On Marijuana

As a teacher, I often find myself thinking to my students, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

The first time I smoked weed, I was fifteen years old, hanging out at my friend’s party. Her parents were out of town for the weekend and she had a fully-stocked kitchen and a hot tub. Perfect party recipe. Two of my guy friends packed a bowl and taught me how to smoke. And I smoked and smoked, bowl after bowl. Because, you know that first time you’re high, you don’t realize you’re high. Afterwards, my guy friends who’d supplied the goods encouraged me to take off my top. That seemed like a great idea, too. Hanging out in my undies felt nice and free. I felt special upon receiving the compliment that I “had a nice rack.”

Now, having spent years in a relationship with a daily smoker, I have mixed feelings about marijuana use. I have plenty of friends and family who smoke. Yet, there is nothing I hate more than a “weed super-nerd.” You know the type: can reel off the specs of a particularly chronic harvest of herb, knows precisely how to calculate the desired air pressure in a water bong, and the chemical reaction involved in how THC affects the body. These weed super-nerds are fantastic at baking brownies, and understand precisely how the THC separates from the plant and will bond to the nearest fat molecules (such as butter) at high temperatures. This extensive knowledge and fascination with marijuana is obsessive—fanatical, and strikes me as particularly pathetic. Please do not worship at the shrine of weed. It’s just a plant, a drug, like any other.

Thus, I was particularly dismayed by a recent poem written by my student. In my sophomore classes, we have been reading and writing poetry in different forms. We study poets’ use of figurative language, sensory detail and concrete imagery, and try to employ these techniques in our own writing. Today’s lesson was the ode. Jake turned in a poem titled “Ode to Grapes”:

They taste so good
whenever I eat them.
Some are sweet
others are sour.
The green ones are
as green as a $100 bill.
and the purple ones are
like Barney.
It’s even better
to eat them both at the same time.
I feel like I’m on a cloud when I eat them.
The smell is so strong
you can smell them from a mile away.
The fragrance is one
of a kind.

While reading this poem, I was initially pleased that Jake included simile and detail appealing to the senses of sight, touch, and smell. But wait, I seemed to remember my ex telling me “grapes” was slang for purple weed. Urban Dictionary confirmed my suspicions. I like the fruit grapes pretty well myself, but I’ve certainly never enjoyed them so much I felt like I was on a cloud, and I wouldn’t say their smell is particularly strong. I’ve got a weed super-nerd for a student! So devoted is he to pot that he has written an ode singing its praises.

My first reaction was one of annoyance: he thinks he can get away with this and pull one over on me! He thinks he can turn in a poem about weed for credit and I won’t even realize! I’ll set him straight. However, as I told this story to more and more people, most didn’t seem to know that “grapes” is a euphemism for purple marijuana. Turns out this is pretty much an insider, street term. I realized that if I don’t handle this situation carefully, I could come out looking like the stoner. If I confront my student the wrong way, I could come off as knowing too much about weed and its related terminology.

I struggle to define what my student has done wrong, and what an appropriate consequence should be. Of course, marijuana is an illegal substance and my school’s line is one of zero tolerance. But that’s not me, and I have to teach in a way that encourages my students to make healthy decisions and think for themselves, yet without undermining my school’s policies.

I believe weed should be legalized. It is one of the biggest sources of revenue for the state of California, but right now this is all under the table and uncontrolled. College students regularly drink themselves to death, since somehow alcohol consumption has become a competitive sport and the ability to imbibe copious amounts has become a point of pride among youth. Alcohol-related car accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the country, and drinking causes belligerence in many and quite violent bar fights. I’ve never known anyone to die of a marijuana overdose, and I’ve yet to meet a belligerent stoner.

However, this is not to say that smoking weed is particularly healthy. Certainly, inhaling smoke and carbon monoxide is damaging to the lungs, THC impairs judgment and clouds the mind, and marijuana has been proven to cause short term memory loss. I will never buy the bullshit line, “I’m a better driver when I’m high,” because weed is a depressant, slowing the nervous system, potentially impairing vision and slowing one’s response time and ability to think clearly. Finally, I have seen plenty of friends become psychologically dependent upon marijuana, perhaps even physiologically addicted.

Yet, cigarettes, alcohol, and coffee remain legal substances. In America, the land of the free and home of the brave, one is free to drink oneself to death, perhaps even encouraged to eat oneself to death (thanks to the government’s support of an agricultural industry that relies on our continued consumption of processed foods). Shouldn’t we have the right to smoke ourselves to death, if we so choose?

So where does that leave me? Here’s what I know: Many friends and I smoked weed throughout high school, and for us it was not a gateway drug. We were bound for success and did not have addictive personalities. We knew how to handle ourselves. However, many people I know have also pissed away their potential smoking weed, literally playing out the lines of the song by Afroman: “I was gonna go to class before I got high/
I coulda cheated and I coulda passed/ but I got high/
I am taking it next semester and I know why/
- cause I got high.” Jake is in danger of doing just that. A strong writer and the rare student who enjoys reading outside of class, Jake never does his homework and will probably squeak by with a D this semester. Is it because he gets high? Maybe. My responsibility as his teacher is to help him learn as much as possible and help him make healthy decisions. Right now, weed isn’t looking like the healthiest choice for him.