"Let's go get stoned."
When the shutters blow off the mind of the newbie smoker and his vision is clouded now by color, it's a distinctively slow-motion rush pursued to duplication with each subsequent toke.
That first weed contact is akin to the first rush of real love.
And the threat of arrest, the fatigue born of figuring out who's Five-0 and who's on the up, even the anxiety of dodging workplace urine tests and the judgmental drama of non-smokers, is all worth the price of a sack.
Weed heads are closer than you think.
Gone are the images of the bungling, stupefied pop culture ganja icons like Jeff Spicolli, Cheech & Chong, Redman and Method Man and ... well, you get the idea.
When I helped brainstorm this cover package nearly 18 months ago I didn't know it'd ever come to pass (pun intended). Why? Weed is still so taboo. Deeper still, it's vilified.
Remember those grainy, government-issue high school films? Young miscreants smoked weed in one badly acted frame and stuck their stupid heads in ovens in the next. Or they started with weed and ended up on Skid Row turning tricks and beatin' people down for money to buy heroin.
Well, it didn't work.
I know so many weed smokers -- weed heads, really -- they outnumber the combined total of friends, associates and hangers-on who smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol.
They are highly educated professionals, entrepreneurs, college students, musicians, visual artists, athletes, poets, attorneys, attorneys in training, mothers, civil servants, fathers, blue collar grunts and old-ass retirees.
The two interviewed here are as different as schwag and hydro.
Isaiah Desnu is a 40-ish black man and Evelyn Crum, mid-20s, is a white woman. Both are professional and college-educated. Their first experiences with weed are similar.
Desnu was 14 years old, growing up in Florida, skipping school and piqued with anticipation by the joint his friends had "out in the woods by the canal." He was also a little scared.
"I had seen the movies about drugs," he says. "I thought if you smoked marijuana, you'd do heroin. I came from a family where nobody smoked. My friends lived different lives from me. One was a foster child and the other was a child of a hippie, and I thought they were so cool."
All those weed-smoking stereotypes are true. Weed heads are paranoid, they giggle and they get the munchies.
"I felt I was so stoned and I laughed uncontrollably," he says. "Then I became deep. It was the beginning of my deep period. Our conversations became very profound and I was the leader, which made everything I said seemingly profound."
For Crum, it was nearly the same. At 15, she and friends played a shell game with their parents to get to a party.
"We went to this 'hood' party," Crum says. "It was out in this huge field. Some local Heavy Metal band was playing. Lots of acid-washed jeans, dirty hair and cheap beer.
"We ran into this kid from our grade. He was a hood. Some even thought he was a devil worshiper. But he was in advanced placement classes, nonetheless. He had a joint, so we all piled into the covered bed of some rusted-out truck and I took my first toke."
Crum didn't get high that first time. However, her second smoke made her "way-diddly high," she says.
Still 15, she began dating a boy her parents loathed; his family was the neighborhood weed source.
"Most everyone who went to my high school scored their first bag or joint from this kid or from someone in his family," Crum says. "After we smoked, we went to Miami Whitewater Park and played on the swing set. I never laughed so hard. I was crying with laughter."
This is where their stories diverge and intersect again. See, smokers are as dissimilar and as familiar as America.
Crum spends roughly $200 monthly on only the best weed, whereas Desnu smokes whatever comes his way and is gifted more than he purchases. Neither is generally paranoid, and both think weed and smokers are more prevalent today than people realize.
"Socially, it seems that more people do (smoke) than don't," Crum says. "When I pass it up at parties, people look at me like I have lobsters crawling out my ears. I've never had problems at work with it -- kind of 'Don't ask, don't tell.' "
Desnu, a seasoned world traveler who's lived abroad, says weed smokers are indeed everywhere.
"Always I come across people that share a common love of marijuana," he says. "However, today people don't seem to be as willing to make you privy to their weed smoking because of all the testing -- the job testing."
Additionally, Desnu says the country's turned the corner toward more violence twinned by race and class profiling.
"Social morality has changed due to increased violence and drug trafficking," he says. "Also, being a black male, we're predisposed to people thinking we're drug dealers and users. I think more people are doing it but more people are hiding it, because it's becoming socially unacceptable."
For Crum, weed is becoming personally less viable.
"I cut back on it because I felt it was making me lazy," she says. "When I smoked during the evening, I didn't want to read or I didn't fully pay attention to people I was hanging out with or a movie I was watching."
She currently reserves weed for planned evenings at home with a good meal and a full TV schedule or for live concerts.
"I am tending not to smoke because it doesn't really do much for my conversation skills," Crum says. "When high, sometimes I tend to obsess about things I say or do, feel guilty about conflicts in my life or just think too much about the way things should be. I wasn't getting that giddy, Jeff Spicolli, 'Hey dude! Let's party!' feeling. So I cut back."
Desnu has a much less philosophical relationship with weed.
"I like it," he says. "I think that it makes me less inhibited and also brings out a more humorous side of me. And I love being around people who are smoking and also have the same combustionable humor off weed."
Crum considers her future with weed. Will she smoke it after she becomes a mother?
Meanwhile, Desnu envisions a near future when weed is legal.
"There will be other things that will be much more harmful and the government powers-that-be will realize that," he says. "Weed is the lesser of the drug evils, and (the government) will then come up with a way to reap the benefits of its uses through taxation."
Or maybe he's just in one of his "deep" periods. ©
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