Oh look! A soapbox! I shall stand!
I have nothing against pot; I certainly smoked my share of it starting around age 15 – somewhat heavily until I turned 20-ish. Occasionally until my mid-30’s, and then realizing that it just make my (then developing) tinnitus SCREAM, I gave it up after about age 50. Over the past decade, it has been gradually becoming legal around these parts; now fully accepted in RI and MA with pot-shops-a-plenty. Visited a local shop and all I can say is that shit is EXPENSIVE! Even for the gummies and chocolates (I tried those in recent years a way to quell my tinnitus, to no effect)! Secondly, the stuff they sell “legally” is considerably more potent than what we could source back in the 70’s! My knee-jerk reaction is “Don’t bitch to me about the cost of eggs or gas when you spend several hundred dollars a week on WEED!” But I digress.
I am the product of a generation of people who chain-smoked cigarettes because back then it was... normal? My dad would go through two cases of unfiltered Lucky Strikes in a week; at least 9 of his 12 siblings smoked as much if not more. Our home was always had that nicotine cloud inside, and tar covered ceilings; clothes all stunk of stale cigarette smoke; most noticeably when I would travel and open my suitcase at a destination. I tried to smoke; when I work in / ran a restaurant, coworkers obligatory cigarettes were always going being the grill line or in the bus / wait areas. Most everyone had a cigarette going (or joints after close). I think I bought, perhaps a pack of cigarettes in my entire life (mainly to give away to folks who ran out). Same with cigars. Tried those thinking I was being all "manly and trendy". Into my third REALLY EXPENSIVE (for the time) cigar, I found myself throwing up. That ended that.
As I have aged, I have really lost my patience the younger generation
who insist on smoking and vaping - especially in light of DECADES of
scientific data pointing to how bad those are. Now entering into my Senior years, I am having…
slight… issues with breathing. Bouts of asthma that hay fever meds just
never seem to mitigate. More heightened senses of bad things in the air. Routine checks with a pulmonologist says lungs are clear; no issues – “Have some more generic Claritin!”
Now that weed is more or less accepted, you can’t go through any parking lot without walking through a plume of pot smoke. (And Hello, Canada! Montreal was GORGEOUS, but felt like I was inside a perpetual bong) We got people toking in their cars, puffing away walking through the parking lots, lighting a spliff the moment they step outside. Our neighbors partake leading to the nightly game of “Is that pot or skunk?” (we do have a population of the striped miscreants that visit the yard looking for scraps) when the weather is suitable.
I have already passed judgement on the idiots who insist on smoking cigarettes around their kids. They are morons and their children are doomed. What is sticking in my craw is when I go into a store, and I see young (trendy!) families pushing carts and baby carriages, perhaps with toddlers or young children in tow, through the establishment, and I get within a dozen feet of them and am hit with a wall of INCREDIBLE pot stench that just grows stronger the closer I get to them. I smoked enough weed in my lifetime to know the difference between pot and patchouli (used to "hide" the pot smell back in the day), and that ain’t patchouli! Woefully apparent that they toked up before coming into the store. I have no idea what pot did to me in my young adulthood. I was a “day dreamer” all through Kindergarten and elementary school (would have been diagnosed on some spectrum in today’s world), so I cannot say that being a young adult immersed in pot made me the perpetual brain-fogged, underachiever (and proud of it) I have become today, but being raised in a chain-smoking environment, all I can think is - damn it – give your kids a chance to breathe normally for a while!
Anyhow.
I shall get off thy soapbox now.
Rade
6 comments:
Interesting. Apparently it's more common at your end of the country than here -- I almost never smell marijuana, in parking lots or anywhere else. I do know what a skunk smells like. They keep getting hit by cars around here and then the smell spreads for a block or two. It's very distinctive, but smells nothing like marijuana.
I have nothing against it either, but people shouldn't be exposing kids to it. I did try marijuana a few years ago when Oregon legalized it, but it didn't do anything much for me, so I stopped. It is, as you say, expensive.
I wish I could still smoke pot, but like I said, the tinnitus just gets amped up when I take a puff. It's annoying enough without the high.
I smoked cigarettes for close to 25 years, finally stopping when the habit was nearly three packs a day. I smoked plenty of pot during that time, too. Now I have COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and have to use oxygen is I'm going anywhere. Recently I've been experimenting with the gummies, mostly to see if it will improve my mood. The jury's still out on that.
A local shop here sold gummies names "Canatini" that let me get to sleep. I found that just a couple of Advil would have about the same effect for 1/100th the price.
That stuff we had in the 70s was nothing but ditch weed alright!
And if you were lucky, it had donkey hair in it!
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