DOSE:

repeated

oral

Cannabis

(edible / food)

BODY WEIGHT:

195 lb

For nine days I have been using oral cannabis, in the form of brownies, to help ease out of a long and increasingly destructive cycle of alcohol and tobacco abuse. I have found this to be a surprisingly easy and refreshingly enjoyable process, and hope that this report might help someone else who is struggling with these legal, ubiquitous, powerful and deadly drugs.

I had been locked into a binging cycle for several months. It began with getting good and drunk every other night (taking the day off in between for the hangover) and progressed to drinking to the point of near-stupor at least every third night (sometimes taking TWO days off for the increasingly debilitating, life-sapping hangovers). I won't go into the reasons for this pattern of behaviour; if you have been there you know that after a while the reason (if there was one) that you started doesn't matter anyway. Suffice it to say that I was drinking twenty-plus drinks at a time (three bottles of wine, or a twelve-pack and a bottle of gin, or most of a thirty-pack...)

I'm not a heavy smoker (anymore) normally, but by the end would easily go through a pack or more between 6 pm and 2 am. This, I'm sure, only added to the physical misery I would be in the next day, when I wouldn't be able to even think of smoking one until night-time. I would often declare that I was quitting and would make it only until the next time I got plastered, which was never more than a couple days.

This never interfered with my work, as I am basically self-employed and can set my own schedule, but was affecting nearly every other part of my life. My social life was limited to the same one, two, or three people coming to my house and drinking everything they brought, everything I had, and usually then going to buy more before the store closed. We had some good times some nights, granted, but to any impartial observer would clearly have seemed disturbed and self-destructive. I play several musical instruments and sometimes play with a friend's band or work on home recording projects; I accomplished little during this period except to make horrible, demented noise in the middle of the night with my quasi-musical drinking partners.
My diet was limited to alcohol, coffee and 'hang-over helper' foods like pizza, ice-cream, potato chips, etc. My house began to accumulate cigarette burns, broken glasses, piles of bottles. I broke my favorite guitar. I crashed my car.

My body finally began to give me ample warning that it NEEDED this to stop. The last hangover didn't really get going until 11 a.m., when the alcohol had finally worn off, but was probably one of the longest days of my life. I felt like my internal organs (heart, lungs, stomach, liver) were rupturing, like all their fluids were leaking. I was forcing myself to breathe and chewing aspirin to calm my heart; waves of inertia and nausea would sweep over me every few minutes. I literally felt like I was dying; I thought my lungs or heart were surely going to give out.

That night I lay in the dark and soothed my nerves with Coca-Cola and television and Xanax, and promised myself that I was done drinking and smoking for the foreseeable future.

The first few days I took Tranxene (clorazepate, a cousin of Librium) to ease the alcohol cravings and Xanax to sleep at night. If I had not had these little pink-and-white godsends I probably would have had to go rehab, where they would have given me essentially the same thing. However, I didn't want to use them for more than a few days since I have a limited supply and they can easily be habit-forming. I decided to try the pot-brownies I had around in hopes of obtaining a similar effect.

I hadn't been smoking any weed except when so drunk that it didn't matter, and had no desire to do smoke anything, so was glad to have made these. They were made with approx. 2 grams bud, 14 grams leaves of a very potent strain, which were ground and simmered in oil before going in the mix. I had previously found a whole brownie to be a somewhat uncomfortably strong experience, so started with a little less than a half on the fourth morning, with half a Tranxene.

I was, quite simply, astonished by how physically and psychologically GOOD I felt. I hadn't really enjoyed marijuana for a long time; tended to make me paranoid or just uncomfortable. I had forgotten how it can uplift one's mood, sharpen one's senses, and foster an appreciation of beauty coupled with a dissociation from the baggage of the self: all the things which alcohol promises but eventually does just the opposite. I've also rediscovered how it can put me in touch with my body, to be able to listen to its systems and have a positive dialogue with it. After the screaming match I had with my internal organs recently this is a tremendous relief.

I've also found that the usual nicotine-withdrawal symptoms which sabotage attempts to quit cigarettes are largely absent. I am not irritable, manic, or irrational, and actually don't even want one in the slightest. Nine days is the longest I have gone without a cigarette in years!

I am off the Tranxene now, and down to .5 mg of Xanax at bedtime, tapering towards zero. I have been eating a half to one and a half brownies per day, usually in little chunks throughout the day, and have felt better over the last week than in probably the last eight months. I do not intend for them to become a permanent crutch; probably will taper them off as well. But I did buy a bag of weed recently for the first time in ages so I could make some more!

Even if I do end up eating them often, I'm convinced that if it is helping me stay free of cigarettes and binge-drinking, they are truly helping to save my life. Certainly sounds 'medicinal' to me!

Exp Year: 2007	ExpID: 69740
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Dec 20, 2017	Views: 2,572
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Cannabis (1) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Medical Use (47), Not Applicable (38)