The Dark Side of Cannabis

My struggle with addiction

Phil Colino
Sep 7, 2018 · 12 min read

“I am going to die!” My heart throbs, my breath quickens. “I am going to die!” I repeat. My mind is stuck in an infinite loop, the same sentence replays over and over again, intensifying my symptoms.

“This is a heart attack,” I think, as I stumble onto the empty street. A car, ignoring the frantic waving of my hands, drives past. The next one stops. “Can you take me to the hospital? I think I’m dying!” Undisturbed by the driver’s horrified expression, I rip open the passenger door and let myself fall into the seat. Occupied trying to calm my breathing and directing my thoughts away from my imminent death, I watch his mouth move, but I am unable to hear a word he says.

The ER is only a 5-minute drive away. I see the relief on his face when I get out and slam the door. Inside, someone leads me into a room and helps me onto a gurney. A kind-faced nurse connects me to machines and asks questions. As I tell her about my symptoms, her face darkens. “You’re not going to die and you’re not having a heart attack! Do you know how young you are? It’s just a panic attack; it’ll be over soon” As soon as I comprehend the meaning of her words, my heartbeat starts to normalize; I regain control over my breath and I begin to think clearly again. Cured by the promise of a medically trained person. As I am slowly coming to my senses, she asks the million-dollar question: “Are you taking any drugs?”

Too scared to lie, I tell her everything. About the occasional pill and the irregular bump. But worst of all, about six years of smoking weed every day. She takes the time to listen and when she opens her mouth, she chooses her words very carefully. She tells me about her son-in-law in the same situation. Yearlong stoner. Never had any problem until one day the anxiety attacks started. They went on for a year until he realized he needed to change. And he hadn’t smoked since.

When she leaves to check on other patients, I have time to mull things over. I recount countless failed attempts to quit over the last two years. Every time I told myself I had just smoked my last joint, a friend scored some killer weed that I simply had to try. Every time I decided to only smoke on the weekends, I found myself blazed out on some couch on a Thursday night. Suddenly, one thought creeps up from my subconsciousness and changes my life forever: “If you don’t quit now, you never will!”


At the tender age of fifteen, I smoked my first joint at a friend’s birthday party. Some older guy, with long, unkempt hair and a skater vibe, passed around a spliff and I was lucky enough to score a drag. Of course, I didn’t feel anything that first time. But I was intrigued. Some months later I became part of a group of friends who smoked regularly. We usually met at someone’s house and smoked weed on the balcony while their mom watched TV downstairs. We laughed over stupid YouTube videos and wolfed down copious amounts of candy. Soon we smoked weed at every occasion. This went on for years and even today I don’t think I had a problem then. I was still a straight-A student and genuinely happy.

The trouble started when I broke up with my first long-term girlfriend. Devastated over the loss of my first love, I started finding solace in the only thing that gave me a kick of dopamine, like being with her used to. It was summer break and I had nothing to do but smoke all day with my friends and binge watch Game of Thrones at night,all the while numbing the pain with joints.

Where I’m from, weed is expensive and I barely had an income at the time. Therefore, I started buying in bulk and selling to friends. Pretty soon I spent my days at the park in front of my parents’ house smoking with and selling to people I before never would have talked to. At that time, smoking weed became the only thing that could make me happy, the only thing I could reward myself with and my only purpose. I would come home from university and no matter how hungry I was, no matter what other plans I’d made to do when I got home, I would sit down, roll a joint, light it and forget.

Eventually, I moved out to my own apartment: an isolated room in the courtyard of a tall building, where I could get high and sell in peace. Finally, during one summer I realized I had a problem. Since I smoked up all my earnings, I didn’t have the money to go on vacation and I hadn’t bothered to get a job. So I spent 3 months locked in my apartment, smoking weed and occasionally selling to some friends who were still in town. During that time, that I now view as the low-point of my life, I did nothing but smoke, watch TV, and smoke some more. Besides for grocery shopping (weed counted as a grocery these days) I didn’t leave the house. A classic vicious circle. Infinite boredom, only bearable when high. Gradually, when I let the haze clear for a while, two realizations forced themselves into my consciousness.

First, it became clear that I was in fact addicted to marijuana. I smoked roughly 5 grams a day. Right when I woke up, I contemplated when it would be acceptable to start smoking. Most of the time that point was right then. Once I had started, I was unable to stop until I fell into a foggy stupor at night.

