Getting Reacquainted with Weed on 420
I got high as an adult for the first time on 420. It’s pretty cliché, I know, but I promise the story of how we got to that point is not.
To set the stage, I need to take you back to high school with me in the mid-90s. I smoked plenty of weed in my early teenage years, from 14-17. Hell, I was drinking, smoking cigarettes, taking pills, using LSD, practically anything that wasn’t a truly “hard drug.”
My relationship with these substances was in no way healthy. I was rebelling against society, my family, school, religion; you name it, I was against it. The best way to express that anti-society nature was to use drugs.
At 17, I sharpened up. Theatre helped me devote myself to art and education while retaining an anti-everything stance. I became an intelligent activist rather than an on-the-road-to-squatter punk. I also went straight edge and vegetarian in the process. It allowed me to rise in my moral superiority over the society I rebuked. I was a lot of fun to be around.
Ultimately, I remained straight edge and very anti-drug-preachy during my six-year college experience. I fully bought into drug war propaganda—although I hated the police—and harshly judged those around me for drinking or smoking anything. Attending theatre at a notorious Texas party school meant I showed up at many parties and judged many people. Most of my dearest friends know me from this period.
Then I fell off the wagon in the most classic, cliché ex-straightedger way: someone broke my heart. In the ensuing Booze-Capades, I met my wife Stephanie, and my life changed forever. After a very long story, we ended up living with my brother and our business partner Jay in Austin, TX.
This brings me back to the point of this story. Spring of 2007 was a popular vacation time for all our friends and roommates; it was not for Steph and me. We were staying home with no plans and nothing to do. So it was that on 4/20/2007, with no one around, bored out of our minds, Steph looked at me and said, “You know, it’s 420. Should we get high?”
I was surprised by this. Steph had not smoked any weed in the days that I knew her (at least as far as I knew) and never mentioned a desire to do it.
Did I want to get high? What a question. Did I still feel the same way about it that I used to? At this point, I had drank so much alcohol it was hard to argue that smoking weed would be worse than that.
“Yeah? Sure. Fuck it,” I said.
“Right on. Now, how do we get some?”
I knew the exact friend we needed at that moment. If you remember that point I made about attending a notorious party school with theatre people who prolifically used drugs? Well, the guy that was the most identifiably stoned most of the time happened to live nearby.
[For the sake of privacy, names have been changed]
“Marc. I need to call Marc.”
Brad calls Marc … ring, ring.
“Brad! Bro, how are you doing? Long time no talk.”
“Marc. This is going to be one of the craziest calls you’ve ever gotten,” I begin.
“Uh, ok? What’s up?”
“I wanna get high with Steph. We didn’t have any idea where to get weed. You were the first person I thought of.”
“Are you fucking with me, Brad?”
“Believe it or not, I am not fucking with you.”
“FUCK YEAH, I WANNA GET YOU HIGH! BRAD FUCKING BOGUS WANTS TO SMOKE WEED? GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE RIGHT NOW, DUDE!!!”
I know all caps can be aggressive, but trust me, they still don’t do justice to the enthusiasm of his response.
We arrive at Marc’s place 30 minutes later, and he meets us outside, jumping with excitement like a kid in a toy store. We followed him in and said hi to his partner Christine, who was also a previous theatre schoolmate of mine. She, too, is completely stoked about what’s going to happen.
Now, I feel it necessary to point out that when I smoked weed back in the day, we bought compressed weed smuggled over the border, grown by god knows who with god knows what chemicals. You could buy it in a nickel bag, dime sack, quarter bag, zip/lid (an ounce), or QPs (quarter pounds).
It was not potent. It was not tasty. It did not contain terpenes. It was good ol’ Texas dirt weed.
When we smoked it, it was out of joints, pipes, bongs, or makeshift smoking apparatuses like gravity bongs or bubblers made from water bottles and aluminum foil bowls. I knew of no technology for smoking weed.
What Marc had prepared for us, however, was unlike anything I had ever seen. On his table sat a wooden trapezoidal box with a knob and short glass extrusion on the front. Next to it was a clear plastic hose with a glass mouthpiece on one end and a glass tube on the other.
He packed the glass tube with some weed like I had never seen; crystally, fluffy and smelled terrific. He then explains what’s going on with the wooden box and how it will vaporize the flower so we don’t combust it but still get all the good oils vaporized for us to inhale.
I’m up to bat first. I start to inhale and feel high immediately. Like fucking-mid-first-breath, immediately. Less than two seconds, I would swear. I continue to inhale but know I’m already in for it.
Steph follows and has a similar, albeit less intense, experience. She’s always had incredible tolerance. I learned that from jump this very night.
Marc, seeing my interest in the technology side of this experience, starts to try to explain “The Volcano” vaporizer to me. This is the most well-known desktop vaporizer in the world, unless you’re me, in which case you can’t even conceive of it.
The Volcano is a large device that sits on a table and looks like a conical humidifier. You pack a cartridge with ground bud and place it in the middle of the top of the cone. You then place this bag that looks comically like a clear blimp on top, and a heated air flow fills the bag with cannabis vapor. The bag has a release valve that allows multiple hits without the vapor leaving the bag unintentionally.
It’s a crazy device. And when your previous closest brush with cannabis technology was a milk jug gravity bong, it’s like having someone teach quantum physics to you.
Marc explains the science behind this thing for what feels like an hour. I’m asking thousands of fundamental questions just to try and keep up.
Steph is dead silent. Her only noises are her laughing at my inability to keep up with the most complicated concept in the known universe. I’ve never seen her so quiet and yet so giggly.
I pull an eject cord on the conversation, resigning myself to a failure of understanding, and we proceed to have a great rest of the evening, probably higher than I’ll ever be in my life.
Many new users would find this to be one of those experiences that was too intense, so they write off cannabis forever. For us, however, it was fun. It was fantastical and educational. It changed how we work as a couple, enjoy each other, and connect on deeper levels with ourselves and others.
And then there’s the novelty of being able to confuse every single one of my old high school and college friends that I—the insufferable straight-edger that judged everyone for smoking weed—is now, indeed, smoking weed himself.
Some may say that it just exposes me as a hypocrite. Sure. I can accept that. But the more accurate explanation was that I learned and evolved. I reopened my mind to the possibility of being lied to for decades about this substance. I discovered one could live a productive, responsible life while consuming cannabis. We also found a healthier alternative to drinking (although it has far from replaced alcohol entirely in our lives).
This journey is what compels me to share these stories and this passion with others now.