I remember being told that smoking a joint was like smoking an entire pack of cigarettes.
That’s what we were told by teachers in elementary school, along with fearful warnings that we’d succumb to a gateway drug.
Apparently marijuana would turn us into crack addicts, but I still haven’t even graduated to heroin! All jokes aside, it took me years to find good and factual information about marijuana and its medical benefits. This was years before I finally tried it for the first time at the age of 17. I had a computer and access to the internet back then, but I was always worried that my parents would see my search history if I started looking up various illicit drugs. I remember finding the website Erowid back in high school and that was when I started to get good information on plant medicines like cannabis and natural psychedelics like psilocybin and mescaline. By the time someone offered me cannabis for the first time a single month before my 18th birthday, I already knew a lot about the drug’s effects and its medical uses for things like pain therapy and seizure control. Back then my friends would roll joints of what I could only imagine was weed purchased off bricks brought across the border from Mexico. It wasn’t even strong enough to get me high the first two times I tried the drug. But once I had strong hydro cannabis, I finally understood the effects firsthand. However, these days I use a dry herb vaporizer to consume my cannabis flower products instead of smoking. It’s medically better to use a vaporizer versus smoking carcinogens with a joint or bong.