That Sticky-Icky
I entered adolescence in the disco era. I gotta admit, out of all the songs that they could play at the roller skating rink, you could do a lot worse. It was still the post-Woodstock decade and many attitudes weren't far removed from the ones that people ordinarily associate with the 60s. Cocaine was consumed openly at Studio 54 and the prevailing attitude was "rich people, what can you do?" The devil's lettuce was everywhere.
That's how, at the age of 12 I found myself all of a sudden on the way to smoke my first joint with a new, more street-wise friend from our apartment complex. We found a nearby construction site. He pulled a fat but loosely rolled joint from his sock. It was damp with sweat and hard to light. I did not catch the slightest buzz from half a doobie of sweat-soaked, low-quality, Mexican ditch weed. And that was that. I did not immediately seek out more. In fact, I waited another couple of years.
We'd moved to another city, all the way across the state. It took a while, but I eventually got invited to light up again and this time, it worked. I have a distinct memory of standing in the kitchen of my benefactor, sharing a jar of maraschino cherries and giggling. I definitely wanted more. I'm not a moocher by nature, so I asked about buying my own supply. I had no idea how that even worked. As it turned out, one could purchase individual hand-rolled joints on the junior high school market for $1.
That's how I bought my very first joint. I was so excited that I tried to light it up in the five-minute break between classes, but I only had three matches and it was a windy day. As I returned to the building, a teacher, and undercover teenage dope-fiend detector, had used the skill called "looking out the window" to see me trying to spark up my purchase. She grabbed me and asked to see what I had in my hands, whereupon I threw the barely singed joint onto the floor. She picked it up. She took me to the principal, a man who knew me very well. He sent me home with instructions not to return for two weeks.
My home life wasn't pleasant. My mom was married to an abusive (in more ways than one) narcissist who didn't like me any more as a teenager than he had as the first-grader I was when he entered our lives. Getting busted was the last straw. The way to keep the peace turned out to be me leaving home for good. I moved to my uncle's farm, where the adventure continued.
If I'd just learned to be cool with weed and rested on my laurels, my life would have been much different. Instead, I ended up wrestling with demon rum until I eventually had to turn from abstinence from everything in order to have the kind of life I wanted. That was in 2008.
Without romanticizing it, I have interesting cultural memories of the way cannabis was used in the 70s and 80s. As mentioned, you could buy single joints at school. Hell, my school still had a student's smoking area, a built-in marketplace. The nickel bag era was gone, but a dime bag, $10 worth of the green, netted you 1/4 ounce of a product that would indeed get you high, if you smoked enough of it.
Smoking it usually involved joints using the rolling paper that you thought the cool kids used. For me, that was J&B 1.5s. Not using a double wide signified that I had been rolling long enough that I didn't need all that extra paper. People these days talk about having an everyday carry pen or knife. For me in those years, it was a packet of rolling papers. We also occasionally managed to get our hands on pipes (bowls) from head shops. Most potheads of my era could make an emergency pipe with a toilet paper roll, some tinfoil and a safety pin.
Looking back now at how my fellow smoke hounds turned out reveals that no one's life was ruined by reefer madness. My fellow partakers are today a senior military leader, the head of HR at one of the county's largest employers, a physician, a retired cop and an ordained minister. I have no idea if any of them still puff, I doubt it, but I wouldn't judge them if they did.
These days we know that most of the harm attributed to cannabis is the stuff of myths, while the claimed health benefits for pain control, anxiety, nausea and appetite stimulation are true. Rather than a life-ruining addictive and noxious weed, the sticky-icky is an herb with thousands of years of medicinal use in its background.
It's not for everyone, but I am 100% certain that you know someone who would be a lot cooler if they would just burn one once in a while.
Weed never got its hooks in me. The bottle did. That's the one that almost took me down, and the one that made me give up everything as a trade for not killing me.
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