Me and Marijuana

Hal M. Brown
4 min readMay 23, 2023

This is meant to accompany my story Florida AG wants to outlaw weird orgies, wild weed parties, and unleashed passion. I blogged about the Florida attorney general attempting to block the ballot initative to legalize marijuana in her state.

Despite how I looked in college at Michigan State in 1969, I wasn’t a pothead. The only time I ever smoked marijuana was when I was briefly a psychology graduate student at the University of Oklahoma. This was before I went back to Michigan State to get my MSW degree in clinical social work.

In Oklahoma I was friends with a group of students and others in their early twenties who smoked pot all the time. I suppose you could call them hippies. Some of them also took LSD. Once a friend saw me walking home from an early morning class and he gave me a ride home on his motorcyle. He told me that he’d just dropped acid but was pretty sure he could get me home before it kicked in. Thankfully both of us got home safely.

Since I never smoked cigarettes, smoking pot was difficult because I had trouble inhaling and holding the smoke in my lungs. I did manage to do this a few times and I did get high. I didn’t particularly like the way pot made me feel all the time. Sometimes it led to my experiencing music more intensely and colors more radiantly.

What made me quit altogether was an experience of having what might be called a bad trip if I was on a psychedlic. I was smoking at home by myself and I found myself unable to control where my thoughts went and at times I thought I was hallunicating. I became very anxious and called my pot smoking friends and some of them came to my house and stayed with me and reassured me until the effects wore off. I later wondered if there was something more than just cannabis in what I was smoking.

Marijuana of course was illegal in Oklahoma at the time and if any of us was caught with it we could have been sent to prison, or at least this is what everyone thought.

Once when I drove from Oklahoma to visit my hippie friends who had moved to St. Louis I had a graduate student friend go to my house to take care of my cat. Once she left the key inside and called the police who got into the house through the bathroom window and opened the door for her. When I got home she told me about this as a breathed a sign of relief because I had a small amount of marijuana in the medicine cabinet.

Even in 2014 people caught with marijuana could get entagled with the law even if you didn’t end up in jail:

Smoke a joint on your porch in Denver and you face no legal consequence. Get caught doing it twice in Oklahoma City and the law says you could go to prison for up to 10 years.

Oklahoma has some of the strictest marijuana-possession laws in the nation, but the reality is few people convicted only of possession find themselves serving time, law enforcement officials, prosecutors and defense attorneys say.

“There are a lot of people who surely believe prisons are full of marijuana possession cases,” Oklahoma County Assistant District Attorney Scott Rowland said. “It’s not true. What’s true, instead, is you have to work very hard to go to prison on drug possession cases in Oklahoma, period.” Reference.

In 2018 Oklahoma legalized medical marijuna.

In 2015 recreational use of marijuana became legal in Oregon where I live. Currently in the suburbs of Portland you can hardly drive two blocks before seeing a pot store. Consider:

There are more than 660 weed dispensaries in Oregon, which equals 16.5 weed dispensaries per 100,000 residents. For context, McDonald’s has a capita of 4.0 restaurants per 100,000 residents. Reference.

When recreational marijuana became legal here I tried edibles which were had mostly CBD which relaxes you and has little THC which is the main chemical which gets you high.

I found that the effects of these edibles varied with some seemingly making me feel relaxed at times, but probably because of the high amount of THC, some made me experience a sensation I didn’t like. At times my mind would race and I’d experience what I could describe as unpleasant trip with vivid unrelated images floating through my mind.

I didn’t experience anxiety because I knew what was causing this. I just let the effects wear off. This took as long as four hours. I decided there were far better ways for feel relaxed than using a drug.

I was never a drinker although perhaps once a week I’d have one beer or one glass of wine usually when eating out. I never partularly liked how even this small amount of alcohol made me feel so about two years ago I decided just to stop drinking altogther.

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Hal M. Brown

From New York to Michigan to Massachusetts and finally to Portland, Oregon taking my opinions and two Westie dogs, now sadly departed, and nothing else with me.