I never considered myself the weed-smoking type. It wasn’t that I was anti drugs – it was more that I had this preconceived notion that weed smokers were layabouts and that I was far too sharp and energetic to be one of those. Cocaine and ecstasy were the drugs for me, or so I thought. But like many people when they go away to college I opened my mind and experimented, and I don’t regret it for a minute.
I first tried it in Dave’s dorm room. I didn’t know it at the time but Dave was to become one of my best friends, and still is to this day. There were four of us packed into his room which was barely much bigger than his single bed.
What struck me first of all was how this seemed like such a communal experience. Just four guys chilling out, having a smoke. Unlike the other drugs I was dabbling with at the time there was no pressure to be impressive or to dance or to do anything other than be there in the moment and share the experience.
And then I had a try. It didn’t seem to do much at first but when it was passed around the second time I began to understand. I started to feel a bit queasy, my vision began to go a bit crazy and in all honesty, I didn’t enjoy it at first.
But then the laughter came.
It’s hard to put into words just how brilliant it is to be in a confined space with three other people, absolutely howling with laughter about something completely trivial. In the background on Dave’s TV was “When Good Pets Go Bad”, which featured the story of an elephant that turned on its ringmaster after years in the circus…. I think it was the OTT analysis of the elephant’s decision-making process (like anyone really knows an elephant’s logic?!?), combined with the commentary over the slow-mo replay of the ringmaster attack that set us all off.
From that moment on I knew I was going to be part of this little crew. If a few smokes of a spliff could make “When Good Pets Go Bad” seem like the ultimate in comedy, then that seemed like a great use of time to me.
So it became a thing. Most Sunday nights we would have a smoke and laugh at bad TV, always being careful to not set the alarms off in the dorms (a pair of socks wrapped over the smoke detector was normally enough), and always making sure we had enough junk food and nibbles to see us through the night. They were very good times from some quite simple pleasures. How on earth could this be illegal?
To me this was never about getting stupidly high and disengaging with the world. I always saw it as an amusing enhancement of reality rather than a path towards an alternative one. Like the English would say “come around for a cup of tea”, me and my crew would say “come around for a smoke”. It was just an everyday kinda thing.
It’s almost 20 years since my first experience, but I still feel heavily influenced by it. Some of my best friends and best laughs have come from the simple act of “having a smoke”.
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