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[Bozack]

See, my difficulty is thus: the only times that I really have to have my shit together and NOT be rocking in a corner hugging my shoulders (aside from seeing all of my SO's relatives THIS weekend and going home for Thanksgiving and seeing all of MY relatives next week) is for the 24 hours I work at Barnes & Nobles. My job isn't that stressful, but I just really don't want to have a panic attack at work. My hope is this: If I were to make very, very weak pot butter, perhaps, if I were feeling a bit out of sorts, I could run back to the break room, have a little dab on some bread and it would calm me down for a while. Would this work?

[V-Adore]

Wow, Smells. I really respect you for bringing the strong sack; there are a lot of times I've wanted to draw the line like that with my SO, and I just can't manage. (It's never about anything that serious, though.) I'm glad to hear that you two were able to work it out.

Man, I think I might just be teetotal for life. Too much of a control freak for this stuff.

[pmcd9]

Thank you so very much for that story Melanie.  I appreciate how you are willing to speak so candidly about your life.  That was a wonderful story and it makes my story of why I quit smoking pot sound pretty pale indeed.  Therefore you've forced me to step up to the plate and reveal more of the story, the part i've never spoken of to anyone before ever.  I quit smoking because it got to expensive.  This was in the mid '80s and when the price climbed to 30 dollars for a quarter of an ounce I said enough, I refuse to pay such a high price.  And of course when you ain't buying people eventually stop sharing with you.  That's my stock why I quit smoking pot story which is all entirely true, but there is more and this is the part i've never spoken of.  As I said people stopped sharing with me because I was becoming a bum, but I was alright with that because something was begining to happen that scared me very much.   On a couple of occassions I heard a voice in my head.  It was not a nice voice.  I percieved the voice to be that of the devil and he was telling me to kill myself.  I should point out that I have mental illness in my family, my Brother is a full blown schizophrenic, manic depressive.  I have other blood reletives, particularly a first cousin who is also a full blown schizo. There are others in my family who suffer to a lesser degree.  I don't entirely attribute these schizophrenic episodes of mine to the pot, but i'm convinced it was a strong contributing factor.  I imagine that what I was feeling is very similar to what my Brother felt all the time before he got himself medicated.  I've smoked weed since then on several occasions to no ill effect, but not for over a decade.  I had actually planned on smoking this weekend, but Melanie's story and remembering my own has made me rethink that idea.

The trouble with mental illness and medication is it's a lose lose situation.  My brother used to be a lunatic with a long trail of destruction in his wake, now he's a semi comatose husk of a man.  At least now he's docile.

~Paul

[pmcd9]

Oh and I forgot to mention, we love you Bozack, keep a stiff upper lip.  We'll do whatever we can to help you through this.

Beatrice, since this is surely all your fault I expect you will be flying to NYC tonight to rock our boy to sleep.

~Paul

[AugustWest]

What about drinking, Bozack?  Could you get drunk at work?


...but seriously, hang tough.  We're all here for you.

[AugustWest]

I quit smoking because it got to expensive.  This was in the mid '80s and when the price climbed to 30 dollars for a quarter of an ounce I said enough, I refuse to pay such a high price.

Yeah, that was a factor with me too.  I understand that it's much worse these days.  If I went back to smoking, I'd grow my own.

[wombat]

Would this work?

It might be enough that you believe that it will work.  The placebo effect is a grand thing.

[slink]

Would this work?

Should do. Worth trying I reckon, at first, before it gets too bad and see how it is. As I say, I always found it made me feel trippier than stoned, but that was in a pretty hefty quantity (like eating a baggy of green so as to nto take it on the ferry, and to get past the horribleness of the ferry).
So yeah, definitely worth a try. And hang in there. I know whereof you speak and it's not nice. Stupid doctors!

[AlohaDawg]

Would this work?

