May bring back a lot of memories.
A lot of people ask me, Frank, “tu que sabes tanto, es bueno fumar mota?” (you that know so much, do you smoke pot?). Obviously my answer depends on who is asking of course. Well the point of blogging is to write a little bit about your life in different topics so I’ll answer the question. Have I smoked pot? Yeah I have, a little bit. Have I developed a taste for it? Not really. I do have a cousin that smokes all the time, I won’t list his name obviously since he may get offended but he doesn’t get on facebook much so, I guess it’s all good 😛 When I was a little kid in elementary school , we used to have the police come over to talk about the D.A.R.E (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), everyone used to get a black t-shirt with the red lettering. Does anyone remember Mcgruff the crime Dog? on commercials? same thing. I am kind of glad that public schools or at least when I was growing up had these sort of programs to raise awareness, since it does teach you about drug abuse and addiction and the consequences. When you’re little, you really don’t know any better and everything you learn at a young age basically molds you who you are as an adult. That is why they say to love your children and give them the best education you can as a parent because how you raise them is how they will be when they are an adult.
el puerto gang sign
The first time I encountered marijuana was back in middle school, I remember walking home and I encountered some wanna be gangsters who thought they were tough and claimed they were in a gang called “El Puerto.” I must of been about 11 or 12 years old at the time and of course to me these guys looked like 18 or something, so I was scared when I would pass by them. One of the guys in particular would always stand outside the school parking lot with his bike and always ask me if I wanted to smoke “oye, try it, te vas a poner loco” and since I had no damn idea who this guy was and more importantly what smoking weed would do to you, I would refuse. As I got older and went into high school, a lot of my friends would smoke weed and would tell me if I wanted to skip class and blaze it up, to which I obviously refused also. Many of these friends I still talk to on a regular basis and they no longer smoke marijuana or at least have told me they still do. Afterwards in college I would encounter more people on a daily basis who smoked marijuana. Almost every house party I went to, there was always guys and girls busting out a toke and always asking me if I wanted to take a hit and it was around this time that I actually decided to try it officially. I didn’t want to be a wuss in front of a lot of these people so sure the peer pressure dragged me into trying it the first time. I grabbed that turkey leg (big ass blunt) and inhaled as if I was going to hold my breathe underwater, well the next thing I know my chest is burning like hell, I was like what the fuck !! so I quickly exhaled and went to the restroom and coughed my lungs out. It took me a while to learn how to properly smoke a joint and after I got the hang of it whenever I went to the next house party, and if they offered me to smoke, I would take a puff or two and this time look like I was a professional. I remember one time in particular, a friend of mine who we call poopy, we went over to the park and smoked a lot of weed that evening. As we were walking my friend tells me “dude, we gotta stop, I’m feeling weird” and so we stopped smoking and went back home. Nothing really ever happened to my friend, other than he was tripping out pretty hardcore, but it was funny since I didn’t ever see anyone trip so much that I kind of got scared. Once everyone finished college, the times of smoking weed came and went, everyone got professional and moved on with their lives.
Actual picture of the blunt I smoked that day, which happened to be synthetic weed.
I hadn’t smoked weed since those good ol times back during the college years but a couple of years ago, I visited a friend to hang out since I had nothing to do that day and I noticed on his desk he had a blunt and I asked him, “you smoke or what?” and he’s like “Yeah, I smoke, it’s special weed though” and I am shaking my head thinking what this “special weed” was and he tells me “Well, you want to smoke with me or what, lets go to back” and sure enough not having anything to do we go to his back yard and light the blunt up. I took a hit of this thing and immediately I start feeling weird and I actually had to sit down since I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on. I’m thinking to myself, “I’ve smoked weed before, but this doesn’t feel like weed” but of course I didn’t want to look dumb so I kept smoking it every time it was my turn to take a hit. After we finished the blunt, I was feeling these effects I had never felt before when smoking marijuana, I had to ask my friend “Hey man, I’m feeling pretty weird dude, are we smoking hydro?”. Hydroponic Weed is basically a process on how the plants are cultivated and do not use soil and thus require more care and so will yield even more potent effects than regular marijuana. My friend told me “What you smoked isn’t weed but if not fake weed and don’t worry, you’ll be fine in a little bit.” I had never smoked fake weed before and in addition the “little bit” part he mentioned didn’t really last a little bit but if not for a good while, I felt like I was having vertigo every time I got up from the chair so it really took about 2 whole hours for the effects to go away. I went home that day and decided that I never was going to try that ever again.
