Born Again Stoner
The tragic story of how this vanilla Christian boy got knees-deep into the amazingly terrible world of edibles. 
I’ve never been one to partake in drug-taking. I'm not even much of a drinker if I'm being honest. On account of me being super paranoid of every itsy-bitsy tick, feeling, or itch out of the ordinary on my body, and also because I have a crippling phobia of getting dizzy. More on that later.
This is not to say I’m a substance prude, I usually have two cups of coffee a day and I drink alcohol occasionally. I’ve been flat-out, getting-naked-in-front-of-strangers kind of drunk a couple of times; but I had never, ever, deliberately consumed any type of drugs other than alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco.
The latter of which I only did for precisely one night––the night that I turned 18.
My friends and I went to somebody’s house to drink beer and chat all night while we waited till the clock turned to midnight and my actual birthday to be. I guess one of my bad-asser friends had brought a pack of cigs, as we cool-cats like to call ‘em, and in between Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Maroon 5’s “Makes me wonder” blasting out from some iPod Mini speakers, I smoked them out of existence.
I probably smoked around 10 cigarettes that night, and I guess it was enough smoke for me because after that I never again touched another cigarette. Don’t exactly know the reasoning behind this decision, but it was probably the fact that living with two parents that smoked as their life depended on it already gave my teenage lungs enough second-hand smoke to even leave some for my future grandchildren to enjoy. A very fortunate decision-making from 18-year-old Alberto, because nowadays not only smoking is not considered cool anymore, packs sell for CRA-ZY money.
Also, and let me climb on top of my soapbox for a moment here, smoking is so stupid. Please, let us be honest with ourselves. It has zero health benefits, it bothers everyone around, and I strongly believe people like cigarettes or feel good when they consume them just because of the addiction factor, not because inhaling smoke in your lungs physically gives you pleasure. I see no upside to smoking. It just puts a strain on your finances and also on the way you interact with the world around you. You have to take a break from anything you’re doing to go smoke, involving going fucking outside of every place you are because it's rightly illegal to smoke indoors. Have you tried looking for a place to rent as a smoker? Unremorsefully kissing a non-smoker? Peacefully taking a long flight? Cigarettes just mess with everything, man. They aren't just a thing that you sometimes do or have. They are like those balls and chains to the ankle we saw in cartoons––they take away your liberty.
Anyways, camp counselor Beto OFF, I remember that night not only for being the only night that I actually smoked but because one of my friends (let’s call him Pepe) got so drunk that he sliced his finger with a broken beer bottle. Joe, another friend, offered to drive Pepe to the hospital to get it stitched up. This because he was worried for him, but mostly because he wanted to seize every opportunity he had to use his new car. A couple of hours later they returned, Pepe with a stitched-up finger and Joe with his 2009 Peugeot insides splashed in vomit, beer, and blood.
This gives me the perfect segway to talk about alcohol.
I started drinking when I was about 15 years old. Some demon-child brought an Absolut Vodka bottle to a party that I was attending to, and mixed with some sweet juice, I drank a bit. This led me to start exploring the wonderful world of alcohol; which around that time (2006-7) was starting to transition from being one of hard, you’re-gonna-go-blind liquors, to being fun, colorful, and pop.
Don’t know if you kids remember a time when alcoholic drinks weren't the sweet and mild drinks that we now have and that might give you diabetes before even brushing your liver. But back in the ol’ days we practically only had fancy and expensive “spirits”, or working-class beers and hard liquor. Then came Absolut-fucking-Vodka.
Absolute Vodka started a revolution. At least in the Mexican provincial town I lived in, every cool kid was obsessed with it. People mixed it with cranberry, orange, and pineapple juices and got totally hammered. Then they started coming up with FLAVORS. Mind. Completely. Blown. You had the citrus one, the raspberry one, the mandarine one, the pear one––YES, GOD FORSAKEN PEAR HAD A FLAVOURED VODKA. And then they started to come out with special edition bottles. I remember seeing an LGBT-rainbow one, a disco-ball one, and a beautiful red-sequin one that looked like Shakira’s skirt or something like that. Shakira, Shakira! They were exciting times and I was there and ready to consume.
So I started slow, drinking one or two glasses when I was at a party or with friends, and slowly searching for the limit on how much I could handle. Limit which I had no trouble finding because a couple of months after I started being “a drinker” I was invited to go to the newest and coolest nightclub in that Mexican provincial town called Oaxaca: Circo.
Circo was a club that had a circus type of theme. It wasn’t fancy or anything, just a warehouse floor and walls, with a medium-sized, red and white tent instead of a roof; but it was for sure the talk of the town that year.
On the fateful night in question, I took my provincianas cousins that had visited from another (and debatably rural-er) Mexican provincial town called Torreón to the coolest and hippest place around. To have some drinks, dance to “La Gasolina”, and perhaps land a phone number or two. Who knows?
Well, I know, because it happened to me in the past, and let me tell you: only one of those three things happened that night for me.
We went to Circo joined by some friends with the plan of drinking beer like the poor teen-aged peasants we were, because since the club was new––it was expensive. But one of those friends, let’s call her Dana, in I’m guessing an effort to push-boost ourselves to the next socioeconomic step (at least in image) had decided to get an exciting boon: a bottle of Absolut Raspberry and cranberry juice to mix it with.
I was offered to drink some and perhaps hypnotized by the raspberry-red colored bottle, I accepted. And again and again I accepted, because by the minute 61 since arriving at the place I was already seeing a non-existent clown show in the middle of the club. I was feeling the happy high of alcohol, but all was steady. Shortly later, the need to pee arose in my being.
I stood up from our table and immediately felt it. Fuck, I think I’m a little bit tipsy. I took a couple of steps, and when I almost fell on top of some strangers’ table I thought, OK, no––I am drunk.
In a deep haze I remember walking to the bathroom and the colorful corridor leading to it spinning like crazy, and by the time I finally got inside I knew it: I am fuuuucked.
I burst through a stall because my need to vomit surpassed the need to pee.
… And I blacked out.
Next thing I know I’m back at the table, sitting down in one of those uncomfortably not-cool bean bags and puking all the precious and expensive Absolut Raspberry on the floor by a little nook between the wall and a sofa. Trying to avoid getting kicked out by Circo’s security. I can see some concerned looks from my posse, which I guess were planning our next move to take me back home; but suddenly a tremendous roar filled up the place––Daddy Yankee’s “La Gasolina” started to play.
Everyone, including my group, yelled.
Black again.
When my consciousness came back, I was outside on the sidewalk and noticed a couple of man-hands fondling my lower abdomen.
The owner of the pair of said hands was a burly man that I barely knew, and he was dry-humping me from behind. There, basically in the middle of the street, and in the two-thousands. We were not that socially progressive yet for this activity between two men to be acceptable. At least not in Oaxaca.