Should do. Worth trying I reckon, at first, before it gets too bad and see how it is. As I say, I always found it made me feel trippier than stoned, but that was in a pretty hefty quantity (like eating a baggy of green so as to nto take it on the ferry, and to get past the horribleness of the ferry).
So yeah, definitely worth a try. And hang in there. I know whereof you speak and it's not nice. Stupid doctors!

You ate a baggy of green?

How twisty did you get?

[side_show]

...something was begining to happen that scared me very much.   On a couple of occassions I heard a voice in my head.  It was not a nice voice.  I percieved the voice to be that of the devil and he was telling me to kill myself.  I should point out that I have mental illness in my family, my Brother is a full blown schizophrenic, manic depressive.  I have other blood reletives, particularly a first cousin who is also a full blown schizo. There are others in my family who suffer to a lesser degree.  I don't entirely attribute these schizophrenic episodes of mine to the pot, but i'm convinced it was a strong contributing factor.

Well my SO and I have a schizophrenic friend whose only been diagnosed recently though she's almost 40, and she's the biggest stoner I've ever met in my life.  Also she's a nurse, which scares the hell out of me.  Anyway, her heavy pot use, up to her diagnosis, has been her only way of keeping sane, and probably the only reason why she's not dead.  She's had far more serious substance abuse problems in the past with coke, so her constant pot use doesn't translate into a problem for her.  I urged her to be straight with her psychiatrist now that she's finally been diagnosed - about her pot use that is.  She's suffered a few paranoid break downs recently, and knowing how dope feels pretty well, it's hard not to imagine that the two are linked.  I certainly don't want our buddy to stop doing the one thing that's kept her alive thus far, but I'm also hopeful that she can find a sense of well being that she's been without.

Also, as a side note, when it comes to hearing voices, I've never had that happen to me, but I do have a spirit animal - since I'm aboriginal, I try to be pensive about this and take it as a signifier of something, not a crazy thing:  there's a black domesticated cat that I see every so often - maybe a few times a year.  This is definitly not a "real" cat, but I used to see it in the distance, usually when high or very sick, running across a parking lot, or walking on the opposite side of the street.  It's been gone for over  a year, and I sort of wrote it off as the result of to too much hedonism, but recently the cat has reappeared, much closer now, and usually hissing angrily but silently, out of the corner of my eye.  When I turn my head, there's never anything there - just my eyes or my mind playing tricks on me.  I have no idea what it means, but since it's a hardly-ever-type thing, I try not to let it worry me.  When it comes to my cat or your voices, let's agree that if they ever become more than just a hardly-ever thing that we'll go see a doctor, okay?

I had actually planned on smoking this weekend, but Melanie's story and remembering my own has made me rethink that idea.

You know, Paul, it's all about personal limits, right?  I know I'd be fine to smoke dope now and any time in the future, but I don't - as a promise of solidarity to my SO.  For me, the line is hallucinogens.  I'm very lucky that I was able to step back and recognize this line in my teens, when most of my friends were a lot less self-aware.  I remember a lot of my friends thought my bad trip was "cool," and that those friends went on to harder, perminantly damaging drugs.  Only two of my friends from that time is are truly lost causes, which is a miracle, really.

The trouble with mental illness and medication is it's a lose lose situation.  My brother used to be a lunatic with a long trail of destruction in his wake, now he's a semi comatose husk of a man.  At least now he's docile.

You know, with my mom having gone over the deepend in the past little while, and since she's been off her med's for over a year, I don't really know if I can agree with you.  Because my mom was medicated basically through out my whole childhood, but still had all the markers of serious mental illness, only to a lesser extent, I know that at least in her case the drugs helped, but not in a way that fixed anything - just lessened it.