As you get older like I am, married and a father of a 4 year old son, it’s hard to think what my kid may do in the future when he’s older and how he’ll turn out to be. I will try my best to educate him on the different kind of drugs that are out there and to ultimately say no, obviously I’m not the most perfect example but at least I can speak from first hand experience. What I do have to say to everyone else that is considering smoking marijuana or synthetic marijuana is that you are ultimately responsible for your own actions. I’ve only smoked weed primarily previously and never had any issues personally but that one time I smoked the fake stuff, I can definitely say to keep away from that at all costs. I’ve never heard of a person overdosing and dying from marijuana and I may be wrong here but I think there has been 0 cases. People die in the thousands around the world from prescription medicine but nobody ever says anything about those things. Alcohol, well we all know what that does to you, you start drinking a grey goose martini or whatever your into and few drinks afterwards, you’re gone. Every year in Spring Break there’s always a few cases of people drinking too much and dying because of alcohol poisoning, but have you ever heard of someone dying because of smoking too much? I haven’t but yet alcohol is legal and marijuana is legal only in 3 states currently, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon. If you ever consider smoking synthetic weed, you should watch this video that I found online from CNN and see how scary it is. After watching the video, I realize now why one hit of that fake weed I inhaled made me feel weird instantly.
It’s hard to understand why they haven’t realized marijuana in all 50 states but it’s only a matter of a few years that you’ll soon find it on a regular corner store. Now I am not telling you to go out there and buy and smoke weed, but the reason I write this is that there’s a lot of people out there who think that marijuana is super evil and they are not informed.
Here are some benefits to smoking weed. (Source http://www.idigitaltimes.com/weed-good-you-20-health-benefits-consuming-marijuana-433939)
1. Weight Loss: The Atlantic recently reported a study which found that people who smoke pot are skinnier. The researchers at the University of Nebraska, the Harvard School of Public Health, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center analyzed data to find that current pot smokers had a smaller waist circumference than those who had never used marijuana. While this may seem counterintuitive — pot smokers reportedly consume an extra 600 calories a day from “the munchies” — the proof lies in the numbers. And yes, the study took into account the extraneous variables such as age, sex, tobacco, alcohol use and physical activity levels.
2. Lung Health: Since marijuana is often smoked, a common belief is that it is not good for your lungs. But a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that weed increases lung capacity and did not effect lung function.
3. Diabetes: Scientists from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found a correlation between Type 2 diabetes and marijuana. One of the most common risk factors for diabetes is insulin resistance and the researchers found that the active ingredient in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), may help the body take in insulin. The study, administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and published in the latest issue of “The American Journal of Medicine,” found that marijuana users had 16 percent lower fasting insulin levels and 17 percent lower insulin-resistance levels. That said, only current smokers experienced the positive effects, implying that the resistance occurred after immediate use.
4. Depression: A 2005 study published by USC and SUNY Albany researchers found that “those who consume marijuana occasionally or even daily have lower levels of depressive symptoms than those who have never tried marijuana.”
5. Anxiety and ADHD: The aforementioned study from USC and SUNY Albany also found evidence suggesting that in small doses, weed may relieve anxiety and symptoms of ADHD. The findings about anxiety were replicated in 2010, when researchers from Harvard Medical School found that marijuana acts as a sedative and can improve the consumer’s mood by reducing anxiety.
6. Glaucoma: Those suffering from glaucoma can prevent blindness by taking marijuana orally, intravenously or by inhaling. How? Marijuana decreases the pressure inside the eye, according to research. In fact, the National Eye Institute states: “Studies in the early 1970s showed that marijuana, when smoked, lowered intraocular pressure (IOP) in people with normal pressure and those with glaucoma.”