When a little bit more of my awareness came through, I saw that the rest of my group was surrounding us and discovered that this over-clothes rapist was actually pushing in my belly, trying to make me vomit all the alcohol I had drank that night. In a futile effort to sober me up a little bit, I guess. (Not quite sure that this is how it works though). And after several pumps and a little bit of vomit out, we went back home.
Next morning, with a scolding from mom on me already, my whole family and I had to go to a christening in a small town outside Oaxaca. And with the sun completely blazing on top, everyone in that church got second-hand drunk from my cousins and I’s Absolut Raspberry fumes.
After that time I’ve been hammered more than a couple of times, but most of my alcohol frenzy era was contained within my high school years. When I turned 20 and started working at a nightclub, I kinda got sick of getting sick with alcohol. When, after 6 months of working there, I quit, I dramatically slowed down on my weekly ml of alcoholic consumption. Today I don’t remember when was the last time I got fully, balls to the wall drunk; which is good because, again, in this economy is not as easy to get drunk as it was before the 2008 market crash.
This clearly depends on each person, but for me to be able to get tipsy I need around five to seven beers. So that's like $15-17 dollars from where I’m from, currently; and if we’re talking liquor store-bought. Not very cheap or feasible for my current immigrant lifestyle, to be completely transparent.
So, what’s left for me to do to get those highly coveted “funnies”?
Weed.
As I told before, I come from a no-drugs background. My parents, both well into their teen-aged years in the 70s, were the type of kids that preferred listening to Trova music and reading semi-liberal texts instead of doing drugs. And I guess I inherited the lame gene because I never got interested in doing any type of illegal drugs. The “doing something illegal” always turning me down from trying to do so. And, honestly, most of my social circles never really did them either. So there were little to no chances of me falling into drugs. We were good, preppy Catholic boys… back then, at least.
But, history and trends repeat themselves through time. “The wheel turns, and nothing is ever new” because not unlike alcohol in the aughts, marihuana started to get very hip in the latter half of the 2010s. This wasn’t a substance for lowlifes with dirt-caked ankles and funky-smelling hair, now the cool kids are doing it!
At first, I didn't pay a lot of attention to it because I hate the act of smoking, and weed was just a 50-times worse-smelling cigarette. Really, whenever someone smokes weed it becomes a whole neighborhood-block affair. Last October I went to New York City with my family and the whole place reeks of marihuana. So, if you read my essay titled “Welcome to New York” you can add that to the list of foul smells that the city offers. I don’t know how New-yorkers cope, I would fucking vote red and start wearing my Handmaid’s Tale fit just out of spite for making me live in what smells to be the devil’s ass hole.
But, as luck would have it, in came capitalism and it turned that smelly herb into beautiful edibles. Like a substance version of Cinderella.
Just like vodka, marihuana got a makeover in the form of delicious candy and baked goods; and also butter, soda, oils, candles, tea, ice cream, cream, and even soap. The sky’s really the limit for these entrepreneurial stoners. And me, once again, was ready to consume.
… Not really, because in Mexico they were still kinda illegal, so I had to wait until I was in a progressive, first-world country to be able to explore this exciting world without the fear of being labeled as a criminal and being put down behind the shed like a rabid dog.
That puts the story in the present day, in the year of our lord 2022, when I moved to Canada.
Time to get fucking high.
…
It took me a bit of time to start exploring the wonderful world of being drugged because I was getting my immigrant bearings here in this land up north. I did keep seeing a bunch of brick and mortar places with ominously tinted windows where one could go in sad and empty-handed, and come out happy and holding precious drugs in the form of benign candy, but I never got the courage to go in. What if I ingest “a weed” and die from an overdose, all alone in my room?
It wasn't until month 3 in Vancouver when I had already visited most touristy places inside the city and managed to get me a steady place to live and a steady roommate to live with, that I decided that it was time to freaking do this.
One fateful night my roommate, let’s call him Rick, and I went to have dinner at our local White Spot. This is like the Canadian version of Applebees (but not nearly as good––sorry, Canadians). We decided to walk there. On our route through Kingsway Avenue, we found a place called Kiaro. Fogged out windows, a giant 19+ sign, and an LGBT flag on the door: A weed shop, we both collectively thought.
“Have you ever had an edible?” I asked, subconsciously seeking some validation for my drug-addict cravings.
“Yeah. One time, a small one. You?”
“Nope. Never. But I kinda want to try one.”
“Want to get one?”
“Really?... Yeah, ok. I guess,” me trying to not look too excited replied. It’s on!
We got in and the place was everything but the dark, dank, rat-infested places I had imagined them being inside my head. This looked kinda like a knock-off version of an Apple Store: White walls with minimum decoration and displayed products on, light wooden furniture, clean floors, a dark grey sofa and comfy chairs kind of area on one side, and two white and wood stations with touch-screen PCs on top in the middle of the store.
Weed’s gone full Silicon Valley start-up.
We were immediately approached by a husky, blonde, long-haired guy greeting us and asking what we were looking for. After explaining to him that we were a bit new to the apparently bright and sleek world of drugs and we wanted to try edibles, he recommended a pair of acai gummies with a blend of 5mg THC and 25mg CBD per piece.
Let me, a fucking expert, explain the science behind weed.
Most things edible-cannabis fall within two metrics: THC and CBD. In layman’s (and because I don’t know better) these are chemical substances that make you “go high” and most edibles have a mix of both. The difference between them is that THC makes your body “feel high”: laugh a lot, not understanding your own language, hyper-focusing, all that fun stuff; and CBD makes your body “relax”, and that’s why your aunt with myalgia loves to drop that shit under her tongue every night.
Now, depending on what you want from your night you can play with those chemical levels. Some edibles have more CBD mg’s and make you droopy, and some have more THC and make you funnier. So, for example, a cookie that has a mix of 10 mg THC to 1 mg CBD is gonna make you feel more high than slow.
We idiots (Rick and I) obviously didn’t know any of this beforehand, so we bought the 5 mg THC to 25 gm CBD pack of two gummies the husky bro recommended.
“This is a good place to start,” the dude said. “Just remember to eat beforehand. Never consume an edible on an empty stomach.”
“YES! NEVER ON AN EMPTY STOMACH,” a ruby-read haired woman all but screamed from behind a counter. “It could get ugly otherwise.”
“Oh yeah, we are going for dinner first,” said Rick. “Thank you, bye!”
And we left.
What’s with eating it on an empty stomach? What could happen? Why everyone was so scared of it? I left thinking.
We had a slightly better than mediocre burger from White Spot and while walking back home we decided to pop in a gummie each; which meant that I had 2.5 mg THC and 12.5 mg CBD in me.
I was very excited, and when we got home I sat down on the couch expecting to suddenly start fucking flying through the cosmos. I also was a bit nervous about two things: the ominously given message from the red-haired woman, and much more so, the possibility of getting very dizzy.
