I smoked weed for the first time when I was 16. At first, it was maybe once a week or so at my friend’s apartment. Out of an apple, because we didn’t have access to proper paraphernalia. We used to call them circle nights and it was one of the few things I looked forward to after long weeks at school and long shifts at my retail job. I didn’t start smoking daily until I was 19. And in the beginning (actually for many, many years), I didn’t want to admit to myself why I was smoking every day. It helped ease my stress, it made me feel good, and that was enough for me. It took me over seven more years to finally come to terms with my underlying reason for daily consumption and then another four months to actually choose to quit.
Now before I share with you my journey to quitting, I want to emphasize one thing. I believe in plant medicine. I believe cannabis is a wonderful option for many people in its many forms (dry flower, topical, sublingual, edible, etc.). I believe cannabis is a form of healthcare and should be considered just like most medications. I believe in accessibility to the plant and accessibility to education around the benefits of the plant. I will never stop advocating for more people to be able to choose this option for themselves and their holistic health and wellness.
I also believe that the cannabis space and cannabis consumers need to be honest about the relationship between the plant and the body. Every single person has a different experience. No two relationships are the same. And I think, especially for those of us in the cannabis industry, we don’t like to admit that there are negative aspects to consuming cannabis. Especially for the wrong reasons. And by consuming, for the most part I mean smoking. You can read this blog that I co-wrote with Allume back in 2020 about the drawbacks of smoking weed. Because, yes, there are many benefits to incorporating cannabis into your life, but if we’re being truly honest there are harmful aspects as well. If we’re all about transparency and education in this space, don’t we want to talk about those, too? Without stigmatizing it, which of course is difficult when there have been decades of propaganda and misinformation around cannabis. But, as someone who started to abuse my consumption, it’s important to me to show all sides and potential relationships when it comes to cannabis consumption. We’ll get into what I mean by that.
So with that out of the way, let’s dive into how I got here: a year and three months after quitting daily smoking for eight years.
How I Started
I remember when I first started smoking every day. It was the summer before I studied abroad and I didn’t smoke much yet. Just a bowl here and there. When I went to Europe to study abroad that fall, I started consuming more and more, since I lived right next to Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark. Christiania, for those of you that are unfamiliar, is a decriminalized area in one of the neighborhoods outside of Copenhagen proper where you could walk in and buy a bag of weed (or other substances, but I didn’t seek out psilocybin or anything else then, just cannabis) and no one would bat an eye.
I vividly remember my lungs adjusting to my increased smoking. I traveled a lot when I was in Europe and there was one week in Spain where I was coughing my lungs out as the cilia (the tiny hair-like structures on the surface of cells in many parts of the body, including the lungs) started to incur major damage. The coughing was so bad, I remember calling my then-boyfriend who was a lot more familiar with consumption than I was at the time and asking him if this was normal. He assured me that my lungs were just getting used to the smoke and recommended I drink more water. So I did. And the smoking continued. Those were the days that euphoria was still very much a part of my experience with cannabis. The numbing hadn’t come yet.
I felt so creative when I was high. I felt more articulate in a lot of situations. I felt like I was tapping into parts of my brain that I hadn’t been able to before. And I probably was. It felt good and it felt right. I do think at that point my body needed more cannabinoids to get to a point of equilibrium or homeostasis. At least, that’s what I told myself.
I didn’t have a therapist back then, but I self-diagnosed my anxiety and thought that my cannabis consumption was helping ease it. It certainly helped with my stress levels. And, of course, as I go through this recounting of my experience I want to again emphasize that I understand cannabis can help people with a myriad of health issues including anxiety. And for me, it was helping. There was just another layer that was under all of this that I wasn’t dealing with. We’ll get to that in a moment.
Then, I was diagnosed (by a gastroenterologist) with IBS. Which began my gluten-free journey. I hated being gluten-free. I didn’t want to be gluten-free. I mean who does. I had to limit my FODMAPS consumption, which is a longgggg list of things (including all my favorite foods like garlic and onions and watermelon and cauliflower, etc.) that I couldn’t eat anymore or could only have in small amounts or else my body wouldn’t be able to digest it properly. Transitioning to a new diet and refusing to limit my FODMAPS took a toll on my body. I won’t get into the details, but cannabis helped immensely to ease my stomach pains and digestive problems. So there was another reason I continued to smoke daily. To help relieve my body of my IBS symptoms.
