It Was Never Just The Weed

On April 27, 2022, I smoked weed for the last time. I had decided a few weeks before that it was time for me to stop. I had a lot of trouble with it. I didn't put in any action, I didn't do anything differently. I wasn't ready to make any real changes. I was in the pre-contemplation stage.

One day though, I became willing.

I decided to travel back home to Montreal to be with my family for the weekend. I figured this would be an easier setting to quit than in a frat house surrounded by chronic pot smokers. The morning of the flight, I took a massive bong rip when I should have been heading to the airport. I am pretty sure I subconsciously showed up late and missed my flight on purpose so that I could go back home and continue smoking weed. That's exactly what I did. I remember being relieved when the person at the front desk told me that I had to get on a different flight later that day. I went home with a smile on my face to take a few more bong rips.

Finally, I made it on the flight and I successfully made it through the weekend without any weed. By the time I got back to school, I had already gone 4 days without smoking and now, keeping the streak meant more to me than smoking. I was white knuckling it. I would watch my friends smoke and I used my will to not do it with them. At this time, I also decided to stop drinking alcohol. This wasn't a permanent decision, but it was for right then. I had also fallen behind on school work at this point, so I traded my addiction to weed and alcohol for school and melatonin. For the next month, I would spend 10-12 hours per day at the library catching up on my class content before my final exams and then would head home and pop 70-100 mg of melatonin to fall asleep. That is about 7-10x the recommended dosage.

I didn't quit using, I just changed what I was using.

I remember vividly finishing my last exam and texting my dad telling him that I was going to the bar with some friends and I was going to have one beer. He advised against it, but I didn't care. I had just finished my sophomore year of college and I wasn't going to sit at home alone while the rest of my fraternity brothers were going to go out to a bar to drink. At this point, going to the bar and not drinking was not an option. But the weed I decided to stay off of. I was now riding a 30 day streak after smoking for basically 4 years straight with minimal to no days off.

At the time, I also firmly believed that the weed was my problem, I didn't think I was an alcoholic.

That night, I did just have one beer. That night, I didn't get piss drunk. That night, I didn't get into a fight with any of my friends or do anything I would regret the next day. That night went smooth. It's not that I was going to go bezerk the first time alcohol touched my lips, it is that I was going to go bezerk in the weeks that followed alcohol first touching my lips. That's exactly what happened.

A few days later, my friends went home for summer break. Because I am Canadian, I was in the United States on a visa and since I was starting my summer internship a few weeks later, I had to get a special visa for that. Since I did not yet have it, I didn't want to risk going back to Canada for the weeks in between school and my internship in case there ended up being a problem with my Visa and I wasn't allowed back into the country. So, I stayed in Madison for two weeks. For the first couple of days that I was there, I had one friend that was there too. Not only did I get back into drinking this week, but I also started doing whippets again for the first time since my freshman year. Because whippets are better for you than weed right? I like to think of myself as the idiot pothead who quit weed for harder drugs because the weed was unhealthy. For those of you that don't know, whippets are an inhalant, nitrous oxide, that you basically hyperventilate on and deprive your brain of oxygen in exchange for an insane euphoric feeling that lasts about 30 seconds. They are used in coffee shops to make whipped cream, so these canister are available at any convenience store. The high would last 30 seconds and there was not much of a come down or after affects, but since it was so short, as soon as it ended, you would want more. This drug was highly dangerous for many different reasons. My logical brain convinced me that it was okay because at least I quit smoking weed.

So yeah, I went from having one beer at a bar to celebrate being done my finals to pounding through boxes of whippets and blacking out with my friend at the bar at night. Within one week. It happens that quickly. To this day, my logic in not touching weed ever again made no sense, but I have been sober from marijuana since that day, April 27, 2022. It is unbelievable how effective replacing one drug for another can be and how it can convince ourselves that we're not addicts because "I quit smoking weed, I'm clearly not an addict."

After my last friend in town left, I resorted to the drinking and whippets alone in a hotel room for two weeks. I would wake up whenever I would wake up, I would go to the grocery store and I would buy a bottle of wine. I would drink until that bottle ran out and then I would go buy more. This was the beginning of what would be a long summer of drinking wine and isolation.

Remember, two weeks before this, I convinced myself I didn't have a drinking problem and that I wasn't an alcoholic. It was news to me, but non-alcoholics don't black out multiple nights in a row and down multiple bottles of wine in a hotel room alone. I thought it was normal.

Finally, I got my visa and my internship was about to start. I got on a bus and header for Minneapolis where I would begin my 3 month summer internship as a facilities engineering intern at Seagate Technology. I did not know a single person in Minneapolis.

When showed up to my internship on my first day, they weren't expecting me. The person who was supposed to be my boss was on paternity leave for the next 8 weeks and nobody had any plans for me to do anything. I spent my summer in that position working on excel sheets for maximum an hour a day, doing walk arounds of the massive plant that they had for another hour and sitting at my desk for the remaining 6 hours of my day watching Netflix. It was the summer of Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul and Seinfeld. All in the span of 3 months. As the summer went on, I started dipping out from work in the middle of the day to go home and watch TV rather than do it sitting at my desk. I did this everyday for weeks. Nobody ever said anything to me.

I would spend my time outside of working hours drinking wine. I would stop at Trader Joe's on my way home and pick up two $3 bottles of wine to keep me company for the night. I would drink them while I watched and gambled on sports, watched TV or shopped for my new obsession, baseball cards.

That summer, I spent 3 months isolated, drinking, gambling and buying sports cards alone in my room. I was counting down the days until the summer ended. I never want to live like that again. I never have to live like that again.