…
When I was younger, around middle-school age, I suffered from vertigo. Or at least that’s what my family and I thought.
Every night, when I went to bed, I got dizzy. I’d jump in my bed ready to relax and recharge for next day’s challenges and I could not do any of it because it was as if I’d just came back from drinking my body weight in alcohol. And it took me ages to fall asleep because I would start to panic, then I’d stand up walk a bit to calm down, and then try again. This could go on for hours.
Don’t remember exactly when or how it started. But it was excruciating. Like an inverse vampire, I’d start to dread sundowns because it meant that it was almost time to go to bed and get dizzy.
My parents took me to get tested for actual vertigo. I remember going to a doctor and her splashing water inside my ear and making me follow an oscillating red light from a machine in an effort to learn the cause of my vertigo. But we never found the answer. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with me, that I was healthy. The issue was all in my head––in my psyche, to be specific.
That was worse. Because at least if I actually had some type of ailment I could get treatment for it to overcome it and get better. But no, there was nothing wrong. And after hearing that nonchalant answer from the doctors, my parents also started to kinda brush it off as a teenager quirk.
(You can skip this next paragraph if you are sensitive to self-harm triggers.)
I was left there without answers and being described as healthy. But every night I went to bed and I suffered sometimes for hours because of this mental thing I had. And I felt helpless. Helpless from science and helpless from my parents. I was around 12 or 13 and I remember one night briefly but seriously thinking of ending it. For a minute I thought of an easy way out of it. I can clearly remember thinking about a specific serrated knife we had in our kitchen. But maybe because I wasn’t brave enough, or because of the general lethargy that permeates most of my actions in life, the moment passed. It lasted so little but it was meaningful enough for me to be able to remember it clearly more than 15 years later. Glad it passed, though! Wouldn’t have been able to live through the superhero-obsessed media era, the pandemic, the housing crisis, the overall social unrest, and all the other cool things we got going on right now!
So I was left on my own, to fix it on my own. And 13-year-old Beto decided to take the same approach he would later then take to fix his acne: Fucking fuck it!
If I was gonna get dizzy every night I was gonna get dizzy every night. Whatever. I still went to bed and started to fly as if I was glued on a frisbee, and it was awful, but I added a bit of self-berating into the mix.
Oh, you’re getting dizzy? Then get fucking dizzy, you idiot! Poor you, alone and spinning in his room. Get fucked you twisted, faux-vertigo-having, weird-body-shaped, non-sport-playing faggot! Hope you get even dizzier!
And weirdly, it kinda worked! I started to be able to go to sleep quicker, and before I knew or realized it, I wasn’t getting dizzy anymore at night.
Nowadays, I sometimes fall in little ruts when I get dizzy again. It usually lasts for a couple of nights and then I’m over it. I have some specific triggers like remembering the swaying Viking ship ride every fair has, picturing me looking outside a ship’s porthole and seeing sea then sky then sea again, and generally imagining oscillating stuff (after writing this, I’m FOR SURE getting dizzy tonight––fun). I can also get dizzy on command. I’m the worst x-men ever.
That is why I have an almost-phobia of getting dizzy, and try savagely to avoid the triggers that make my head go turn-turn.
“Then how come you sometimes deliberately got drunk?”
Because I’m masochistic, I guess. And also because my problem really is when I get dizzy without a cause under my control. Consuming alcohol with friends it’s in my “You’re gonna get dizzy when you get back home, you know” list of activities I got going on. In between going swimming and riding rollercoasters. These are things that I KNOW are going to give me trouble back in bed, so I tolerate them. And do them infrequently enough that they’re not as big of an issue.
Weed, at least right now, does not qualify to be on this list. And I remember hearing someone say that there was a possibility to get “the spins” from consuming the drug.
…
Back again on my sofa after eating the acai gummy. I’m nervous because I really don’t know a lot about this process. At this point, I know this about edibles:They can take hours to kick in.They get you “high” (whatever that means).They can give you “the spins”.ABSOLUTELY DO NOT EAT THEM ON AN EMPTY STOMACH. (Why? Don’t know.)
All I could do is to play the waiting game, so I did.
I waited…
… and waited.
“Do you feel something?” Rick asked from his room.
“Not really.”
At hour 4 I lost hope. The only thing different in me was that I was feeling a little bit sleepy. And I couldn't even blame it fully on the edible because it was already 11:30 pm and I had been up since 6 am that day.
My first time getting high experience was a bust. Nothing happened.
But I was undeterred, I was going to get high no matter what the cost. So for the next couple of weeks I kept on trying to get high. Bought another acai round and ingested BOTH gummies––nothing. A couple of days later I bought another flavor––also nothing.
What’s wrong with me? Am I unable to enjoy this pleasure of life? No love, no money, no sex, and now no getting high? Why did I come to this earth for? Just to suffer?
I was ready to abandon the idea of me getting high because it was starting to feel like these fucking stoners were just selling me overpriced candy. But one Friday I decided it was enough.
I went to Kiaro after school and told a lady there, “I’ve been getting gummies but with no success. I need something stronger.”
“Okay, maybe what you need is to up the THC level of edible,” she answered.
“What’s that?”
She then proceed to lay out the scientific lesson I gave you a couple of paragraphs ago.
“Ok. Gimme that one then,” I concluded.
The edible to end all edibles was a 5-pack of blue raspberry gummies, which had a blend of 10 mg THC to less than 1% CBD––so mostly get-high juice. It was perfect because I could ingest gummy by gummy and up my level of drug-ness in levels of 2 mg.
I decided to “take it slow” and eat two and a half gummies (5 mg THC in me) right outside the store, like a fucking drug-addicted vagrant. I checked the clock to measure the time it was going to take me to get high. That way I could use the same metrics and methodology in future drug-related endeavors. Not to write a second personal analogy in the same paragraph but I felt like a scientist––a ganja scientist.
Went back home and yet again sat on my couch to be ready to get as high as both Petronas towers stacked together. Rick, my roommate, was around busy planning his own mental health Friday, so I really was left alone to have this new experience. It’s the good one now.
An hour went by and again fucking nothing. I decided to eat another gummie and a half (8 mg THC in me).
After 15 minutes and still nothing, I said “Fuck it” and had the last gummie. This put the THC mg in me to a whopping 10.
I spend around 10 minutes waiting on the sofa as if I was pretending to be the Mexican Akshobhya (one of the Five Wisdom Buddhas, you uncultured swine), and suddenly an itch––a tingling––started to happen deep in me.
But this feeling wasn't a physical one; no, sir, this was an EMOTIONAL one.