So many reasons. But still not addressing the biggest one.
I started smoking more and more. It wasn’t just a bowl here and there. It got to the point where I was smoking on average about three eighths a week. Sometimes a lot more. Doing the math, that’s over an ounce and a half a month. About 1.5 grams a day. Now, I know there are plenty of people who smoke more than that each day. A lot of people I used to smoke with, in fact, and a lot of people in this industry. When it came to events like my birthday or industry parties, I would chain smoke joints and consume even more.
Don’t get me wrong. I loved the ritual of smoking and sharing with friends. Feeling the bud in my hands, grinding it up, packing a bowl or a cone or rolling a joint (I was never that good at rolling), and lighting up. It was so comforting going through the motions. Having the plant in my hands. Smelling the smoke. That’s the part I miss the most: the ritual.
What I don’t miss is the coughing. I had a lot of folks ask me what I was doing to mitigate the lung damage. I’d tried everything. I switched to a hemp wick early on. I cleaned my bong regularly (probably could’ve cleaned it more though). I preferred to smoke with water so a bong or a bubbler rather than a pipe or a joint. I used herbs like mullein to help with my lungs. But I was still coughing up dark phlegm. By the time I finally chose to quit, a big reason why was because I would wake up in the middle of the night and feel like I was drowning in my lungs. That was the last straw for me.
In the last few years of my daily consumption, my days would look like this (especially after the pandemic started): I would wake up and smoke a few bowls to get my day going. It would also get my appetite going. I would smoke and smoke until I got too high to function properly or be able to complete my work. Then, I would take a nap to sleep it off. I’d wake up from my nap and start smoking again until I was too high to function and then I’d go back to sleep. It wasn’t a set cycle in terms of smoking for X number of hours and then sleeping for X number of hours or doing that twice a day or anything like that. It all just felt like one long day where I was smoking then sleeping then smoking then sleeping with some eating in between. I know some people will read this and be surprised, because it didn’t seem like this was my life. I managed my client work, I managed my social life, I managed my relationships and friendships, I seemed incredibly functional. But behind it all, I felt numb. I felt good and high. But it was all just to numb myself, I realized later.
The Epiphany
At the beginning of the pandemic, I started microdosing psilocybin in addition to my cannabis consumption. I would also macrodose here and there (as responsibly as I could) by setting intentions for my larger trips with what I wanted to get out of each one. My psilocybin journey is probably a conversation for another time. But what was relevant was in December of 2021, I had what I’ll call my epiphany trip. I have an hour long video I recorded of myself coming to this conclusion about my life and my consumption that I will keep for the most part private, but the main takeaway was that I had been smoking every day for almost eight years because I was avoiding my grief and my pain. When I was 14, my life changed forever. I lost someone very close to me and I never properly dealt with it. Sure, I dealt with it in therapy a bit, but I hadn’t actually sat down with my 14 year old self and unpacked my trauma. That night I finally did. And I admitted to myself that I was using cannabis to push those feelings down. To avoid confronting them. Sure, the cannabis helped my anxiety and it helped relieve my IBS symptoms. But the main reason I had been increasing my dosage on a daily basis for so many years was because I didn’t want to feel my loss and deal with my grief.
Of course, I’m still working on that. Just because I quit smoking doesn’t mean I magically healed and worked through all of my trauma. Quitting was a step in the right direction, though. I wasn’t quitting the plant. I was quitting my abuse of the plant. Cannabis is beneficial when used for the right reasons. And I was very much using it for the wrong reasons. Now that I manage my anxiety and my IBS symptoms without cannabis, I truly realize how much I was using cannabis in the wrong way. The wrong way for me, at least.
