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A long rant about my drug use on discord

September 11, 2023

A long rant about my drug use on discord

A young man invited me to his discord to talk about recovery around pot. Initially I noticed that some of the conversation was in a Germanic language (I learned Dutch later) and I was hesitant. I decided to go for it, and type out my story. Edited lightly for typos and relevance.

Evilbob93
I’m 61M, been smoking pot since I was 17 in 1979. Been pretty much a daily smoker since my mid 20s.i had a grow room for many years so I could smoke for “free” except for the power bill. i live in Colorado, USA, and we had a ballot initiative last November called Proposition122 in which we decided to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms, ibogaine, and non-peyote mescaline. I started growing mushrooms in my home the previous summer (before it was legalized) but didn’t have much success until just around the time of the election.

As I started microdosing, a strange thing happened. I would get to my garage to smoke a bowl, and I would find myself looking at the bowl and deciding in the moment that maybe I don’t want to smoke. This was completely uncharacteristic behavior for me. I have always been the person who you could be pretty sure had some weed with him and would love to share it with you. This continued for the next few months. More and more times where I would normally have smoked a bowl, like just before bed, I would decide not to bother: it was cold out in the garage. I got into the habit of not smoking in the house several years ago, I just adopted the same things in my current house.

I had a plan to go to a warehouse techno party at the end of February. I had noticed that my microdosing seemed to interfere with my ability to have a satisfying recreational dose, so I stopped smoking and taking mushrooms rom the beginning of February.
At the party, I took ar big dose of tea, and managed to stay away from the room where people were smoking pot. I had a great time.
after the party, I decided to continue abstaining from pot for a few more weeks.
During April, I was on a program that had me supposed to do a live stream each day. I was doing well enough but I started smoking again and, long story short, I ended up not completing the program.
I have been on and off of smoking since then.
Today I have been, other than two days a few weeks ago, abstinent from smoking pot.
Great, right? well. no, given my history, this is the part that I get cocky. I forget what led me to decide to quit and I start to entertain the idea that maybe I could have just one.
sure, what would it hurt?
and then I spend the next several months or years in a haze again
So now I am in a space where I am looking for places I can chat more in real time. I have been very active in recent months on r/leaves and more recently r/petioles
I see people post things like “i’m 24, i’ve been smoking every day for the last few years and I feel like I am wasting my life” and I find myself thinking “y’all are adorable” … very condescending, I know
leaves is very supportive, but there are a couple of rules that I chafe at, specifically they dont want to hear about other drug use. Maybe that is the case here, I suppose I’ll find out soon enough, but it if twas not for the mushroom tea I would not be here today
well now you know the rough outlines of my story, I hope that I am a food fit here and that we can chat on occasion.
Kradiac
yeah I can imagine it feels very unfamiliar to have such a feeling after so much days of smoking. What made you move to microdosing, was it your goal to change the daily smoking back then?
sounds like progress, or how did you experience those moments?
how did you like the parties on shrooms? I dont have personal experience with that one. Before you did parties only on weed or like weed/ alcohol mixtures?
you enrolled into the program bc you knew that april would be more difficult month? or what was your thoughts when going in?
so what was the idea or goal behind quitting or lessening in the first place? Its difficult for me as i’ve only tried a few things in my life so far but getting from your stories you have lived and tried quite a bit of things. Though, it seems at some point in every system you’ve you come to realize that the benefit of quitting doesn’t weigh enough anymore to keep you going. I believe this to be a very interesting part of your life stories! I’ve created a system for myself but only been busy or working on for a 1+ year or so. So i’m also curious for myself in what extent I will challenge this system in the future
whats r/petioles about?
mmh I feel that, ive recently been very active too on reddit (especially during my holidays). I like the r/leaves, r/selfdevelopment, r/decidingtobebetter, r/productivity and r/addiction. Some others too but those are the ones that I like to talk with people the most, feels like talking to real humans on the internet instead of upvote farmers.
sometimes I get that feeling too when im seeing a 18y old posting something, but then I also feel very privileged bc I can help this guy who is already thinking and doing more than I was back then. Help them in a real way by sharing my experiences and what worked and didnt work for me. So perhaps the message I want to convey to you here is that its less important to actually have the answer for you or him/ her/ …, but more important to talk about it and share experiences.

there are no real rules or things you can or cannot talk about. Presumably at some point we might have to think about them, but for now im just focuses on having conversations and discussions about these difficult topics. I think r/addiction could also be a very good one for you, a lot of ‘heavier’ stories or addictions going on there. I always feel a bit ‘outclassed’ as i’m only dealing with a weed addiction.
we definitely can my friend! Always welcome to chat here with me or others if they feel like it. None should feel pressured to talk about these things, its all open conversation that others can follow and perhaps join in at some point in the convo.
I believe you hold a lot of value and experience that we can learn from, not to appraise you too much but you also made me think about what I want to do with this discord channel
so the mushroom tea did do something real already and is not just a thought, there is already some manifestation 🙂
I’ma look for some others im talking with privately and see if they are interested in joining this channel too now that I feel like we can make something real of it
I’m really glad to hear your story my friend, we all have difficulties and ideas of how we want to tackle them. So I find it very interesting to hear about your shroom path, as i’ve not delved into that one too deep (yet) 😄
.