What if something wrong happens? What if I get the spins and get very dizzy for hours non-stop? My Medical Services Plan hasn’t yet arrived. What if something goes REALLY wrong and I had to be taken to the hospital? It would break me financially! Would my roommate be able to help me? He barely speaks English and does not have any experience dealing with this! What happens if I ingest marijuana on an empty stomach? DID I EAT ENOUGH?! I DIDN’T EAT ENOUGH HAVE I?!
I jumped out of my padmasana and ran to the fridge. Cold, white rice.
I splashed a little soy sauce on it and stick it in the microwave for one minute. While waiting for this I found a half-eaten bag of Takis Fuego that had exactly six Takis left in it and I all but poured them into my open mouth from above.
When the rice was “ready”, I took it out and started eating it like a hungry Goku from ‘Dragon Ball Z’. I had to put food in me lest I die here and turn into yet another meaningless number in the yearly “Migrant Deaths and Disappearances” pie chart the government puts out for scholar Caucasians to feel a little bit bad about for exactly four seconds till they scroll down to another page.
After finishing my one-minute hearty meal I went back to my sofa to twiddle my thumbs and wait for Armageddon. Oh my god. What the fuck is going to happen to me?
At this point into the experience, I suddenly decided to do more “previous research” about it. So, exactly like that time that I was branding a one-day-old gash wound in my lower abdomen from a surgery, I decided to do probably the worst thing you can do in these sensitive situations––I Googled.
That one time that I Googled pictures of my one-day-old surgery I had almost fainted on the hard floor, but today I was sitting down––It’s okay. I typed “What happens when you eat edibles on an empty stomach” and don’t quite remember what I found. (Probably because I was already stoned.) What I do clearly remember is, after getting this still unknown fact, suddenly recalling that one of the most important things to do when you get high for the first time is relaxing. You gotta keep you cool because if you start to panic the drug can extrapolate your fears and anxieties and now it really is shit town.
You mustn’t panic.
Next thing I know I'm typing “is 10 mg THC too much for first time getting high?”
A Quora thread popped up. In between all the stoner opinions, in my haze I could conclude the answer: It is.
I had to take this drug out of my system.
I panicked.
…
The air inside the bathroom was cloudy and felt almost oppressively smothering. A fruity smell was present all over. Lights were dim and they had this round colorful aura caused by moisture in the atmosphere. You could barely see the sink, the fogged-up mirror, the needs-to-be-vacuumed pink bath rug. There was this quietness only broken by a light finger drumming by the beautiful woman inside the screen.
Holding an oval wooden brush, the woman alternated between tapping her fingers on the back of it and going through its rubber bristles. It was one of those ASMR videos on Youtube. Being played inside my roommate’s MacBook, perched on a breakfast table on top of the bathtub.
He himself? Wearing a mint-green face mask and submerged to his lower lip in neon blue water, still fizzing a little from the also neon blue nine-dollar bath bomb he’d dropped in it 30 minutes ago. He was just two cucumber slices over his eyes away from representing the cliched image of a person in a spa. Drowsy, eyes almost closed, fully relaxed––he looked even more zooted than me.
While all this was happening inside our only bathroom, outside I was drunkenly stumbling out of my bedroom, through the living room, and into the kitchen.
Carrying my trash bin in one hand, I violently emptied the contents onto the floor. Oreo packets, dental floss, and body-fluid-stained tissues all got yeeted around the kitchen. I got on my knees and placed it in front of me as if I was about to pray to it, or to suck his trash-bin cock.
Took in a last big breath and I started fingering my throat.
Never in my life have I gone this far. And I’m not even talking about this drug-taking experiment, I’m talking about the literal distance my finger traveled down my throat. I believe I even touched my throat anus (epiglottis) with my finger. I must've done this very violently because after puking a shot glass’ worth of whatever I had in my stomach into the trash bin, the right side of my throat hurt. It felt roughed up and violated. Which is what I, in my drug-induced hysteria, did.
I stopped the fingering after I heard Rick pausing his ASMR video to––I’m guessing––locate the source of this not at all ASMR noise (at least not a socially accepted one). The embarrassment of him seeing me panic out of an edible beat my actual fear of death by weed gummie. So I pulled my hand out of my esophagus and shot out a couple of loud, fake coughs.
I peeked inside the trash bin and started combing through my own vomit with my fingers to try to find pieces of the gummy that would make me feel like these theatrics were worth it. But alas, that Taki-Fuego-red viscous liquid told no tales of barely-legal substances.
I heard the bathtub plug come off and quickly got up to clean my violated trash bin in the sink. Then I picked up the trash littered all around the kitchen and jumped out of sight just in time for my roommate to come out of the bathroom and see a serene, untouched kitchen.
“How was your bath?” I asked, while “walking out of my room.”
“Oh, it was so goo––”
“––The Takis made me cough,” I interrupted.
“Really? They are very spicy!” he unknowingly answered.
After all this episode I was still scared, but not in panic anymore. That’s the sole benefit of social anxiety: it even breaks the fear of dying.
I decided I was going to actually try to relax now. With a sore throat, I got in bed and put ‘Turning Red’ on my iPad. Not even with a gun to my head I could explain to you the plot of that movie, but I had a pleasant experience.
When the movie ended I felt a bit drowsy but my mind was again focused. The high was over and my troubled experiment had concluded with a single thesis: My safe place, as with pretty much everything in my life, is movies.
…
Since that experience, I’ve kept on experimenting with edibles. I’ve taken a semi-scientific approach to this, keeping track of the mg and the time that it takes me to get high depending on the type of edible (a gummy takes an hour to kick in, while a cookie takes almost two). Now that I’m a total expert in the field, I’ve begun to actually enjoy myself while being high.
A couple of weeks ago I put on one of those “galaxy lamps”, which are basically just some cheap LED lights and a green laser pointer stuck inside some melted plastic, got stoned, and put on King Gizzard and the Lizzard Wizard’s ‘Butterfly 3000’ album. I just laid on my couch listening to music while stargazing the Chinese-made personal starfield on the ceiling. I felt inside the third act of ‘2001’. Then went to pee, sat down (it’s cleaner and more comfortable, sue me), and spent what it felt like 45 minutes peeing. Amazing night.
And while movies are definitely my safe space during these experiences, I’m almost ashamed to say that browsing through TikTok while being high is almost as fun as going to Disneyland. I’ve gotten the deepest, girthiest laughs I can remember having from it, and also had my mind completely blown from the most mundane type of videos. The only downside of this is that my poor 4-people contact list on the app gets flooded with notifications from all the “funny” videos I send during. All in all, 10 out of 10––would definitely recommend.
I have yet to do this outside, or in the company of others (on account of me not having any friends here in Vancouver). But I’m excited to try.
The future is bright for this born again stoner, newly baptized into the Ganja church. If there’s anything for you to take away from this piece other than entertainment is this: do your research beforehand, start slow, make sure you’re in a physically and mentally safe space, don’t freak out, and DO NOT DO IT ON AN EMPTY STOMACH BECAUSE YOU WILL MOST CERTAINLY DIE ON THE SPOT (I assume).
