of off and on use, Greyfox hadn’t been able to stop using weed, tobacco, or alcohol without experiencing severe withdrawal symptoms and strong cravings.  All periods of abstinence had been followed by relapse and escalating addictive use.  When he quit all of them at once in 2003, there were no cravings, no desire to indulge.  The difference that time consisted of orthomolecular amino acid supplements to balance his brain chemistry. I had previously used similar supplements to kick my lifelong sugar addiction — just a different mix of aminos — mine supplemented catecholamine production and his supplemented serotonin, among other things.

Whether you’re using weed or not, and if you are, whether it gets you going or mellows you out, whether it is a pleasant indulgence or a troublesome addiction, HAVE A HAPPY STONERS DAY EVERYONE, and let’s LEGALIZE IT, quit making criminals of ordinary people who just happen to have chosen a drug that just happens, for no good reason, to be prohibited in this nation where drug use is the norm.  Its being illicit makes it more attractive to rebellious adolescents, too.  Over the past forty years, I have changed my opinions and my tune on a lot of things, but I am still saying now as I said four decades ago:  END MARIJUANA PROHIBITION!

My mother, Dorris, was born in northeastern Kansas one hundred years ago today.  Happy birthday wishes would not be in order: she survived only three quarters of that century.  Even during her life, birthdays were not happy events for her.  She didn’t like growing older, and often cried on my birthdays because she hated to see me grow up.  Time, apparently, was never her friend.

This isn’t a sentimental occasion for me.  Mama had enough sentimentality for both of us, and even if I wasn’t generally unsentimental I don’t think I’d get misty or maudlin over anything involving her.  The mere fact of my still being around to take notice of the hundredth anniversary of her birth is astounding.  Nobody, least of all my mother, expected me to live this long.

Jim, the young man beside her in the photo above, from 1926 or ’27, was her first love.  As the story goes, my grandfather, “ran him off” because the two teens were, “getting too serious.”  Was that a euphemism for sexual activity?  Who knows?.  Given the personalities involved and the tenor of the times, my mother might have had an illegitimate child and nobody ever would have told me.

They parted, and the Great Depression and Dustbowl era took Mama out of Kansas, to Pueblo, Colorado, where she met the “man of her dreams.” She had,

dreamed of my father before they met, recognized his face the first time she saw him.  A fortune-teller had also foretold the circumstances of their meeting, seeing “plates with a big red ‘M’”, which turned out to be the “W” for Woolworth’s, the lunch counter where my mother was working.  Daddy worked in a salvage yard, and lived there in a trailer he fabricated himself from old car bodies.  I recall his telling of having one fork and one spoon which he licked clean after each meal, and one plate, which he would wipe clean with bread and turn upside down over the “clean” fork and spoon, until the next meal.  He was working for a dollar a day, plus a commission on the parts he removed from junk cars for customers. (memoir segment, “Parents and Early Memories“)

After he died, and particularly whenever she was comparing him to her then-current or recently former boyfriend or husband, she said she had been very happy with my father.  I recall seeing her in tears many times during those early years of my life.  I recall hearing her complain about a lot of things.  I remember sharing jokes and laughter with my father on various occasions, but my mother didn’t joke around or laugh much.  After my father died,

my mother got an exciting phone call late one evening.  Jim Henry had been her first boyfriend when she was about sixteen.  My grandfather had run him off.  My great Uncle Walter, Mother’s father’s brother, and his wife Lilly had been traveling through Arkansas when they had a flat tire.  They ended up in a tire shop in Pine Bluff near Little Rock, where they saw a familiar face:  Jim Henry.  When he found out that his old time sweetheart was newly widowed, he got her number and called her. (memoir segment “San Jose, 1952“)

Around that time, she sent him her copy of the photo of the two of them at the top of this entry, writing on the back of it, “How about this–ain’t we a handsome couple?  I’ll bet we were about the happiest couple in the country.  I know we were certainly in love.  Please don’t let this get away.  It’s the only one I have.  Maybe you have one.  This was taken about 1926 or 1927.  I was about 15 or 16.”

She married Jim twice.  It’s a long story.  This link also contains a lot of info about my relationship with her.  We had a complex relationship.  I depended on her for food and shelter.  She depended on me for emotional support, personal validation, menial services such as foot rubs and hair brushing, and mechanical or mathematical tasks that were outside her capability.  The most important things she gave me include some basic cooking skills and the motivation to perfect them.  Another revealing post about Mama and her relationship with me was done on the day before Mother’s Day eight years ago, in response to readers’ questions.  It is here.  It brought up more questions, which are answered here.  Eventually, after all that, I felt I needed to set the record straight,

I love my mama.  It isn’t the respectful and/or dependent filial love of a daughter looking up to the superior maturity and wisdom of a parent.  My mama turned me into her caretaker when my father died.  Any remaining shreds of filial awe were dispelled when I was 25, homeless, just out of jail and soon to be on my way to prison, and she was 58 (my age when I wrote this) and confided in me about her man troubles and asked for my romantic advice.

My love is not a euphemism for guilt or obligation or gratitude.  I don’t think I owe her a thing.  I consider our mutual karma balanced, null and void.  She wanted a baby, to fulfill her need to be a mother.  She stated that in so many words.  She tried before and bore another girl who lived a few hours.  I was her last chance at motherhood.  She could have adopted one or two of my cousins, but wasn’t interested in that, neither before nor after I was born, though my cousin Buddy and I were closer than many brothers and sisters.  Buddy and I both wanted him to stay with us, but just as she did with a long succession of dogs, cats and various love objects of mine, Mama wouldn’t have it.  It had to be her own baby, and only her own, and the baby was not allowed to have other love interests.

Mama and I didn’t bond properly when I was a neonate.  Both of us had separate surgeons working on us as soon as the obstetrician got my foot pushed back up so my butt could come out, and I managed to back into this life.  I don’t know how soon it happened, but Mama became the odd one out, unable to fit in the tight, companionable rapport between me and Daddy.  It didn’t help that she lacked the native intelligence of his family.  She was a little bit slow.  We both thought, talked and ran rings around her, laughing at her the whole time.  I think that after he died she decided to make me pay for some of that.

My love for mama is composed of empathy and compassion.  I know how hard she suffered for her errors and I know intimately the cultural and family history that led her into error.  I love her as I love all the rest of the people I know intimately.  It’s really just the same love I have for the entire Universe, only intensified by the intimate contact and knowledge.  The better I know someone, the better I love them.  And I know my mama very well.  I was her confidant, the one whose shoulder she cried on, whom she blamed when the latest man moved on, and who was sternly admonished when the next one started coming around that, “children are to be seen and not heard.”

I have made my peace with mama, though she never made peace with me.  I was a gross disappointment to her ’til the day she died, though she always spoke of how proud she was of me.  As paradoxical as that sounds, she did have both pride and shame in me, simply because she tried to own me, control my life and live through me.  To the extent to which she got her way with me, she was proud.  I was smart and pretty, brave and capable.  To the extent that I did not conform to her ideal, she was ashamed.  I was independent, irreverent, headstrong, and promiscuous, as precocious at sex as at the intellectual stuff.  She was mortified.

It drove me nuts and drove me out of her reach.  I don’t have to pretend that she was anything she wasn’t in order to love her because I love her unconditionally.  She was just exactly the mother I needed.  She showed me the error of hypocrisy, dishonesty and denial, gave me something worthy of rebelling against and made me who I am today.  

A hundred years… is a long time.