“It’s No Big Deal:” My Personal Experience with Cannabis

Written by a senior at CU Boulder.

Three years ago, I started my first semester at the University of Colorado Boulder. Colorado was the first state to legalize marijuana for adult recreational use. So, you can imagine how popular it is here.

Most people who I met smoked weed. It truly was, no big deal. I saw the casual attitudes towards marijuana, and I saw my friends imbibe regularly, seemingly without consequences. I was curious, so when one of my friends offered me a joint, I partook for the first time in my life. And yeah, it was no big deal. I felt happy and chill, this was great; I could understand now why people liked it so much.

But here is what they don’t tell you: Everyone’s tolerance for weed is different. Every form of consuming weed will affect you differently. The only way to figure out how weed will affect you is by trying it. It’s a trial and error process, and no one talks about the errors.

I didn’t partake regularly, but I thought getting high was fun. At this point, I had only ever smoked weed, but edibles sounded like a great alternative. Smoking made me cough and it was hard to do inconspicuously; I was under 21, and did not want to get caught. My friend gave me her dealer’s number and I decided to buy edibles off him. The movies depict dealers as a shady guy in a hoodie, selling hard drugs on a backstreet. My dealer was a fellow college student who handed me a bar of chocolate inside his dorm. I think most people would feel at ease with this arrangement and not think twice about what they were doing.

No one tells you this about edibles but the dosing is very finicky. The only way to know exactly how much weed you are consuming is to purchase edibles at a dispensary where it is highly regulated. However, that’s expensive and I couldn’t stroll into a dispensary with an ID that did not say I was 21. My friend had been buying from this guy for months and nothing bad had ever happened to her, so I wasn’t worried.

But here’s the thing about chocolate, or brownies, or any home-made edible: the distribution of weed is not guaranteed to be even. I didn’t know this, and none of my friends had ever warned me about this; they probably didn’t know either. Even if they did, so what if you consume an extra 10mg? You’ll just have a better time, no? And maybe that’s true for some people, but again, there’s no way to gauge your tolerance without just trying it. And your tolerance for smoking weed vs. your tolerance to consuming it in the form of edibles is different. What I’m trying to say is that you can be as cautious as you’d like, but you can’t control your genetics, and if you have a low tolerance, you will have a very bad experience despite all your precautions.

Well, I am one of those people. I have an extremely low tolerance for weed. The smallest amount will get me high. The thing with smoking, is that you feel the effects very quickly, and it’s easy to cut yourself off. It can take about an hour to feel the effects of an edible, and by then, there’s no way to get it out of your system. The chocolate bar I bought contained 100mg of marijuana and had 10 squares, 10mg per square. 10mg is a fairly small dose, so I wasn't worried.

One weekend, I decided to try it. I had one square and it was fine. I didn’t get very high but it was just a chill night. Now, I truly had no fear. The second time I had a square will hopefully remain the worst experience of my life, because I don’t know if I could survive something worse. I can only guess, but I don’t believe the weed was distributed evenly throughout the chocolate bar. I have no idea how many mg were in either of those doses. All I know was that the first dose must have been less than 10mg because I really didn’t feel high at all. And the second dose must have been more than 10mg, how much more? Couldn’t tell you, which makes the whole thing scarier.

You know what’s something else that’s not talked about? Weed is a hallucinogenic. Most people won’t have a psychedelic experience, but how can you be certain that you’re most people?

My experience with that second edible would be considered, “greening out,” which is clinically an overdose on marijuana. It’s not fatal, but it is awful. That night started out with me feeling happy and giggly. But I began to feel very uncomfortable, much too warm, which was the first sign that I was about to green out. It started with tremors up my whole body, then nausea. My mouth was so dry; my eyes were burning. I sat on my dorm room’s floor with a trash bag and began to dry heave. Anything I managed to throw up was just stomach acid, the edible was long gone. I began to hallucinate. There was metal in my throat, climbing up to my brain. Pushing on it, pushing on my eyes. Any second, it was going to pierce my brain and I would die, or it would poke my eyes out and then I would die. I could hear a train outside my window. If only I could stand up, if only I could manage to walk. I could go lay down on those train tracks and the train would kill me, and I wouldn’t have to suffer anymore. This lasted for six hours.

I was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and eventually schizoaffective disorder. I didn’t know I had a genetic predisposition for developing these disorders and I didn’t know that partaking in any hallucinogenic such as weed, could cause me to develop these disorders due to my genetics. I didn’t know that I had already been experiencing symptoms of bipolar disorder before I had even started smoking weed. I didn’t know that it was making my symptoms worse. There is no careful way to go about consuming weed. You won’t know how it affects you until you try it. I hope that if you are over 21 and choose to try it, you are with people you trust, and you verify that your weed is from a dispensary.

To learn more about cannabis and mental health, visit the Positive Paths Cannabis Factcheck website.