I decided to quit smoking the day after I came home from Las Vegas after seeing BTS in concert in April of 2022. Four months post-epiphany trip. It was a combination of finally wanting to take action about what I had realized back in December as well as being sick of the damage my lungs were enduring at that point. I was tired of having a hard time breathing. I was tired of feeling numb.
The transition away from daily smoking was a lot easier than I expected. At first, I bought a Volcano vaporizer so I could vape dry flower at home. I’m not a fan of vaping oil/using cartridges because it hurts my lungs, so I decided that grinding up flower and vaporizing rather than combusting was the right way to transition out of smoking. The lower heat definitely helped, but my lungs still weren’t entirely happy. So I transitioned to RSO, thinking that would help. I have an incredibly high tolerance for edibles, as in I need at least 80mg to feel anything, so I thought RSO would be the right choice since it had a higher dosage. At first, I liked it. But I notoriously do not hydrate enough and I had one bad experience where I didn’t drink enough water and had a major headache for two days after putting too much RSO in my meal. So I decided to stop consuming that way. I would vape dry flower out of my Volcano here and there when I needed it, but for the most part because my lungs were so much happier when I didn’t inhale I just weaned myself off of cannabis consumption entirely. It happened within the span of a month or so and then I wasn’t consuming any THC at all in any form. I didn’t feel a flushing of cannabinoids from my body per se. It happened gradually, but also pretty swiftly. I do remember that I was very annoyed at people and extra on edge/easily aggravated at first. But there wasn’t a huge before and after moment for me, more of a smooth wave to how I feel nowadays without THC in my system. These days, I feel a lot less numb and a lot more present. That’s because I was using cannabis to numb myself and that may not be the way other cannabis consumers are using the plant.
Now, I’m not saying this is or will be the quitting journey for everyone. Again, every body has a different relationship to the plant. I was incredibly lucky that I was able to stop consuming entirely so quickly. It really was listening to my lungs, though. My lungs just weren’t happy and edibles weren’t doing what I wanted them to do. So completely ending my THC consumption was the path of least resistance for me.
What I Learned
The thing I had to remind myself as I was quitting was that your relationship with your own body changes many times over the course of your life. My body changed going through puberty. My body changed when I was diagnosed with IBS. And now my body was changing and it didn’t want to be smoking anymore. Someday my body will change again. Maybe I’ll be able to eat gluten again. Maybe I’ll have worked through what I need to to be able to consume cannabis responsibly and not abuse the plant. I’m not there yet. I think about smoking every now and then. I get strong urges to sometimes. I have dreams about smoking and how good it feels to be high. But then I remember that I’m not ready for that yet. If I started smoking again today, I’d get back to the place of numbing myself. Maybe not to the extent it was before, but I’d make all sorts of excuses and still ignore the root of the problem.
So I choose not to consume.
I hope to be ready someday. I hope to be ready to be responsible because I love the plant and I’d love to re-establish my relationship with it.
I’m not there yet.
My favorite part about quitting (other than not coughing all day everyday) is the dreams. My dreams came back with a vengeance after I first quit. They were so vivid. They continue to be vivid. They feel so real. Even the nightmares are a relief to have, weird as that may sound. Before I started smoking daily, I was able to lucid dream. I’m working on getting back to that, because I loved it and lucid dreaming is incredibly fun for me. Being able to dream again is such a reward that I didn’t know I had missed all those years. I’ve been able to receive unconscious messages that I can work out through journaling or talking with my therapist that I didn’t realize existed when I was under the fog of consumption. My massage therapist has also noticed an apparent difference in my energy now that I don’t smoke anymore. Where there used to be a layer that she had to work through during our sessions, now it’s (in her words) a serene, smooth lake.
My second favorite part is my skin. It’s a lot less dry. Sure, I could always be drinking more water according to my facialist and dermatologist. But my skin was so dried out from smoking every day and now it’s feeling supple and hydrated and I love that.
One of my biggest fears about quitting smoking was that I would need it to manage my IBS. I’ve been surprised by the fact that I don’t need cannabis to help with my IBS anymore. My body has also adjusted a lot to having IBS for seven years now. I don’t try to test my limits with foods I know I can’t eat. So the symptoms have eased a lot on their own.
