An Overrated High

My first experience with marijuana put me asleep and I am still pissed off about it. It took place during spring break in Daytona Beach, Florida, or more accurately, Ormond Beach, about eight miles to the north, in my freshman year at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York.

A group of my floor-mates at Fisher, together with several rowdy students from nearby Morrisville State College, took a grueling, 19-hour bus ride from upstate New York to Florida. Along the way, the driver, an older black man from Georgia, sweated out the Northerners by keeping the heater on full blast to, quote, "keep my feet warm."

Then, once in Florida, a few of our friends and other spring break revelers at our hotel passed around a crushed Budweiser can that served as a makeshift bowl to smoke marijuana. Before then, I had never tried any illegal drugs, although I was still underage and occasionally drank beer at weekend parties at Fisher.

But on this night, April 4, 1988, I took a few hits from the can because I wanted to know what smoking marijuana felt like. I desired to know what my friends and fellow students found so alluring about the small cigarettes I would see passed around at dorm and off-campus house parties.

The exact date of my indoctrination into recreational drug use is important because in Kansas City on that night, the Oklahoma Sooners battled the Danny Manning-led Kansas Jayhawks in the NCAA basketball championship game. Unfortunately, I would never watch a second of the action. Instead, after my eyes itched and watered profusely from smoking the pot, I flopped on one of the double beds in our suite and fell into a deep sleep while the party continued around me.

When I finally woke up in the morning, I had the uneasy feeling I had missed the anticipated Heartland hoops showdown. This was confirmed by my suite-mates, who told me Kansas won the game.

Later in the week, I made the mistake of trying marijuana again, as if attempting to redeem myself for the initial failed experiment. I guess I still wanted to know what everyone else thought was so great about this drug.

This time, I found myself in the middle of a packed hotel room just off the Daytona strip with a heavyset man wearing a straw Panama hat who sort of looked like the pre-weight loss version of bluesman John Popper. He passed around a thick white marijuana cigar and I took a few hits. I learned later from my friends that the cigar was purportedly laced with crack cocaine.

On the same night I sampled the marijuana cigar, one of my suite-mates and I produced a late night culinary creation. Our hotel room had few provisions and we were both famished after returning to the hotel after partying into the early morning hours. My friend turned on the small stove in the narrow kitchen, buttered a frying pan, dumped a few cups of Cheerios into the pan, and we ate handfuls of the toasted cereal like popcorn. And I remember some of the browned Cheerios falling to the floor and sticking to the linoleum surface.

I have never tried marijuana again, and I still become nauseous whenever I attend a rock concert and get a "contact high" from that familiar smell wafting through the stadium grandstand or other music venue. Last year, a relative of mine and his friends, an upper middle class couple in north Rome, New York, passed around a joint in the couple's garage, using their backs to shield their actions from the eyes of their nosy neighbors milling about. As for me, I did not join in and had to step out into the driveway, where the cool April air swept away the sickening smell of the marijuana.

And I've decided if I ever reside in California and develop an illness calling for a prescription of medical marijuana, I will have to refuse on the grounds of being "allergic" to the gag-inducing smoke. Or perhaps, I could get around this by consuming pot-laden brownies instead.