When it comes to myself I've been repeatedly told by physicians to go on anti-depressants, and have been totally resistant to the idea.  I am a person who depends on my capacity to think and dive deep into the wells of my psyche both for fufillment and because of my career, so I don't want to ever play with intentionally numbing myself.  Even when it came to pot smoking, I never enjoyed a whole day of being high - I like being totally in my head more than not.  I look back at my most serious bout of depression and think that, really, if I could have been totally sedated for that time, it probably would have been better, but would I have known to come off the drugs?  Would I have know that I'd passed through the darkness to the other side?  I don't know, how can I trust that the drugged me would be able to judge these things?  I think about this a lot, because if the depression comes on again, which I hope it never does, I know that I could never make it to the other side on sheer strength alone again.  I think of one of my lost cause friends - the one who fried his seratonin receptors on E - and his life on anti-depressants.  Sure a part of his brain was toasted by the drugs, but he's been on any combination of prescriptions for about 6 years now, and he is now a shell - my buddy is mostly gone.  My 36 year old buddy is in his parent's basement right now, where he always is, or his body is, but where is my buddy?  If the drugs have miraculously fixed him, will he, or his doctor, know this and take him off the drugs?  Or is it just assumed that the fog is a perminant coping thing so that mom and dad don't have to face real feelings and talk about real things?  I don't know, and I don't trust.

The human mind is so fragile - you've seen it, Paul, and you're grappling with it, Bozack, and I constantly live with the fear that my spirit will break.  I think it's unfair to come out for or against psychiatric drugs - it's not even a personal thing - it's a case-by-case and moment by moment thing.  Tomorrow, one of us could turn a corner and find ourselves in front of a maniac crushing several childrens' heads in with a rusty pipe, and our minds may not be able to handle this, and we may choose to take a little vacation from our own heads, and if we do - that's gotta' be okay, and if we instead choose to limp through it on our own - that's gotta' be okay too.    

I look at my future and think, well if the really dark days come ever again, I know I have to choose either the drugs or death.  I know, having waded through it once, that I couldn't make it through again, fully aware and feeling it.  I don't ever want to take the drugs, but I'm pretty certain that the answer would be yes should I ever have to cross that bridge again - it was too dark and too terrible, and I know that I can't go there again.  

I'm deeply, deeply skeptical of Big Pharama, and certainly as someone who interacts with little sniffers every day, I am deeply angered at the number of spirited children labelled as "disordered" and drugged.  I know the path we, as a North American society, are taking is the lazy one: teachers and even parents don't want to deal with the stand out students anymore, so the solution is to get the ADHD or ADD or HD label stamped and the drugs swallowed.  It sickens me.  I also know that when it comes to adults too many of us choose to lead thoughtless lives, where even if the emotional pain we feel has a legitimate grounding, we choose to take a pill instead of doing the hard work of finding the core of the hurt or taking the difficult road of healing from the past.  This also deeply worries me, and is why I've always refused the meds when the script has been pushed under my nose.  But now that I've spent five years examining my pain and healing from it, I feel pretty confident that I've looked at all the angles.  I've looked at the hurt and said:  "Hey, I know you.  I know where you came from, and why you're in me, and I'm glad to see you're going away, and I hope it's a long, long trip away, but if you do come back, I'll know you right off the hop, and I'm not going to put up with you anymore."  Not as many people as should take the time to examine their shit before diving into the sea of meds, but I feel like Paul and Bozack, that both of you are on the path to "Know thine self," and an important part of knowing yourself is knowing the breadth of your spirit and how much you can take.  I know exactly how much I can take, and Paul you probably know from having seen the beast, and having it brush past you, just how far down you're willing to go too, and maybe it's a fight to the death for you.  And Bozack, it sounds like you're right in the middle of figuring it all out.  All of us have the capacity to step outside ourselves and decide our path, y'know.

It's very early on a Saturday morn' and maybe I should get some sleep.  I'm not too sure where I was heading with all this.  Mostly that I'm here for you two and everyone, should you hear voices, or if you are not sure if you can come off the drugs without flaking.  And I suppose if this was a rant for anything, it was the rant for free choice, to use drugs legal or not, as long as the choice is one that is throughly examined.