This essay is part of Alberto's first book "Today I Turn 30... And I'm Terrified".
You can get it NOW by searching for it on Amazon or easily by clicking this LINK . Or the button below.
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I’ve never been one to partake in drug-taking. I'm not even much of a drinker if I'm being honest. On account of me being super paranoid of every itsy-bitsy tick, feeling, or itch out of the ordinary on my body, and also because I have a crippling phobia of getting dizzy. More on that later.This is not to say I’m a substance prude, I usually have two cups of coffee a day and I drink alcohol occasionally. I’ve been flat-out, getting-naked-in-front-of-strangers kind of drunk a couple of times; but I had never, ever, deliberately consumed any type of drugs other than alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco.
The latter of which I only did for precisely one night––the night that I turned 18.
My friends and I went to somebody’s house to drink beer and chat all night while we waited till the clock turned to midnight and my actual birthday to be. I guess one of my bad-asser friends had brought a pack of cigs, as we cool-cats like to call ‘em, and in between Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Maroon 5’s “Makes me wonder” blasting out from some iPod Mini speakers, I smoked them out of existence.
I probably smoked around 10 cigarettes that night, and I guess it was enough smoke for me because after that I never again touched another cigarette. Don’t exactly know the reasoning behind this decision, but it was probably the fact that living with two parents that smoked as their life depended on it already gave my teenage lungs enough second-hand smoke to even leave some for my future grandchildren to enjoy. A very fortunate decision-making from 18-year-old Alberto, because nowadays not only smoking is not considered cool anymore, packs sell for CRA-ZY money.
Also, and let me climb on top of my soapbox for a moment here, smoking is so stupid. Please, let us be honest with ourselves. It has zero health benefits, it bothers everyone around, and I strongly believe people like cigarettes or feel good when they consume them just because of the addiction factor, not because inhaling smoke in your lungs physically gives you pleasure. I see no upside to smoking. It just puts a strain on your finances and also on the way you interact with the world around you. You have to take a break from anything you’re doing to go smoke, involving going fucking outside of every place you are because it's rightly illegal to smoke indoors. Have you tried looking for a place to rent as a smoker? Unremorsefully kissing a non-smoker? Peacefully taking a long flight? Cigarettes just mess with everything, man. They aren't just a thing that you sometimes do or have. They are like those balls and chains to the ankle we saw in cartoons––they take away your liberty.
Anyways, camp counselor Beto OFF, I remember that night not only for being the only night that I actually smoked but because one of my friends (let’s call him Pepe) got so drunk that he sliced his finger with a broken beer bottle. Joe, another friend, offered to drive Pepe to the hospital to get it stitched up. This because he was worried for him, but mostly because he wanted to seize every opportunity he had to use his new car. A couple of hours later they returned, Pepe with a stitched-up finger and Joe with his 2009 Peugeot insides splashed in vomit, beer, and blood.
This gives me the perfect segway to talk about alcohol.
I started drinking when I was about 15 years old. Some demon-child brought an Absolut Vodka bottle to a party that I was attending to, and mixed with some sweet juice, I drank a bit. This led me to start exploring the wonderful world of alcohol; which around that time (2006-7) was starting to transition from being one of hard, you’re-gonna-go-blind liquors, to being fun, colorful, and pop.
Don’t know if you kids remember a time when alcoholic drinks weren't the sweet and mild drinks that we now have and that might give you diabetes before even brushing your liver. But back in the ol’ days we practically only had fancy and expensive “spirits”, or working-class beers and hard liquor. Then came Absolut-fucking-Vodka.
Absolute Vodka started a revolution. At least in the Mexican provincial town I lived in, every cool kid was obsessed with it. People mixed it with cranberry, orange, and pineapple juices and got totally hammered. Then they started coming up with FLAVORS. Mind. Completely. Blown. You had the citrus one, the raspberry one, the mandarine one, the pear one––YES, GOD FORSAKEN PEAR HAD A FLAVOURED VODKA. And then they started to come out with special edition bottles. I remember seeing an LGBT-rainbow one, a disco-ball one, and a beautiful red-sequin one that looked like Shakira’s skirt or something like that. Shakira, Shakira! They were exciting times and I was there and ready to consume.
So I started slow, drinking one or two glasses when I was at a party or with friends, and slowly searching for the limit on how much I could handle. Limit which I had no trouble finding because a couple of months after I started being “a drinker” I was invited to go to the newest and coolest nightclub in that Mexican provincial town called Oaxaca: Circo.
Circo was a club that had a circus type of theme. It wasn’t fancy or anything, just a warehouse floor and walls, with a medium-sized, red and white tent instead of a roof; but it was for sure the talk of the town that year.
On the fateful night in question, I took my provincianas cousins that had visited from another (and debatably rural-er) Mexican provincial town called Torreón to the coolest and hippest place around. To have some drinks, dance to “La Gasolina”, and perhaps land a phone number or two. Who knows?
Well, I know, because it happened to me in the past, and let me tell you: only one of those three things happened that night for me.
We went to Circo joined by some friends with the plan of drinking beer like the poor teen-aged peasants we were, because since the club was new––it was expensive. But one of those friends, let’s call her Dana, in I’m guessing an effort to push-boost ourselves to the next socioeconomic step (at least in image) had decided to get an exciting boon: a bottle of Absolut Raspberry and cranberry juice to mix it with.
I was offered to drink some and perhaps hypnotized by the raspberry-red colored bottle, I accepted. And again and again I accepted, because by the minute 61 since arriving at the place I was already seeing a non-existent clown show in the middle of the club. I was feeling the happy high of alcohol, but all was steady. Shortly later, the need to pee arose in my being.
I stood up from our table and immediately felt it. Fuck, I think I’m a little bit tipsy. I took a couple of steps, and when I almost fell on top of some strangers’ table I thought, OK, no––I am drunk.
In a deep haze I remember walking to the bathroom and the colorful corridor leading to it spinning like crazy, and by the time I finally got inside I knew it: I am fuuuucked.
I burst through a stall because my need to vomit surpassed the need to pee.
… And I blacked out.
Next thing I know I’m back at the table, sitting down in one of those uncomfortably not-cool bean bags and puking all the precious and expensive Absolut Raspberry on the floor by a little nook between the wall and a sofa. Trying to avoid getting kicked out by Circo’s security. I can see some concerned looks from my posse, which I guess were planning our next move to take me back home; but suddenly a tremendous roar filled up the place––Daddy Yankee’s “La Gasolina” started to play.
Everyone, including my group, yelled.
Black again.
When my consciousness came back, I was outside on the sidewalk and noticed a couple of man-hands fondling my lower abdomen.
