A Personal Story

As a kid, I was always interested in “how stuff worked”.  I was forever pulling apart my parent’s electronic appliances, always with my nose in an science book, or indeed any other fact-based book I could get my hands on.  I guess you’d have called me an “inquisitive child”

My love for finding things out changed, as I grew older.  I began to marvel at how wonderful it was to have a working mind, to explore the more creative aspects of thought and cognition.  In short, I became interested in drugs that affect mood, perception and creativity.

In my teens, I explored a range of substances, but there was one I kept coming back to…cannabis.  Call it what you want to – Mary Jane, wacky terbacky, pot, weed, ganja, rasta weed – I soon found that I just couldn’t get enough of it.

I won’t bore you with a long history of my youth, apart from to say that my friends and I had many weird and wonderful adventures thanks to our favorite plant.

Can’t, Won’t Grow Up

But, one by one, my friends grew up, got jobs, and moved on.  Sure they’d still like to have a smoke on occasions, but that was getting rarer and rarer.  I, on the other hand was just getting started.  I didn’t realise it then, but I was setting myself up for serious health problems.

Marijuana became part of my life, something I increasingly did while I was alone.  I discovered computers, and would get high and play games until my eyes felt like sandpaper.

I did try to quit a few times, half-heartedly, but I just loved the feeling of being stoned too much.

This Isn’t the Body I Started Out With…

It was around a year or two after “going hardcore” with the weed that I started to first notice the changes happening to my body.  I became aware that my own personal body odor had changed.  I was able to smell a rather unusual, pot-like smell coming from my skin.  I quickly recognized it as the side effects of smoking too much marijuana.  It worried me a little, but of course, it didn’t stop me smoking.

I experimented a little with this “weird odor”.  I stopped smoking for three or four weeks, and the odor would get stronger for a week or two, then gradually get weaker.  I never really did these experiments for long, because the “cravings” would come back.  I didn’t realise it at the time, but my body was starting to change…I was slowly poisoning myself.

Years rolled by.  My habit didn’t change.  I’d still get high almost every night, and learned to live with “the smell” and the coughing.

Alarm Bells

Then one day, not so long ago, I had a huge shock…a king-sized wake-up call.  Whilst driving my car one day, I pulled over to pick some food out from between my teeth.  My finger slipped while I was doing this, and landed on the roof of my mouth.  I instantly felt a sharp pain that went right through my head!

At first, I was confused.  I hadn’t hit it with my fingernail, so I wondered what it could be.  I felt around the area and discovered a small, hard painful lump.  That was the moment I knew that my smoking had changed my body (in truth, I had known for a long time, but denial is a powerful enemy).  This little lump worried me so much (I really thought that this was the beginning of the end for me) that I went to see a doctor.

After some tests, the results came back after an anxious wait.  Cancer.

I don’t think anyone is ever prepared for news like this.  If there was any good news about this, it’s that the cancerous lump was benign, not malignant.  My doctor’s advice was predictable…STOP SMOKING POT!  He told me that my body was reacting from years of toxic overload.  He said that I had smoked so much cannabis over the years that my body had “at least 3 to 6 months worth of toxic garbage to get rid of”.  He scared me even more when he said that I might have lumps like this one inside my body, and that I probably just couldn’t see them.

A Clean Break?

So, I did what he suggested.  I stopped smoking that day, threw my stash out and also tossed my bong in the trash.  The withdrawal symptoms lasted a few days…maybe ten days at most.  Again I noticed the smell get stronger during this time, as my body fought to clear out the backlog.  The smell would even come back just after a shower…in fact it took more than two months for me not to be able to detect it anymore.

Slowly, as my body began to detox, the lump began to get smaller.  It took about three or four months (I was feeling it every day!) but it finally disappeared as if it was never there.

Happily Ever After?

This would be a great point to end the story…but there is more…I had a re-lapse.

One night, I was sitting around with friends, drinking beer and having a good time.  One old buddy pulled out a joint and passed it around.  Almost automatically, I took a hit.  It felt fantastic…like the good old days, after I had just discovered pot.

To cut a long story short, I started smoking again.  Of course, it didn’t take long for “the smell” to come back, and a few weeks after that, at the very same spot in my mouth, the lump came back.

I knew at that point that I didn’t want to live without the wonderful feeling that the pot gave me, but I also didn’t want to end my life early!

I already knew that smoking pot the “old fashioned” way caused lost of dangerous chemicals to enter my body (many of the same poisons found in tobacco).  I also knew that the only thing in that cocktail of chemicals that my brain wanted was THC (Tetra-Hydro-Cannabinol), the active ingredient in pot, and the thing that makes you high.

A Better Way…

I realized then that I had to find a better way to get stoned.  It didn’t take me long to find out about vaporizers on the Internet.  I even tried to make one myself, but it didn’t work out very well.

A few months ago, I discovered ”herbal” vaporizers, and they changed my life!  I can still get high whenever I like, and I feel much better knowing that I’m avoiding more than 95% of the toxic fumes that used to go into my body.

I’ve been lucky enough to choose two awesome vaporizers, the Volcano (for home use), and the truly magic Magic Flight Box (for portable use, out and about).

Do yourself a favor and get a vaporizer…your body will thank you for it!