Bosack: In regard to your "will the mild pot butter work question," I say probably not.  I've done the gross strong butter, and I was out of it just as if I'd smoke hash oil, and when it came to the weak stuff, basically, I felt nothing.  Depending on how much you usually smoke of course, and where your tolerance level is, this is basically a non-science that you probably don't want to fuck with.  In the past we have made weak pot butter out of leftover scratch we had lying around, and the result was, basically that we felt no difference in our day-to-day world.  I briefly had a strong interest in making a nice dinner, but I am generally a light-weight, and if - and it's a big question mark "if" -  if I felt anything at all it was very, very fleeting.  There was no euphoria so to speak.

My personal suggestion to you is to prep. your employer with a semi-fudged explaination:  Something like: "Just so you know, I'm dealing with some family problems that I'd rather not gointo, and I may be a little off kilter, or need to take a stress day over the next couple weeks, but I assure you that this will only effect me for a short period, and soon enough I'll be back to my happy-go-lucky self."  If you preset the fact that you don't want to talk about the issue, your employer will likely be understanding, and will probably assume that there is an illness, divorce, etc. going on and respect your privacy.  Just be polite but firm about not wanting to discuss the details - your boss doesn't need to know that the "family" member having the problem is you.  I know I told a boss basically the same thing when some bad shit was going down in my life, and my somewhat erratic behaviour was accepted as me "greiving" or being stressed.  I can understand why you wouldn't want to tell your boss the full story, since the whole stigma is there, hopefully only with one or two people you work with, but, yeah, I understand why you don't want your boss to think you're a nutter.  Still, why not at least clue him/her in to the fact the you will be a little weird over the weeks you're coming off meds, so that if it turns out you need to go smoke a doobie on you lunch break, that he/she will already anticipate that you will be a tad of kilter, and not instantly think that you are high or crazy.  I think this is the smartest solution, and probably a mature way to approach things in a way that will maintain the respect of everyone involved.  It's a courtesey to you boss and coworkers, and they'll assume you're a kind and sensative young lad (which you are anyway), likely caring for an ailing aunt, or helping a sibling through a difficult divorce (which you aren't, but these are their assumptions, not yours!).

Or you could just full out lie and say you have an out of town wedding or funeral you need to attend and take the time off, but I imagine you need/want the income, and need/want to maintain some sense of normalcy while coming off, so you know whatever.

Do I win the longest post of the week award?

[Bozack]

Do I win the longest post of the week award?

You win a little can of Dr. Pepper.

But it was a post filled with useful information. Thank you.

[Limmo]

I stopped smoking pot for two reasons.  First, roundabout when I turned 27, I just lost the ability to handle the stuff.  I would smoke, be high for 45 minutes, turn into a bag of lead for two hours and then spend the next two days with my thinking processes noticeably slowed down.  It ceased to be fun.

Second, my stoner buddy moved out of town.  And since then I just never felt the deep urge to continue with it.  I've been high a few times since then, and just don't have any deep urge to smoke the stuff anymore.

If they made a drug that made music sound as good as it does when I'm stoned and had no other effects, I would keep a bowl of it on my desk.  Some of my fondest (blurry) memories are of being turned on to music I'd never gotten into before, like the Pixies' Surfer Rosa and Laurie Anderson's Strange Angels.  Oh well.

Bozack: pot brownies!

[Lister]

Although I can't offer any personal experiences with recreational drugs or psychological medication, I've had a lot of experience dealing with people on both.  Here's my long-winded opinion/philosophy -- Though I use words like "should" and "you need to" throughout, remember that I'm only really able to speak for me.

Sometimes antidepressants can help.  One of my best friends in high school/college had bouts of severe depression.  He went to counseling first, and was on antidepressants for about four months while he continued the counseling.  Eventually he was able to work through the depression and learn the tools for dealing with it on his own, and he went off the medication.  When he began the medication was also worried about his writing, but he later told me that not wanting to die helped his writing a lot more.