The owner of the pair of said hands was a burly man that I barely knew, and he was dry-humping me from behind. There, basically in the middle of the street, and in the two-thousands. We were not that socially progressive yet for this activity between two men to be acceptable. At least not in Oaxaca.
When a little bit more of my awareness came through, I saw that the rest of my group was surrounding us and discovered that this over-clothes rapist was actually pushing in my belly, trying to make me vomit all the alcohol I had drank that night. In a futile effort to sober me up a little bit, I guess. (Not quite sure that this is how it works though). And after several pumps and a little bit of vomit out, we went back home.
Next morning, with a scolding from mom on me already, my whole family and I had to go to a christening in a small town outside Oaxaca. And with the sun completely blazing on top, everyone in that church got second-hand drunk from my cousins and I’s Absolut Raspberry fumes.
After that time I’ve been hammered more than a couple of times, but most of my alcohol frenzy era was contained within my high school years. When I turned 20 and started working at a nightclub, I kinda got sick of getting sick with alcohol. When, after 6 months of working there, I quit, I dramatically slowed down on my weekly ml of alcoholic consumption. Today I don’t remember when was the last time I got fully, balls to the wall drunk; which is good because, again, in this economy is not as easy to get drunk as it was before the 2008 market crash.
This clearly depends on each person, but for me to be able to get tipsy I need around five to seven beers. So that's like $15-17 dollars from where I’m from, currently; and if we’re talking liquor store-bought. Not very cheap or feasible for my current immigrant lifestyle, to be completely transparent.
So, what’s left for me to do to get those highly coveted “funnies”?
Weed.
As I told before, I come from a no-drugs background. My parents, both well into their teen-aged years in the 70s, were the type of kids that preferred listening to Trova music and reading semi-liberal texts instead of doing drugs. And I guess I inherited the lame gene because I never got interested in doing any type of illegal drugs. The “doing something illegal” always turning me down from trying to do so. And, honestly, most of my social circles never really did them either. So there were little to no chances of me falling into drugs. We were good, preppy Catholic boys… back then, at least.
But, history and trends repeat themselves through time. “The wheel turns, and nothing is ever new” because not unlike alcohol in the aughts, marihuana started to get very hip in the latter half of the 2010s. This wasn’t a substance for lowlifes with dirt-caked ankles and funky-smelling hair, now the cool kids are doing it!
At first, I didn't pay a lot of attention to it because I hate the act of smoking, and weed was just a 50-times worse-smelling cigarette. Really, whenever someone smokes weed it becomes a whole neighborhood-block affair. Last October I went to New York City with my family and the whole place reeks of marihuana. So, if you read my essay titled “Welcome to New York” you can add that to the list of foul smells that the city offers. I don’t know how New-yorkers cope, I would fucking vote red and start wearing my Handmaid’s Tale fit just out of spite for making me live in what smells to be the devil’s ass hole.
But, as luck would have it, in came capitalism and it turned that smelly herb into beautiful edibles. Like a substance version of Cinderella.
Just like vodka, marihuana got a makeover in the form of delicious candy and baked goods; and also butter, soda, oils, candles, tea, ice cream, cream, and even soap. The sky’s really the limit for these entrepreneurial stoners. And me, once again, was ready to consume.
… Not really, because in Mexico they were still kinda illegal, so I had to wait until I was in a progressive, first-world country to be able to explore this exciting world without the fear of being labeled as a criminal and being put down behind the shed like a rabid dog.
That puts the story in the present day, in the year of our lord 2022, when I moved to Canada.
Time to get fucking high.
…
It took me a bit of time to start exploring the wonderful world of being drugged because I was getting my immigrant bearings here in this land up north. I did keep seeing a bunch of brick and mortar places with ominously tinted windows where one could go in sad and empty-handed, and come out happy and holding precious drugs in the form of benign candy, but I never got the courage to go in. What if I ingest “a weed” and die from an overdose, all alone in my room?
It wasn't until month 3 in Vancouver when I had already visited most touristy places inside the city and managed to get me a steady place to live and a steady roommate to live with, that I decided that it was time to freaking do this.
One fateful night my roommate, let’s call him Rick, and I went to have dinner at our local White Spot. This is like the Canadian version of Applebees (but not nearly as good––sorry, Canadians). We decided to walk there. On our route through Kingsway Avenue, we found a place called Kiaro. Fogged out windows, a giant 19+ sign, and an LGBT flag on the door: A weed shop, we both collectively thought.
“Have you ever had an edible?” I asked, subconsciously seeking some validation for my drug-addict cravings.
“Yeah. One time, a small one. You?”
“Nope. Never. But I kinda want to try one.”
“Want to get one?”
“Really?... Yeah, ok. I guess,” me trying to not look too excited replied. It’s on!
We got in and the place was everything but the dark, dank, rat-infested places I had imagined them being inside my head. This looked kinda like a knock-off version of an Apple Store: White walls with minimum decoration and displayed products on, light wooden furniture, clean floors, a dark grey sofa and comfy chairs kind of area on one side, and two white and wood stations with touch-screen PCs on top in the middle of the store.
Weed’s gone full Silicon Valley start-up.
We were immediately approached by a husky, blonde, long-haired guy greeting us and asking what we were looking for. After explaining to him that we were a bit new to the apparently bright and sleek world of drugs and we wanted to try edibles, he recommended a pair of acai gummies with a blend of 5mg THC and 25mg CBD per piece.
Let me, a fucking expert, explain the science behind weed.
Most things edible-cannabis fall within two metrics: THC and CBD. In layman’s (and because I don’t know better) these are chemical substances that make you “go high” and most edibles have a mix of both. The difference between them is that THC makes your body “feel high”: laugh a lot, not understanding your own language, hyper-focusing, all that fun stuff; and CBD makes your body “relax”, and that’s why your aunt with myalgia loves to drop that shit under her tongue every night.
Now, depending on what you want from your night you can play with those chemical levels. Some edibles have more CBD mg’s and make you droopy, and some have more THC and make you funnier. So, for example, a cookie that has a mix of 10 mg THC to 1 mg CBD is gonna make you feel more high than slow.
We idiots (Rick and I) obviously didn’t know any of this beforehand, so we bought the 5 mg THC to 25 gm CBD pack of two gummies the husky bro recommended.
“This is a good place to start,” the dude said. “Just remember to eat beforehand. Never consume an edible on an empty stomach.”
“YES! NEVER ON AN EMPTY STOMACH,” a ruby-read haired woman all but screamed from behind a counter. “It could get ugly otherwise.”
“Oh yeah, we are going for dinner first,” said Rick. “Thank you, bye!”
And we left.
What’s with eating it on an empty stomach? What could happen? Why everyone was so scared of it? I left thinking.
We had a slightly better than mediocre burger from White Spot and while walking back home we decided to pop in a gummie each; which meant that I had 2.5 mg THC and 12.5 mg CBD in me.
