It seems as you get through your high school years into college everyone smokes weed, you’re almost a social outcast if you didn’t smoke at least once in your life. Sure, it’s "fun" and "cool" to do when you’re in your teens and early 20s, but what does it really do for you? Millions will argue the “benefits” to smoking weed, using medical treatment as their biggest defense, but what no one talks about are the negatives to the plant everyone seems to inhale. “It’s not addictive.” Yes, it is. “It doesn’t interfere with daily functioning.” Yes, it does. Surely many of you would argue with me and chalk me up to some privy girl trying to find a reason to hate the drug, but how many of you can say you grew up in a smoker’s haze?
I spent almost sixteen years of my life trapped in the suffocating cloud of my father’s addiction. I grew up surrounded by the smell of a green plant and my mother’s perfume he used to the mask the smell, I grew up to the thought of my father “rolling his own cigars” and being told to stay out of his dresser draw. I grew up listening to two hour long lectures after getting in trouble, knowing that when my dad’s anger was triggered he’d walk off with one of those “cigars” and come back in a better mood. It wasn’t until I got into my teen years that I drew the conspiracy of my dad being a marijuana smoker. Always reeking of a smell I could only compare to a skunk, always smoking those same “cigars” that was too thin to be an actual cigar and burned too fast. I watched the rage grow more and more violent. Down to a science, my sister and I could predict when he would explode: every Sunday. I grew up locking myself in a bathroom for hours while my dad would rip through the house and leave with one of his “cigars”. Until it all changed.
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My dad was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for possession of marijuana on August 5, 2011. Cops raided my house like it was a drug den, coming up with little to nothing while scattering objects across my lawn. They sold a story to the local news with false statements and allegations and, in my small little hometown, this “drug sting” was the biggest thing the local police could get. And in sheer embarrassment and anger, I started my junior year of high school knowing that everyone, even the school’s therapist that I saw to help cope, “knew” my dad was a “drug dealer."
I went through a period of hating my father, years of struggling and blame, but as the years of sobriety rolled in, I noticed something. The anger issues my dad claimed were the reasons behind his smoking disappears. He wasn’t angry or irrational, he was calm and expressive. My dad gained almost 70 pounds because he said he ate every time he felt like smoking, the times I knew him to leave the house to smoke, he would smoke an extra cigarette or eat or even check his phone. I could slowly see him replacing the routine of lighting up to other habits. His two hour long lectures turned into short, concise sentences. I started to have discussions with my father about his drug addiction and he told me very seriously that the mental addiction of weed wasn’t just a joke people made, it was real. He explained how at first it was just for fun, then became a habit, until he convinced himself that he needed it and became mentally dependent and addicted. The last five years I have been introduced to a new man as a father, the hazy cloud that constricted him from being the man he always was has lifted.
So keep telling yourself there’s no such thing as a weed addiction, I know where I stand on the matter.