7. Epileptic Seizures and Tourette’s: In 2012, a British study from the University of Reading found that marijuana can help those suffering from epilepsy — a condition that afflicts one percent of the world — as THC has anti-convulsant properties. The researchers determined that it could potentially lead to an effective treatment with no side effects. Researchers have also found that marijuana helps those suffering from Tourette’s as well.
8. AIDS: More recently, scientists found that THC might have a helpful function: stopping the spread of HIV in monkeys. According to researchers, monkeys that were treated with high THC doses on a daily basis had more healthy cells than those who did not. While these findings are preliminary, and have not been observed in humans, they are promising.
9. Cancer: It’s not news that marijuana helps cancer patients when they undergo chemotherapy, but a 2012 study found that marijuana can play a role in curing aggressive cancer. Or rather, a marijuana compound “can stop metastasis in some kinds of aggressive cancer.” This wasn’t the first study of its kind, as researchers in the U.K. have successfully killed cancer cells in leukemia patients using marijuana. How does it work? According to the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, marijuana turns off the gene and in turn, stops cancer.
10. Migraines: Does a blunt a day take the migraines away? Marijuana has anti-inflammatory properties that assist in pain relief. In fact, the effects are said to be “several hundred times more powerful than that of aspirin.” Doctors in California have treated more than 300,000 migraine cases with medical marijuana. has shown to be effective in treating a host of illnesses and conditions, such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and migraines.
11. Arthritis: As mentioned above, marijuana is a potent pain killer and it even helps with rheumatoid arthritis and other chronic pain conditions. In 2011, researchers announced that patients with rheumatoid arthritis reported less pain, more sleep, and reduced inflammation when taking marijuana.
12. Alzheimer’s Disease: A 2006 study, published in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics, found that marijuana (specifically, THC) has the ability to block an enzyme that is responsible for creating the amyloid plaque–what kills brain cells in patients of Alzheimer’s. The study also found that marijuana prevents “protein clumps that can inhibit cognition and memory.”
13. Opiate Addiction: Opiates have addictive qualities that are far more damaging than marijuana and as such, cannabis can be used as an effective remedy to reduce dependence on opiate-based medication.
14. Neurological Damage: There is research suggesting that marijuana has neuroprotective qualities. What does this mean? Consuming marijuana can limit neurological damage after a stroke or trauma. Rumor has it that the NFL may introduce marijuana to combat concussions in athletes.
15. Hepatitis C: The European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology found that those who smoked marijuana daily were more likely to complete their Hepatitis C therapy–the medications have severe side effects which often causes a patient to stop their treatment regimen. What’s more, marijuana supposedly makes the medication more effective, as those who take it in conjunction with their treatment have no sign of the virus in their body.
16. Inflammatory Bowel Diseases: THC-like compounds made by the body increase the permeability of the intestines, allowing bacteria in. A 2010 study, published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, found the THC in marijuana blocks the THC-like compounds made in the body, which allow bacteria into your body by increasing the permeability of the intestines.
17. Multiple Sclerosis: The THC in pot binds to receptors in the nerves and muscles to relieve pain. Marijuana’s pain relieving ability makes it beneficial to patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, as the THC binds to receptors in the nerves and muscles to alleviate pain. In a 30 people study, Jody Corey-Bloom found that smoking marijuana reduced pain in multiple sclerosis patients.
18. Bipolar Disorder: A study found that those with bipolar disorder can benefit from ingesting pot. According to the research, those with bipolar I disorder who smoked pot showed improvement in areas such as processing speed, attention, and working memory.
19. Creativity: There was often a stigma that marijuana makes you stupid but researchers have since found that the stereotype was based on correlational evidence, instead of cause and effect. In fact, scientists have found that those who smoke tend to be more creative.
20. Verbal Skills: Researchers have also found that marijuana increases “verbal fluency” amongst users.
Hope you guys enjoyed this article.
-frank mar