I was very excited, and when we got home I sat down on the couch expecting to suddenly start fucking flying through the cosmos. I also was a bit nervous about two things: the ominously given message from the red-haired woman, and much more so, the possibility of getting very dizzy.
…
When I was younger, around middle-school age, I suffered from vertigo. Or at least that’s what my family and I thought.
Every night, when I went to bed, I got dizzy. I’d jump in my bed ready to relax and recharge for next day’s challenges and I could not do any of it because it was as if I’d just came back from drinking my body weight in alcohol. And it took me ages to fall asleep because I would start to panic, then I’d stand up walk a bit to calm down, and then try again. This could go on for hours.
Don’t remember exactly when or how it started. But it was excruciating. Like an inverse vampire, I’d start to dread sundowns because it meant that it was almost time to go to bed and get dizzy.
My parents took me to get tested for actual vertigo. I remember going to a doctor and her splashing water inside my ear and making me follow an oscillating red light from a machine in an effort to learn the cause of my vertigo. But we never found the answer. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with me, that I was healthy. The issue was all in my head––in my psyche, to be specific.
That was worse. Because at least if I actually had some type of ailment I could get treatment for it to overcome it and get better. But no, there was nothing wrong. And after hearing that nonchalant answer from the doctors, my parents also started to kinda brush it off as a teenager quirk.
(You can skip this next paragraph if you are sensitive to self-harm triggers.)
I was left there without answers and being described as healthy. But every night I went to bed and I suffered sometimes for hours because of this mental thing I had. And I felt helpless. Helpless from science and helpless from my parents. I was around 12 or 13 and I remember one night briefly but seriously thinking of ending it. For a minute I thought of an easy way out of it. I can clearly remember thinking about a specific serrated knife we had in our kitchen. But maybe because I wasn’t brave enough, or because of the general lethargy that permeates most of my actions in life, the moment passed. It lasted so little but it was meaningful enough for me to be able to remember it clearly more than 15 years later. Glad it passed, though! Wouldn’t have been able to live through the superhero-obsessed media era, the pandemic, the housing crisis, the overall social unrest, and all the other cool things we got going on right now!
So I was left on my own, to fix it on my own. And 13-year-old Beto decided to take the same approach he would later then take to fix his acne: Fucking fuck it!
If I was gonna get dizzy every night I was gonna get dizzy every night. Whatever. I still went to bed and started to fly as if I was glued on a frisbee, and it was awful, but I added a bit of self-berating into the mix.
Oh, you’re getting dizzy? Then get fucking dizzy, you idiot! Poor you, alone and spinning in his room. Get fucked you twisted, faux-vertigo-having, weird-body-shaped, non-sport-playing faggot! Hope you get even dizzier!
And weirdly, it kinda worked! I started to be able to go to sleep quicker, and before I knew or realized it, I wasn’t getting dizzy anymore at night.
Nowadays, I sometimes fall in little ruts when I get dizzy again. It usually lasts for a couple of nights and then I’m over it. I have some specific triggers like remembering the swaying Viking ship ride every fair has, picturing me looking outside a ship’s porthole and seeing sea then sky then sea again, and generally imagining oscillating stuff (after writing this, I’m FOR SURE getting dizzy tonight––fun). I can also get dizzy on command. I’m the worst x-men ever.
That is why I have an almost-phobia of getting dizzy, and try savagely to avoid the triggers that make my head go turn-turn.
“Then how come you sometimes deliberately got drunk?”
Because I’m masochistic, I guess. And also because my problem really is when I get dizzy without a cause under my control. Consuming alcohol with friends it’s in my “You’re gonna get dizzy when you get back home, you know” list of activities I got going on. In between going swimming and riding rollercoasters. These are things that I KNOW are going to give me trouble back in bed, so I tolerate them. And do them infrequently enough that they’re not as big of an issue.
Weed, at least right now, does not qualify to be on this list. And I remember hearing someone say that there was a possibility to get “the spins” from consuming the drug.
…
Back again on my sofa after eating the acai gummy. I’m nervous because I really don’t know a lot about this process. At this point, I know this about edibles:They can take hours to kick in.They get you “high” (whatever that means).They can give you “the spins”.ABSOLUTELY DO NOT EAT THEM ON AN EMPTY STOMACH. (Why? Don’t know.)
All I could do is to play the waiting game, so I did.
I waited…
… and waited.
“Do you feel something?” Rick asked from his room.
“Not really.”
At hour 4 I lost hope. The only thing different in me was that I was feeling a little bit sleepy. And I couldn't even blame it fully on the edible because it was already 11:30 pm and I had been up since 6 am that day.
My first time getting high experience was a bust. Nothing happened.
But I was undeterred, I was going to get high no matter what the cost. So for the next couple of weeks I kept on trying to get high. Bought another acai round and ingested BOTH gummies––nothing. A couple of days later I bought another flavor––also nothing.
What’s wrong with me? Am I unable to enjoy this pleasure of life? No love, no money, no sex, and now no getting high? Why did I come to this earth for? Just to suffer?
I was ready to abandon the idea of me getting high because it was starting to feel like these fucking stoners were just selling me overpriced candy. But one Friday I decided it was enough.
I went to Kiaro after school and told a lady there, “I’ve been getting gummies but with no success. I need something stronger.”
“Okay, maybe what you need is to up the THC level of edible,” she answered.
“What’s that?”
She then proceed to lay out the scientific lesson I gave you a couple of paragraphs ago.
“Ok. Gimme that one then,” I concluded.
The edible to end all edibles was a 5-pack of blue raspberry gummies, which had a blend of 10 mg THC to less than 1% CBD––so mostly get-high juice. It was perfect because I could ingest gummy by gummy and up my level of drug-ness in levels of 2 mg.
I decided to “take it slow” and eat two and a half gummies (5 mg THC in me) right outside the store, like a fucking drug-addicted vagrant. I checked the clock to measure the time it was going to take me to get high. That way I could use the same metrics and methodology in future drug-related endeavors. Not to write a second personal analogy in the same paragraph but I felt like a scientist––a ganja scientist.
Went back home and yet again sat on my couch to be ready to get as high as both Petronas towers stacked together. Rick, my roommate, was around busy planning his own mental health Friday, so I really was left alone to have this new experience. It’s the good one now.
An hour went by and again fucking nothing. I decided to eat another gummie and a half (8 mg THC in me).
After 15 minutes and still nothing, I said “Fuck it” and had the last gummie. This put the THC mg in me to a whopping 10.
I spend around 10 minutes waiting on the sofa as if I was pretending to be the Mexican Akshobhya (one of the Five Wisdom Buddhas, you uncultured swine), and suddenly an itch––a tingling––started to happen deep in me.
But this feeling wasn't a physical one; no, sir, this was an EMOTIONAL one.