Second, said addiction was ruining my life. I had trapped myself in this apartment, because I was too lazy to get a job and smoked up what little money I had. While I used to be an outgoing person, now the highlight of my days was sitting on my couch with a joint in my hand. All the dreams and ambitions I once had, like having a decent job, caring for a family or doing good in the world, seemed out of reach.

Things needed to change. After careful consideration I decided to buy growing equipment, so I could produce and sell my own weed. Also, I was going to smoke less. Odd combination of resolutions you might think, but I didn’t see the contradiction then. It all made sense. Growing, I would collect the full profit margin instead of the roughly one fifth of the sales price, I added onto the product I bought. Besides, I would smoke less, so I could sell more. All my financial problems were solved. As for the dreams and ambitions, those would sort themselves out when I wasn’t blazed out all the time.

The first part went smoothly. I borrowed some money from a friend, read up on the art of growing weed and ordered equipment on the internet. Suddenly, I had a new hobby which for the most part didn’t involve smoking weed. I cared for my “Ladies”, as I called them, with unprecedented dedication. And when there was nothing more to tend to, I simply admired them for hours in the golden glow of the sodium-vapor lamp.

The rest of the plan was more difficult. Wanting to prolong the time I spent sober, I tried to set rules, restricting when and how much I could smoke. Start as late in the day as possible, smoke only on weekends or try to quit for weeks at a time. No matter the restriction, I would eventually fail to carry it out, making up excuses for why in this instance it was okay to give in.

In the periods I was succeeding, I was faced with a question that had eluded me for a long time: What did “normal” people do all day? And what was I to do with all that time I wasn’t stoned? For years my only hobby had been smoking weed. Being sober felt weird. Since my stoned waking hours used to outweigh the sober ones by far, that state of being had become normal. As I was trying to adjust to my new-found clarity, I was looking for ways to occupy my mind, picking up old hobbies like reading or running.

As time passed, I improved at reducing my dosage. For a while, a friend and I would buy 2 grams together, which would last us for the week. But deep inside I knew it wasn’t enough. Keeping the consumption of an addictive substance to a minimum is terribly difficult. It leads to an endless amount of decisions about when and where to consume. However, there are only so many decisions a person can make before it gets exhausting. On top of that, each of these micro-decisions has to be made with serious effort and dedication. That level of self-control and willpower is impossible to sustain long-term; there is only so much strength one can muster. The easier and more sustainable route is to decide to quit completely and to spend all one’s resources enforcing this decision. This way, new habits can form over time and the initially complex task of not consuming becomes natural, requiring less effort, until it eventually becomes effortless.

I realized I would never be completely free if I continued to smoke regularly. However, I couldn’t let go. I loved smoking so much. I’d spent my whole adolescent and adult life dedicated to it; it was the only life I knew. Therefore, I kept smoking.

At that point, my subconsciousness intervened, altering the way I felt about weed. I suddenly didn’t enjoy the feeling of being high anymore. Whereas before, I could relax and let go of everything that bothered me, now there was only agony. My mind kept racing, relentlessly shooting thoughts into my consciousness. Before, I slept like a baby when high, but now I kept rolling around in bed because when all other senses didn’t deliver input, my mind went into overdrive, torturing me with negative thoughts. This climaxed in a sensation I named “burning brain,” where I literally felt like the outside of my brain, right beneath the skull, was on fire. To avoid this, I didn’t smoke right before going to bed, but I kept smoking.

More physical sensations appeared. For months I was unable to sleep on my left side, because if I had smoked at some point during the day, my heart would be pounding out of my chest and the feeling of lying on my pumping heart was so discomforting, it was impossible to rest. I solved this by only sleeping on my right side, but of course, I kept smoking.

The mind knows things before they are aware to the conscious self. When we make a realization, it is not the discovery of something new, but a re-found truth, something we have known all along. Likewise, my subconsciousness knew I was unhappy with my life, myself and my addiction. However, its means of communication with the conscious self are limited and obscure. By creating physical and mental symptoms that I’d never experienced or even heard of before, it was telling me the only reasonable course of action: to quit the shit forever. I heard, but didn’t listen, because I kept smoking.