Evilbob93
I didn’t know what to expect from microdosing. It’s had a lot of buzz, people trying it, interesting things happening Sometimes relief from depression, sometimes they decide to do things like engage with their hobbies.. I didn’t know what to expect. What happened was I had been on an app for assisting with joint pain that I just wasn’t getting any traction with, I had done the thing about 3 times in three weeks. Once I started microdosing, I was ever day for several months, in addition to the sudden ambivalence about smoking.

My initial moments of deciding to forego were kind of .. not sure the word. like who did that? I have always been the guy in the room who has some dope on him and sure, lets got ouside and burn one. Nobody else want to? no problem, i’ll go burn one myself if it’s been an hour or so and I can get away with it.

Rave-type parties have almost always been LSD or mushrooms or ecstasy and of course, smoking weed kind of events. I hadn’t been to one in many years. About 20 years ago, when I was in my late 30s, early 40s, I went to house parties and such about every week. Always smoking pot, and if there were other party favors, I was all over them. Was never into the white powder types of things. Alcohol maybe but not my main driver. I decided in my late 20s early 30s I was drinking too much and did’t particularly like it, decided that I was going to specialze in smoking weed, and did so. Many times and in quantity.

The thing in April was called Live Every Day in April and was designed to make you comfortable doing live things on Facebook or other platforms. I didn’t find out about it until about the 2nd of April because a friend told me about it. I caught up and was doing pretty good, but at one point I fell off the abstinance. I did one session with my eyes a bit red, decided I didn’t like the look so then I was trying to do it when I wasn’t smoking, but of course, once I start smoking it’s back on the bus, morning noon and night and before bed. It’s been a long time since I woke up at 3 am, burned one and went back to bed, but that’s happened on occasion. Eventually it became hard to fit a live thing around my constant smoking, and I missed a day, then another. tried to get caught up but ultimately I missed the last half dozen days.

I started having “nah” moments starting in about October. Once in a while, i’d decide maybe not now. Those happened more and more often and I started speculating on what if I stopped altogether. Curioslty, mostly. One insidiious piece of my psyche that manifested particularly when I smoked cigarettes is I liked the change in global state. That is, when I would quit for a few days, it felt good to breath a little easier, not cough up brown hunks into the sink in the morning and I would feel a little clearer, but then the first cigarette or two when I fell back was (almost) like startiing over. The first cigarette after an abstinence is awesome. by the 5th it’s like shit, i’m back on this thing.. and it would be a while before I got up the initiative to quit again.
As I said, the decision to quit at the beginning of February was coincidental to quitting the microdosing as well. I stopped the microdosing because I had noticed that the microdose gave me a tolerance so that when I wanted to have more like a recreational dose, I didnt get the experience I was hoping for. By abstaining from mushrooms for 3 weeks, I would get the maximum effect from what I took for the party. Quitting pot at the same time was just more of “nah” extended. The first few days are usually difficult, but I have found in my experiments with magic mushrooms that they can disrupt the pot thing. between February and now I have probably quit and unquit a half dozen times. I experimented with things. One thing I learned is that if I have been off the bus, gummies before I go to bed don’t give me much of a craving. Not zero, but not enough to send me running to the dispensary. Dabs kind of the same - they’re kind of strong, harsh on the lungs and if I am doing it on my own in a banger/bong thing, I take as big a hit as I could and the vapor is still going into the air. Wasteful! and the actual effect, well I think there is something lost in the process of extraction to the wax I would get, something that was still there when I smoked bud.
Evilbob93 — Today at 8:53 PM
When I went to the party, I took a rather large dose of mushrooms just as I got to the parking lot. When you do tea, it’s hard to translate to how many grams you took, but I calculate I took somehing on the order of 9 grams or so. Some would call that a “heroic dose” but I would say it was pretty intense, but I didn’t go off into magical lands, meet elves and fairies and get taught the Meaning of All Things. I was and still am looking for a voice that spoke to me once in about 2003 or so. That’s another story, but to me, there is a mushroom spirit who has spoken to me more than once, and I would like to hear it again.
At the party, I ended up surfacing and facing some kind of foundational stuff, like my parents’ possible racism. I had a couple of friends with me, guys in their 20s, who took a smaller amount than me, and were kind of watching out for me. At 4 am or so, I ended up wailing my eyes out into my friend hugging me and I said I was ready to go home. We went to his place and I was on FIRE, gave about a 2-3 hour rant in which we talked about racisim, classism, the Illuminati, Enochian spirits and all kind of things. and then I went home, couldn’t sleep really until sundown, went to work the next day.
Evilbob93 — Today at 8:59 PM
I get that, and I believe I have so far been more supportive than condescending in what I actually type. The “adorable” and similar sentiments are more like what I say out loud when I read those posts. I appreciate there have been people who have been posting in their 40s and 50s about their thing. I don’t feel quite as alone.
I think I lost track of which reply is which but yes, I have tried a lot of things. My partner once said to me “well you’ve tried everything” and I was like “wait.. no.. um… well….. I have never had peyote!”

