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pot doesn't exist any more

Someone posted on reddit the following:

Oh boy, weed sure was fun, too bad it doesn’t exist anymore, right?

2 weeks in after a 1 day relapse after 3 months sober.

Gettings cravings and experimenting with just telling myself weed is not even a fucking thing. It doesn’t exist. If it doesn’t exist, what am I gonna do instead? There is no option to use something that doesn’t exist. Gotta do something else then. Oh well.

Requires a fair amount of self-gaslighting 😅 but who knows, maybe it might help you too? It’s not like we’re not good at lying to ourselves, might as well use it for good.

I responded with this:

I admire the spirit. I hope that it works for you.

When I first read your headline, I had a momentary jolt of that what you describe is literally true. Weed, as I knew it in my youth, essentially doesn’t exist any more. For real. In those days, it was some brown stuff that came in sandwich baggies that were rolled up and you had to lick the edge to get it to stay closed as you rolled it up. It came with big stems and lots of seeds. You had to break it up with your fingers, usually on a record album sleeve, before you could roll it it up into a joint or smoke it in a bong. Nobody knew the details of sativa, indica or hybrid back then, let alone the vast array of names we know now. The basic difference was cost and a little bit stronger. If you found someone who grew it, was sativa had narrow leaves and indical had shorter, fatter leaves.

We got pretty high - there were essentially 2 main kinds but there were other names. Most of it was “columbian”m but it probably mostly came from Mexico. If you were lucky, some folks had something callad “Hawaiian” which was quite a bit stronger but wasn’t around much. There were legendary names like Acapulco Gold, Panama Red, “Thai stick” which was allegedly brought back by our brothers. uncles, friends and cousins who fought in Vietnam. Occasionally we heard of something exotic called “sinsemilla”, which was notable by the fact it had no seeds, but it was pretty rare.

Very rarely/occasionally, there was hash. It usually existed in quantites of single digit grams most of the time. It was basically a lot like bubble hash, crumbly and sticky. You either broke it up into a powder and put it on top of a bowl, mixed in your joint, or did “hash under glass”, where you stuck a needle into a cork, put a little bit of the hash on the end of it. Set that on the counter, have a glass. You’d torch the hash and put the glass over it, and it would fill the glass with smoke. You’d take a hit from from the edge of the table and get sent way high really quickly. many years later I learned of hot knives, which involved the kitchen stove and a couple of butter knives and a toilet paper roll, which was the closest thing to dabbing as we know it now.

I only sawa hash oil once in the 1980s. We smoked it in a glass pipe and it was one of the harshest things I ever put into my lungs.

To get it, you had to know a “dude”: some sketchy friend of a friend, usually, who would have basically 2 kinds to choose from: he would have the Columbian which was $40/oz, $20/half, $10 “dime bag” or “nickle bag” which was essentially just a couple of buds and some shake. You didn’t buy shake or bud separately, it all came in that baggie mixed up. Older folks referred to something called a “lid” which was measured by using the lid from a jar. Then he’d have something a little bit nicer, still brown usually. When you completed the transaction, you were supposed to smoke a bowl with him (or her) as a kind of tip.

We measured the weight using these little metal hanging thingies that you can still find at a head shop sometimes. Only a few people had scales, and they were never electronic. Some had a triple beam balance if they were lucky, you know, the kind you used in chemistry class. At one point I had one of those that I got from a friend and it had a thin layer or resin all over it. I ended up giving it to a friend’s kid for a birthday party, not revealing what it was usually used for but showed her how to weigh various things, all science-like. I have one of those even now that I picked up from a thrift store.

That doesn’t exist any more.

Now you don’t need a dude in many/most places, there’s a dispensary on the corner. When you want to buy buds, you get just buds, or you can buy just shake. No one sees seeds any more, and the stuff you get from the place, while having many different name are almost all stronger than anything that you got from a dude. The dispensaries for a while were run by some old hippies for a while but now they’re mosly chains of branded stores took it over and consolidated it into something corporate. Wall street has pot stock mutual funds.

There’s all the different names of extracts: shatter, wax, etc. The pot today is almost a whole different beast. It’s not the weed of old. The new stuff is so strong that people get addicted to it, with all of the physical effects we see people describe here. None of that stuff happened with that old brown stuff. If you couldn’t find any, you might have saved some resin from cleaning your pipes and you’d smoke it when you had nothing else around, buit otherwise you just went without until the “dude” got som more. In the old days, nobody believed you could be addicted to pot, it was “just weed”.

But yeah, pot doesn’t exist any more. What is out there, just a short drive or walk away, is a whole different animal. I don’t know what word you might want to distinguish the new world as, but it is miles away from pot as we knew it.

Now, if you’re in the struggle that people on this sub are engaged in, you gotta turn a blind eye to the little places, still sometimes just out of the city’s regulation, just outside of town. But They’re for other people.

They don’t exist for you any more.