The lesson I'd take from his experience is that the knowledge that you can gain with a good therapist is the most important way to treat depression, and to be wary of anything anyone prescribes for you for an indefinite period.  I'm of the opinion that any therapy without an "exit strategy" isn't really a therapy.  It'd be like planning to use a nicotine patch for the rest of your life -- your goal should be to help yourself deal with your own brain chemistry.

In other words, while I think pharmaceuticals are overprescribed in general, they are not necessarily bad things if you are aware of their risks before their benefits, use them for limited periods, and are overly cautious about them.  Sometimes you simply can't "get over" something without help.  Sometimes it is a chemical problem.  The important thing is to find a professional who can help you find that balance.

Personal stuff: I've got ADD.  It's been pretty obvious for a while.  I don't and never have dealt with it through medication, since it first started affecting me when ADD kids were still "energetic" and had to learn how to behave.  I just know that if I don't have a written record of something, I won't remember it.  I do my best to get as much sleep as I can.  I have as many bills as possible paid through automatic debit, and overpay the others so there's always a positive balance when I inevitably forget one month.  When it's obvious that I'm not able to address a problem clearly, I take a break to feed my brain some different experiences so it will come back to work with me.  That's what's mostly worked for me.

I guess what I'm saying is that it might be possible to deal with problems without drugs, but be wary of either extreme regarding their use.  Mindless acceptance or rejection can both be damaging.  Either way the most important thing you can do is train your mind to deal with your problems, and that's something very few people can do on their own.  I hope this therapist will help you be able to do that, and that whatever support we've offered here can help you make it through the trial you've got ahead.

[arkabee]

if all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.

and there are these fuck*ng guys, and they have a real fuck*ng big hammer.

and you, me, and that guy standing over there, and there, and there are all just nails to be pounded on.

and it's not anything new, because they've been doing it since the dawn of time.

but the drugs, man they are scary.  just a big fuck*ng hammer, ready to pound on you.

and, ya, there are a lot nails out there, that do need hammering.  a nail's supposed to be in the bag with other nails, or hammered into something.  so a nail that's halfway in, it needs to be hammered in.  that's what a hammer is for.

but those fuckers with their hammer, they sure seem to take an almost joy out of hammering things that aren't nails, at looking at you and saying "you are a motherfuck*ng nail and i'm going to hammer you".

and i think, on somedays, that they KNOW you aren't a nail.

and i think, on other days, that they don't know you aren't a nail, that they honestly think you are a nail, and they fully feel justified in bringing the hammer down.

and now you got adverts on the telivision, you got marketing psycho-engineering you and me to believe that we are nails and that we need the hammer.

they are trying to convince you and i that we _want_ to be hammered.

that's what kills me.

i'm not a fuck*ng nail, put the fuck*ng hammer down, take a god damned second and look and get a 5/6's and turn me down a quarter turn, but just stop hammering on me.

how many generations did it take to go from "mind your own fuck*ng business" to "who wouldn't think one-size-fits-all is the best for everyone"?

ah, one.
ah, two.
ah, three.
CRUNCH.

[Bozack]

Drugs can be good. But when they aren't, I'm sitting in the subway on the ride home from work with the sweats, clutching my elbows and trying not to throttle the two dumbass guys (who actually, at one point, admitted to being 25) who kept trying to repeat old Carlin routines and fuck*ng them up mercilessly. I swear to FUCK, if I could take one subway ride in New York without being a)hassled for money, b)played mariachi music that I don't want to hear, c)told, in depth, that someone is a ho, c)getting crushed by some asshole who apparently has buboes in his groin, thus requiring him to open his legs as wide as possible, or d)ALL OF THE ABOVE, I think I would die at that moment. It would be a moment so far outside of my normal experiences that my cerebellum would hemmorage and I'd just die, right there, and maybe fall over onto the leg guy. Maybe I could bleed a little bit onto him, out of my nose or something. If I could go out pouring a mixture of mucus and blood onto one of those bastards, I would be smiling as they lowered me into the ground.