I've smoked and vaped dope pretty much daily for approximately 50 of the last 55 years, exclusively vaping and occasionally using edibles for ten years now. From that first puff, or actually the first puff in the second session(the very first session didn't do anything) in 1966 or 7) I was a doper. Yet I had a prominent and highly regarded professional career. In part because once I went back to college in 1981 and started working a professional job, I never once in forty or so years got stoned before or during work. Not once, in spite of being tempted many many many times. I was the CEO of two environmental conservation organizations for much of that time and held two senior govt. positions during that time. I wanted to succeed and to make this world a better place: I felt that using weed during work would compromise my ability to accomplish good and even great things for myself, my family, and this world we live in. During the most critical five years, when I was doing difficult but important and often highly visible things and also because of the possibility of drug tests, I stopped completely and during probably ten years I used from Thursday night to noon Sunday, with Saturday being a stoned by 10am day. I wanted to give my all, or nearly my all
to the things I believed in and cared about.
Back in the Seventies and early Eighties I was a hippie college drop-out, livin' the life, often stoned by 10am and a regular dropper of LSD. One of my best buddies and I met for coffee almost every day and then went somewhere to get stoned. But he was already stoned, being a wake and bake kinda guy. In 1981 the two of us convinced the National Park Service(we lived in a town nearly surrounded by a National Seashore) that we could produce a book about the Park, with me as writer and my buddy as artist/graphic designer. I would write all day while straight and then get stoned in the late afternoon and evening for re-writes and editing. I thought of the stoned state as if a second person was looking at the work. He was stoned all the time. After the book came out, all the readers and the two of us could only find one typo and not one factual error in the text. Unfortunately pictures got switched around and a few graphics ended up out of line. I always think of this as the difference between a daily stoner and an always stoner, between managing my addiction and letting the addiction manage me.
My buddy died of a heart attack when he was fifty, still living in that beautiful town and wake and baking every day. He had an MFA and a previous career as Art Director at a NYC agency before he dropped out and moved there. But he died stoned and broke. Fortunately we found half a pound of weed in his closet that he'd been planning to peddle, which we sold to pay for his burial and grave. After the success of the book and an environmental campaign that I'd led as a volunteer, I went back to college, got a degree Summa Cum Laude(doing weed every night but not during school), and had a wonderful and fulfilling career...and still got stoned probably 95% of evenings and weekends for 55 years. Now I'm 76, sitting here at my remote cabin in northern Newfoundland with an iceberg in my front yard, with a stash of three different superlative rosins, a couple of different tasty 30% plus flowers, and max strength edibles. But even now retired, I wont' get stoned until I head out for a bike ride or walk over the moors. To my mind, balancing being stoned with not being stoned makes being stoned more fun while giving critical attention to things that need that.
