Me and weed have had a tricky old time of it, all things considered. But nowadays we generally get along. I suppose that new entente is primarily caused by my need to slow down and weed's need for me to speed up, but I have no real idea. Sitting here as I am, full of post-Covid fog, really good tequila, reasurringly quick Merc qualifying, eight or so of Dr Keef's dots, prime lunatic James Bond entertainment. and nostalgia, I'm also reminded that just three days ago, I was seriously considering quitting work in all its forms, getting back on benefit, and then engineering the most lopsided divorce in history - or at least the most lop-sided divorce since Amber's.
As a teenager, weed was like alcohol squared. Or Boozecubed. Nobody Mknew how it worked, but it only ever appeared if your Cool-Adjacent Friends had some, you for some reason found yourself at an afterparty, well after you should have had alternative transit shit in place. Weed, in any transformational, this-here-is-better-than-Fosters-sense, then, was late on my bus.
The reason for this lateness is that we, as boys who were English and lived in England, got fucking pissed in clubs, pubs and wherever else (I've had a pint in a Pizza Hut at 0130). Since me and my whole generation were programmed that This is How We Can Have Fun from the age of fifteen, is anyone surprised? My friendships were formed on what you liked to do with your free time - drinking while watching football, drinking while watching cricket, drinking while watching bands, or drinking. No fucking surprises. No alarms either, as we'd sleep through them anyway.
Then, bit by bit, along comes weed. The first time I had some, I was walking through Barton, from one field to another, after a big curry and some parent-sanctioned pints to celebrate Chris Hatch's birthday. I felt great: illicit, chatty, funny, dizzy... all of that shit.
Every time me and weed met after that, though, weed was nasty. It made me fall down, get hangovers, forget where I was. Weed, I surmised, was a dick. I steadfastly ignored it for about 18 years, choosing to merely smoke absolutely shitloads of actually carcinogenic cigarettes while blousily rejecting cannabis and all its derivatives as stoner nonsense.
When I was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, and got through the original, everything-you-eat-tastes-of-cooking-oil onslaught of chemo, I starteed reading. I was told - you're told a lot of things when you have cancer, but this is one of the things that actually helped - that something called CBD and THC was a useful emollient to the deleterious effects of chemo, and potentially a 'cure', such as there is one, for several types of Actual Cancer. So, I did some digging, asking my friends who used to smoke if they could source some.
After a few bonkers 'I can get you a kilo of pure Afgan from Dover if you can fake a Turkish accent'-type responses, a man I know who remains nameless popped into my socials and agreed to provide both a link to CBD that wasn't merely goosefat at £100 a bottle and also some 'liquid THC at over 70% purity.
A relationship, as you can imagine, was forged.
Initially, my friend's contributions were, shall we say, 'light on detail', and rather overlooked the fact that, as a brain-cancer survivor, my tolerance for his exquisetly-produced but potent product left me, and I don't think I'm swerving when I say this, fucked beyond belief. Pluckily though, I persevered, and now can manage a dose, a beer and a Bond film with the calm assurance of a magistrate. I'm also certain that my doctors are baffled as to my continued success in the survival field, and would love to attribute this to my being bolloxed on weed, but can't.
A case in point arose only last week, when I couldn't ingest as planned doe to Covid. As well as the virus itself, I felt massive rises in anxiety, anger, confuaion, headaches, weakness down my left side, which we know is down to cancer, and many other things. But put weed back in, and I'm not wobbly, weak, sad, stiff, sore or any of the above. I have composed this whole post on nine drops of Keef's weed (as well as two tequilas and a pint) and while I'm tired, I'm not limping, or haunted by visions of eyeless shapes breathing death into me, which I was last night. And the transformation in my muscle-health and mobility is obvious. It's almost as if the NHS should prescribe it.
