Memoir: Smoking weed before 420 was a thing
It was 1969, the summer before sixth grade, and I had just moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
The upcoming school year was fraught with lessons vividly describing the wonders of all manner of illegal drug experiences rising to national attention and creating a new vocabulary related to “drug abuse.”
After ingesting just a few, the main ones I remember hearing about were amphetamines, barbiturates, cocaine, hash, heroin, LSD and marijuana.
If you want to learn to sound like a genuine 1969 hippy, you should study all the terms.
Throughout sixth grade, we learned about the cool effects of drugs, getting high, getting the munchies, seeing colors, staying awake, euphoric feelings and so forth. At the same time, we were sampling the legal vices usually available only to adults, tobacco and alcohol, when no one would see us.
We retained information about the cool drug effects but not so much about the dangers. Most of my friends and I decided that heroin was to be avoided, since addiction sounded problematic.
Many years later we learned our school’s cool janitor was jailed for selling heroin, but not to elementary students.
By age twelve most of the kids I knew had summer jobs for funds to buy drugs for recreation, never considering abusing them.
We had grown up in a world under constant threat of total destruction by way of nuclear war. We actually had get under our desks for a drill once as if that piece of wood would protect us from a nuclear bomb. If you were male, you might get a one-way ticket to Vietnam with a return trip in a body bag possible.
So knowing these things, with little to lose, we moved on to what was then called junior high school and went looking to buy some pot.
We learned about dime and nickel bags and joints, going at $10, $5, and $1 respectively. It took us a year to meet someone stupid enough to sell pot to kids twelve years old. One of our mob turned out to have brother age seventeen with a connection.
At that time in South Carolina, there were no laws regarding drug paraphernalia. It wasn’t legal to smoke, but it was legal to buy all the gear smoking in style required.
Like all new and avid hobbyists, we would hop on our bikes, a visit the head shop, where all manner of cannabis accessories were sold. That included a multitude of rolling papers, water pipes, lighters, cigarette rolling machines, posters for room décor, and weed themed fashions too.
If you were resourceful, you didn’t need anything but your baggie of pot, a match, a little aluminum foil, a pin and a kazoo. Take the kazoo’s membrane out from between the body and the turret, place some pin hole poked aluminum foil in its place, add some pot, light a match, and take a toke from your pipe.
“Don’t bogart it dude- breathe deep- pass it on!”
This was the beginning a few years of high anxiety, somewhat paranoid, which lessened a little after we learned some of the parents were smoking pot too.
The day I turned 15, we moved to Mt. Pleasant, where pot smokers were easy to meet. The older we got the better we could be connected.
In the summer of 1974, three enterprising busboys each put in sixty dollars to buy a one-pound bag of marijuana imported from Mexico for one hundred and eight dollars.
Our connection was the brother of the mayor of N. Charleston. He had a shiny trash can in his guest room closet full of pot. After our purchase, we went home and sampled the goods, removed stems and seeds, and bagged up the rest.
I will never forget driving around with my friend on the back of my motorcycle carrying a Charles Chip can full of lids, approximately one-ounce bags, that we were selling for twenty dollars each until we each got our 60 dollars back and each had two ounces left over.
That summer we worked at a new restaurant where every employee--except the owner and the cashier—were pot smokers and we smoked theirs.
For the first month, a cloud of pot smoke could always be found above the pack porch of the restaurant.
Cooks, dishwashers, busboys, waitresses, and the bartender were often giggly. Many trays of dishes were dropped.
After work it seemed like an endless series of parties. Everyone smiled a lot. We finally got around to smoking our own once school started.
That summer was my last pot purchase. I was a very occasional pot smoker after that and by age 18 I had given it up completely because I enjoyed drinking more and did not want to run astray of the law.
Fast forward forty years and my adult daughter brings me some chocolates after visiting a friend in Oregon where all over, all kinds of pot products are sold legally now in little boutique stores.
She suggested to eat just a little, as I crunched up some big bites. It tasted normal to me so I went on a little drive and shortly after that I felt I was flying and when I got to my destination I was starving, both familiar feelings but distant.
I have no recollection of what I ate at a diner in Barnwell that day, but I felt good all over.