As for my anxiety, therapy has helped a lot. I can use CBD tinctures or edibles if I need some extra support. (Which some people might argue that because CBD is a cannabinoid I am still consuming cannabis. Let’s not get caught up in the semantics, I quit smoking THC that doesn’t mean I won’t use other cannabinoids if I need them.) I also was prescribed propranolol on an as needed basis if my cortisol production gets too high. I used to use propranolol for speaking engagements or to deal with my stressful family. These days, I’ve been able to use a lot of tools from therapy to remove myself from triggering situations or avoid them altogether. So cannabis is less of a need there.
My appetite was something that I had to monitor during my transition out of smoking daily. In the first few weeks, I definitely did not eat as much. Which is something that I always dealt with when I used to take tolerance breaks (which didn’t really last more than a week or two). My appetite came back pretty quickly after those first few weeks, though.
The first year has gone by pretty quickly. I haven’t been incredibly tempted to go back to smoking. Again, because I know I’m not ready mentally for that. I’ve still got a lot of healing and learning to do.
My advice for those that are re-evaluating their relationship to the plant? Give yourself grace. Your journey is not linear and you shouldn’t expect it to be. Be patient with yourself. If you revert back to consumption for a bit, that’s okay, too. Listen to your body. Quiet your mind. Your body will tell you what you need. My lungs had been screaming at me which is why I think it took me less time to stop smoking.
Be honest with yourself. I’m not saying everyone should consider quitting. I am saying you need to have a real conversation with your body about what it needs and why you’re consuming. How you’re consuming. Does that need to change? If the answer is no, that’s great! If the answer is yes, take baby steps. Journal. Write it down. Talk it out. It may not happen tomorrow or for another few months or another few years. That’s okay.
And remember you have options. Try using a hemp wick if you’re not already. Try mullein to help open up your lungs and breathe easier. Clean that glassware regularly! Or use a dry herb vaporizer instead of combusting. Tinctures, topicals, and edibles are all great alternatives as well.
What I will caution on if you do decide to quit is to not try to replace the lack of cannabis consumption with consumption of other substances instead. Such as alcohol or psilocybin or anything else. Really make an effort to find homeostasis without cannabis first. I am not a medical professional, so this is all just from my experience. I am not making any recommendations for your health plan. It’s just that there was a time I tried to replace cannabis with psilocybin consumption and I started to abuse that, too, and I quickly realized that was not the right path for me.
What’s Next
I’m not entirely sure what’s next. I’m ready to heal more. I’m ready to explore my shadow self. Talk to my inner child more often. There’s a lot to be learned about myself, getting in touch with spirituality, with my energy, understanding who I am and how my body functions. I have a long ways to go.
As for the smokers in my life, I love to be around them and I certainly don’t ask that they restrict their consumption in front of me. Smelling cannabis smoke is always a pleasure, so spark up and puff away if you’re a cannabis consumer. But I won’t be puffing or passing for the time being.
I had some people ask what the biggest shift was for me after quitting. As I mentioned before, I didn’t feel a huge before and after change other than not feeling like I was numbing myself all the time. I intentionally go to bed now, instead of falling asleep on my couch from getting too high to make it upstairs. I wake up and don’t feel the need to get high right away. It’s a good feeling to be present in my body and in my mind. It surprises me that I don’t rely on cannabis to eat or to be in public or to watch TV. I’m a lot less late for things since I’m not smoking a few extra bowls before I leave the house anymore. I love not being reliant on something the way I was with cannabis.
If you’re considering a new relationship with cannabis or if you have your own story to share, I’d love to hear it. You can always email me at youre@almostconsulting.com or DM me at @almostconsulting on Instagram. I won’t share anything you choose to share with me, I just want to open the dialogue about cannabis consumption and the many different ways we each look at it.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. It was really wonderful to be able to candidly share my experience. I’m sure I’ll have more updates in the future. Maybe a follow up post in a year or five. Who knows! In the meantime, I wish you well and hope to connect with you over the plant or otherwise. Here’s to each and every one of your journeys.
Kieryn