After a long day of playing it polite on a date with my boyfriend, I’d finally gotten him into my dorm room and out of his clothes. We had just reached the “fondling and groaning” bit: his hands moved from my chest downward, my eyes closed, and I let out an admirably sexy moan. The moment lasted about three seconds before I heard a knock.
“HEY! Can I come in, can I come in?”
No moment was spared—my shirt goes back on, and the comforter is yanked over our shoulders. I say weakly that, sure, “they can come in,” but my voice is drowned out by the bang of my door slamming against its hinges. Two strangers enter.
“Where the fuck is the weed? She said if we found it, we could smoke it.”
“If we don’t find her weed, like, right now, we’ll go.” They proceeded to spend a never-ending few minutes rummaging through my roommate’s desk looking for her dab pen. They found it, finally, and squealed out the door. I couldn’t bear to watch them go, for I knew what destruction they left in their wake. When I reached for my boyfriend under the sheets, he had gone soft.
Why does that little pen deserve to cockblock me? What about weed could drive these two girls to ransack their friend’s shared bedroom with two half-naked strangers in it? I’ve been despairing over this question since that night—not because I’m still mad about it (okay, maybe a little bit), but because I’m at a loss for what weed does for other people that it fails to do for me.
Not to sound too cool for school, but I’ve smoked weed before. I’ve met a dealer, entered a dispensary, and been in the same room as a bong. I’ve smoked French weed, Hawaiian weed, Tri-State Area weed, Coloradan weed (supposedly the second best), and Californian weed (the best). Every time I’ve tried it, the effect has been the same: I get really tired and hungry, as if I’ve just clocked out of a 24-hour shift of nonstop manual labor without food or water. There’s about a thirty-minute buffer between consuming the weed and craving McDonald’s chicken nuggets before collapsing into bed. Admittedly, this isn’t very different from how I usually feel; maybe weed is meant to turn normal people into gluttons and sloths, not the other way around. Yet the effects seem as if they’d be unattractive when worn by anyone, especially two skinny college-aged girls.
I can’t say, however, that I’ve ever had a lonely moment on my weed world tour. There’s a unique sense of camaraderie felt when someone passes you the blunt. Literally, I am taking into my hands a tube of burning bud—metaphorically, I am being invited to explore the concealed part of my smoke-buddy’s mind. When my high school crush offered me my first edible, I expected to be shot into the astral plane. Instead, I was privy to an excitingly intimate conversation shared over a box of crackers. The feeling of our fingers touching as we reached for another bite was enough for me to ask to join his next smoke session.
Only weed, though, seems to have this sort of effect. I’ve traded alcohol shots with girls I couldn’t pick out in a police lineup, and it’s not true, either, that the less popular the drug, the more impressive the bonding—taking my friend’s adderall just inspired him to try upselling me the rest of his prescription. Weed’s reputation, however, is not innocent compared to more dangerous substances: marijuana maintains its aura of treacherous exclusivity despite its wide legalization in the US. Mary Jane is considered by some a gateway drug, smoked in dark rooms lit only by a blunt, or somewhere in the woods, or by vagabond musicians, or by high schoolers under bleachers. The fact that weed is often legally available and bustling head shops named “Pot Palace” sit on every other street corner seems to exist independently of weed’s social standing. I think D.A.R.E. was, in that way, successful.
An unintended consequence of the effective anti-marijuana propaganda is that it cultivates a close-knit culture. No matter where we are, or whether it’s day or night, something about passing a blunt makes me feel like I’m underground, sharing a secret. I can’t help but stare into the faintly illuminated faces of the rotation and feel as if we are uniquely connected. We’re using this notorious controlled substance together. We’re trusting each other to be in a private space together and alter our cognitive abilities in a particularly vulnerable way.
That’s just it: weed is a perfectly social, perfectly taboo drug. If I hung out with people to smoke in the hopes I’d be reborn, I might as well just go sober. I go to the smoke session for the same reason I was in my dorm room with my boyfriend: to do something forbidden with people I want to get intimate with. Those girls who barged in on us were desperate to be in a position similar to ours—not naked or fondling each other (probably), but connected emotionally. Maybe they needed an intimate night more than we did—but don’t think I’ve forgiven them just yet.
