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Chapter 4: Drug Abuse, and how it never solves anything

I probably started smoking pot freshman year of high school, near the end of it I’ll wager. I’ve smoked until now, as I’m typing, and quite frankly, now when I look back at all the s**t I’ve gotten for it, it really was never worth it. Although, in the end of every adventure, does the hero stare back at the battlefield and say, ‘This was a lost cause..’
I think not.
For everything my parents ever said, the only thing right about pot is that, yes, it is illegal. The fact that it kills brain cells, promotes the use of other drugs, and causes you to become inexplicably dumber over time, is and forever will be, urban myth and legend. Weed doesn’t do any of the above three, except I could bet that a few of my friends are smoked out stupid, that is for sure.
Other then ******** with my short term memory and the color of my eyes, nothing on the sub-atomic scale to truly make weed the Devil. Why it’s illegal, I do know, and why I’m not going to spiel about the negatives and positives and prerogatives and motives and chitty chitty bang bang is because who cares?
This is about my life, not about a drug war.
Anyways, I began smoking with my good old time friend, Dan Wallace. He was a taller kid, a good guy, who had a rough placement of his sensibilities. The first time I went over to his place we shot at trees with BB guns and burned the midnight oil. The second time I went over, I was introduced to Lady Jane. It was the first time I had ever even seen weed, which got me overly anxious, almost on a thrill high without even touching the damned stuff. Drugs were gilded in legend, shot in the light of horror and evil since the days of my middle school years. Anything that even resembled pot had been shunned from birth. Hell, I hadn’t even smoked a cigarette yet. That first time I was the highest I had and probably will ever be. It was amazing, eye opening, far too emotional to give words to grandeur…
It made me feel time on this world was limited. It stopped my heart and kicked at my ribs, waking me up then sitting me down. I learned that dreaming without doing was just dreaming, something my Mom once told me. It made me want to dance, to cry, to laugh until I was fit to die, and I was fit to die in that broken moment between taking hits of a bong and trying to remember the names of characters I had created in my head. Who were these people, these creations that meant nothing but were in their own self shadows of me, spirits that spoke from the bowels of my sub-conscious, dragging themselves up to be heard, to be clung to and loved. I loved and still do love them all, and weed only made them all the better, all the more real.
Weed made me realize that I wanted to be on television, and from there, movies, and from there..
To become a memory.
After the first hit, I was taken on a four year journey of pot abuse, acid dropping, shroom eating, and the occasional pill snorted, my life compacted and shipped in between being top dog in wrestling for the state of NC, and barely passing high school with below par grades, smoking weed at lunch and after school nearly every day. Ladies and gentlemen, that is a lot of pot. All accrued I most likely smoked well over six thousand dollars worth of green, which is…
Sad.
I was the golden child with a charred soul, a perfect prince with a faded smile. No one suspected, but rumors flourished. Yes, I was one of the many school pot heads, and yes, I was one of the TOP potheads at my school…
But did I not do my job? Did I not lead my wrestling team to over three state titles, including individual championships? I earned my keep, and I did whatever the ******** I wanted forthwith. I was the baddest ********, the flame spitter, and I had the mouth and moves to work it to my angle.

I lost my Senior year at Highschool States in the finals, failing to repeat my victory, because of pot. I failed to go on and place in Nationals that same year because of pot. Anyone can say anything about it, but here’s the bottom line.
The top ten in the country aren’t ******** smoking weed, they’re training their little asses off. The top ten in the country aren’t dropping acid, or slinging dope on the side. ******** Michael Phelps, everyone says so much crap when I throw up this argument. “Well he smokes weed.”
Yeah, but you can ask that mother [********], and I know without even asking so myself he’d say he didn’t touch the stuff the year he won Olympic Gold. No winners are made out of drugs, and failing has left me a sad but true lesson to think upon. Do you think weed helped when my mother was crying over my dismal GPA, thousands of emails from upset teachers, and reports from the principal? Do you think weed helped when I failed my first drug test on the collegiate level, bringing me to a one on one shot at NEVER wrestling in collegiate athletics again?
Don’t ruin your life for drugs. People who want you to do drugs when they know it can ruin your chances at life are not your friends.
Misery loves company.