I have had ecstasy and acid, ecstasy and mushrooms, mushrooms and acid, and each of them on their own. I’ve had ketamine a few times, DMT a few times. Salia divinorum is just plain weird and I am not sure I want to try it again, but if I had someone to supervise me it might be a different experience.

After reading John Lilly, I think it’s probably a good thing for me that Ketamine is difficult to obtain. Read recently that Musk is all about it. It probably has somethign to do with his erratic behavior. I haven’t really liked opium the few times it has crossed my path. Tried smoking heroin once, all it did was let me sprain my ankle and not realize how badly until the next morning.

Tried crack once, just made me jittery, anxious and annoyed. Cocaine absolutely nothing except give me a sore throat; I take that as a chemical confirmation that I have ADHD because I have read that coke doesnt work the same for those folks like it was with neurotypicals. I have smoked pot through almost all of the things.

Drinking has never really been a problem since I decided I don’t like it in my 20s. In my 40s at the same time I was growing weed in my basement, I was also making a lot of wine and mead but mostly my wife of the time drank it, and guests. I enjoyed the technical process of making wine and mead a little more than I liked drinking it. A year or two ago I was drinking a bit more than I liked on Friday nights when my workmates would converge on the taproom next door to the office. I’ve had a little more beer recently as I have cut back on the cannabis. That seems to be part of my process: I always seem to have a phase where I try to replace pot with alcohol, and I quickly realize that no, I don’t like hangovers and I don’t really like how I fee on alcohol.
In regard to psychedelics like acid and mushrooms, I have noticed amongst my friends that people will swear off drugs like pot, coke, etc but psychedelics are different. There isn’t nearly as much of an addiction piece to them, although I have seen the path whereby abuse of mushrooms happens. I have avoided it, mostly by just not doing them very much at all the last few months. Part of that is that I have had some difficulty in my cultivation - the clean technique is more difficult than what is needed to brew alchohol, in my opinion.
r/petioles is more of a “lets try to get to a place of moderation with pot” as opposed to “let’s quit altogether and not talk about any other drugs that might be helpful” on r/leaves
I have alluded to mushrooms on r/leaves, the moderation bot rejects them. r/leaves is also not that interested in people talking about Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Quit Cannabis for some reason
I went to my first Marijuana Anonymous meeting this evening. I had attended an AA meeting or two about 12 years ago with my partner at the time. I didn’t really consider myself to be an alcoholic. I have some issues with the “i am powerless and can only do it with a higher power” rap. They have some things at the beginning that they do like recite the serenity prayer “got grant me the serenity.. the courage.. the wisdom.. etc” and then reading some tenets of the system. OF COURSE the nice lady handed me the one about the higher power to read.
I bought a 12 step book to read, and I will probably refer to it on occasion.
I posted once on r/leaves about the sense that I had wasted my life being wasted, and someone pointed out that I was a Subject Matter Expert, and that can be helpful. Your questions indicate to me that perhaps that is a possible role I can fulfill.
I also have some issues with one point in particular in the Allen Carr book. He asserts that it was never good. I disagree. I do concur with the idea that it is a slippery slope: the simile used in the book is a fly attracted to the sweetness of a carnivorouse pitcher plant, and that once you realize that you are sliding it is likely too late for you to get out.
What I know from my experience this year is that I do not get to have pot easily at hand. If it is there, I will smoke it. If I smoke with a friend out at their house, I do get the cravings the next morning, and sometimes that leads me to go to the dispensary. It is a very slippery slope, but if the dispensary wasn’t just a few hundred yards away, it probably wouldn’t be a problem. Always thinking outside the box, I wondered today what if I went to the dispensary and ask if they have a list of People Who Are Not Allowed In, and if there was such a list, ask to be put on it. At each dispensary.
After my post-rave mushroom coming down rant, I realized that I have things I want to say. In the time since, I have been much more open and vocal on Reddit and Facebook, and in other places in my life. I realize now I have been sitting here typing for an hour. Thank you for the place and space to do this.

Of course, there has been some rumbling that cannabis may be rescheduled from schedule I to schedule III. This has the dispensary owners concerned because it might affect their business. Schedule III includes:

So it’s not necessarily going to be as easy to get as, say, booze or smokes yet.