On the day of my anxiety attack, I went to the lake with some friends. We had a good time swimming, chilling and talking when a friend asked if I’d brought some weed. I had recently harvested a batch that was almost completely sold, save for my own personal supply. So, I rolled a joint, lit it, took a couple of puffs, passed it and didn’t accept it when it came back around. My usual symptoms had instantly set in: my heart beat heavily and my mind raced. Since I was with my friends, there were plenty of distractions, and I was able to stay focused; I avoided immersing myself in the unpleasant sensations. My panic attack only started to full-on roll out, when my friend dropped me off at my university, from where I had planned to walk home.


When I returned from the hospital, I was dedicated. This time would be different. Finally, I had made the decision to quit completely, so now I could focus on achieving this goal. And weirdly enough, it worked. I simply stopped smoking weed. Of course, the urge was still there. Dormant most of the time, it would wait for the perfect moment to strike: watching Netflix on my computer (I’d never watched movies sober), hanging in the apartment of a friend, where we used to smoke until we fell asleep or at parties where that sweet smell would linger in the air. But I had found ways to overcome my cravings. From the hospital I brought a diagnosis: a piece of paper, signed by a doctor, containing my symptoms, blood work and as treatment a recommendation to quit smoking weed. Also, I’d kept a small amount of my last harvest. Every time I wanted to roll that up and light it, I read said piece of paper first. And every time the urge dissolved.

In the beginning, I tried to avoid my friends, spending my free time reading or working out, for fear they would cause me to relapse. And true enough, the hardest part was the social situation, where it was normal to smoke weed. To say “no” every time a joint was offered. To explain why I wasn’t smoking. To fight the desire to participate in those situations. But eventually, my friends stopped offering and the wish to smoke faded. Today I rarely ever get these urges. And when they come, I simply wait them out, because I know they will pass.

After the day in the hospital, I changed every aspect of my life. In the morning, right when I woke up, I didn’t feel dizzy anymore; I did not need hours to wake up completely. Now I could be alert within a reasonable time. Also, I was astonished by the amount of work I was able to achieve when I didn’t invest my life’s energy in the creation and destruction of joints. I started working part-time, saving up money for travelling and finished university at the same time. Even at night I felt more like myself. Gone were the days when I spent parties glued to the couch because I was too high to move. Now I could socialize all night and when my stoner friends were unable to form a sensible sentence, I could still talk to everyone and my dating and sex life improved a great deal because of it.

But of course, there were setbacks. One of the hardest parts was seeing how some friendships that I maintained and cherished for years simply dissolved. A lot of my friendships at the time were centered around the ritualized consumption of cannabis. When that wasn’t part of the equation anymore, some people felt uncomfortable or even unable to communicate with me. So, we started hanging out less and less until ultimately there was no contact whatsoever. I consoled myself saying that these relationships weren’t healthy in the first place and change was inevitable, but still it hurt. The friendships I did maintain, became stronger. Many good friends respected or even admired my decision and talking about this added a deeper layer to our friendship.

One might think that I would condemn cannabis or even advocate for its continued criminalization. On the contrary, I believe that with cannabis, just as with any other drug, responsible consumption is possible. The responsible consumer enjoys the drug but doesn’t get carried away. He uses to enhance pleasurable moments, but never lets it become the sole source of pleasure. He controls the drug, instead of being controlled by it. Just because I failed to be such a consumer does not mean others shouldn’t be able to enjoy the many medical and recreational powers this plant possesses. As long as one is happy with his life and his consumption, there is no need to worry. However, along with legalization and destigmatisation, there is a need for education concerning the dangers of using drugs, as well as a safety net, with support groups or rehabilitation centers when said education has failed.

Now, as I am approaching the one-year mark of my abstinence, I am filled with gratitude for a nameless nurse, who found the right words at the right time, and my own strength in breaking out of my self-incarceration. In the past year, I found my way back towards the dreams and ambitions I once thought out of reach. I graduated university and found a career path I want to pursue. Stepping out of my comfort zone in a five-month solo backpacking trip, I found sides of myself I never knew I had. On top of that, I discovered fresh love and I am beyond excited to spend the next adventurous chapter of my life with her.

I don’t believe any of those things would have happened, had I not made that step into an unknown cannabis-free future.

Phil Colino

Written by

Releasing the content of my cluttered mind.

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