What if something wrong happens? What if I get the spins and get very dizzy for hours non-stop? My Medical Services Plan hasn’t yet arrived. What if something goes REALLY wrong and I had to be taken to the hospital? It would break me financially! Would my roommate be able to help me? He barely speaks English and does not have any experience dealing with this! What happens if I ingest marijuana on an empty stomach? DID I EAT ENOUGH?! I DIDN’T EAT ENOUGH HAVE I?!
I jumped out of my padmasana and ran to the fridge. Cold, white rice.
I splashed a little soy sauce on it and stick it in the microwave for one minute. While waiting for this I found a half-eaten bag of Takis Fuego that had exactly six Takis left in it and I all but poured them into my open mouth from above.
When the rice was “ready”, I took it out and started eating it like a hungry Goku from ‘Dragon Ball Z’. I had to put food in me lest I die here and turn into yet another meaningless number in the yearly “Migrant Deaths and Disappearances” pie chart the government puts out for scholar Caucasians to feel a little bit bad about for exactly four seconds till they scroll down to another page.
After finishing my one-minute hearty meal I went back to my sofa to twiddle my thumbs and wait for Armageddon. Oh my god. What the fuck is going to happen to me?
At this point into the experience, I suddenly decided to do more “previous research” about it. So, exactly like that time that I was branding a one-day-old gash wound in my lower abdomen from a surgery, I decided to do probably the worst thing you can do in these sensitive situations––I Googled.
That one time that I Googled pictures of my one-day-old surgery I had almost fainted on the hard floor, but today I was sitting down––It’s okay. I typed “What happens when you eat edibles on an empty stomach” and don’t quite remember what I found. (Probably because I was already stoned.) What I do clearly remember is, after getting this still unknown fact, suddenly recalling that one of the most important things to do when you get high for the first time is relaxing. You gotta keep you cool because if you start to panic the drug can extrapolate your fears and anxieties and now it really is shit town.
You mustn’t panic.
Next thing I know I'm typing “is 10 mg THC too much for first time getting high?”
A Quora thread popped up. In between all the stoner opinions, in my haze I could conclude the answer: It is.
I had to take this drug out of my system.
I panicked.
…
The air inside the bathroom was cloudy and felt almost oppressively smothering. A fruity smell was present all over. Lights were dim and they had this round colorful aura caused by moisture in the atmosphere. You could barely see the sink, the fogged-up mirror, the needs-to-be-vacuumed pink bath rug. There was this quietness only broken by a light finger drumming by the beautiful woman inside the screen.
Holding an oval wooden brush, the woman alternated between tapping her fingers on the back of it and going through its rubber bristles. It was one of those ASMR videos on Youtube. Being played inside my roommate’s MacBook, perched on a breakfast table on top of the bathtub.
He himself? Wearing a mint-green face mask and submerged to his lower lip in neon blue water, still fizzing a little from the also neon blue nine-dollar bath bomb he’d dropped in it 30 minutes ago. He was just two cucumber slices over his eyes away from representing the cliched image of a person in a spa. Drowsy, eyes almost closed, fully relaxed––he looked even more zooted than me.
While all this was happening inside our only bathroom, outside I was drunkenly stumbling out of my bedroom, through the living room, and into the kitchen.
Carrying my trash bin in one hand, I violently emptied the contents onto the floor. Oreo packets, dental floss, and body-fluid-stained tissues all got yeeted around the kitchen. I got on my knees and placed it in front of me as if I was about to pray to it, or to suck his trash-bin cock.
Took in a last big breath and I started fingering my throat.
Never in my life have I gone this far. And I’m not even talking about this drug-taking experiment, I’m talking about the literal distance my finger traveled down my throat. I believe I even touched my throat anus (epiglottis) with my finger. I must've done this very violently because after puking a shot glass’ worth of whatever I had in my stomach into the trash bin, the right side of my throat hurt. It felt roughed up and violated. Which is what I, in my drug-induced hysteria, did.
I stopped the fingering after I heard Rick pausing his ASMR video to––I’m guessing––locate the source of this not at all ASMR noise (at least not a socially accepted one). The embarrassment of him seeing me panic out of an edible beat my actual fear of death by weed gummie. So I pulled my hand out of my esophagus and shot out a couple of loud, fake coughs.
I peeked inside the trash bin and started combing through my own vomit with my fingers to try to find pieces of the gummy that would make me feel like these theatrics were worth it. But alas, that Taki-Fuego-red viscous liquid told no tales of barely-legal substances.
I heard the bathtub plug come off and quickly got up to clean my violated trash bin in the sink. Then I picked up the trash littered all around the kitchen and jumped out of sight just in time for my roommate to come out of the bathroom and see a serene, untouched kitchen.
“How was your bath?” I asked, while “walking out of my room.”
“Oh, it was so goo––”
“––The Takis made me cough,” I interrupted.
“Really? They are very spicy!” he unknowingly answered.
After all this episode I was still scared, but not in panic anymore. That’s the sole benefit of social anxiety: it even breaks the fear of dying.
I decided I was going to actually try to relax now. With a sore throat, I got in bed and put ‘Turning Red’ on my iPad. Not even with a gun to my head I could explain to you the plot of that movie, but I had a pleasant experience.
When the movie ended I felt a bit drowsy but my mind was again focused. The high was over and my troubled experiment had concluded with a single thesis: My safe place, as with pretty much everything in my life, is movies.
…
Since that experience, I’ve kept on experimenting with edibles. I’ve taken a semi-scientific approach to this, keeping track of the mg and the time that it takes me to get high depending on the type of edible (a gummy takes an hour to kick in, while a cookie takes almost two). Now that I’m a total expert in the field, I’ve begun to actually enjoy myself while being high.
A couple of weeks ago I put on one of those “galaxy lamps”, which are basically just some cheap LED lights and a green laser pointer stuck inside some melted plastic, got stoned, and put on King Gizzard and the Lizzard Wizard’s ‘Butterfly 3000’ album. I just laid on my couch listening to music while stargazing the Chinese-made personal starfield on the ceiling. I felt inside the third act of ‘2001’. Then went to pee, sat down (it’s cleaner and more comfortable, sue me), and spent what it felt like 45 minutes peeing. Amazing night.
And while movies are definitely my safe space during these experiences, I’m almost ashamed to say that browsing through TikTok while being high is almost as fun as going to Disneyland. I’ve gotten the deepest, girthiest laughs I can remember having from it, and also had my mind completely blown from the most mundane type of videos. The only downside of this is that my poor 4-people contact list on the app gets flooded with notifications from all the “funny” videos I send during. All in all, 10 out of 10––would definitely recommend.
I have yet to do this outside, or in the company of others (on account of me not having any friends here in Vancouver). But I’m excited to try.
The future is bright for this born again stoner, newly baptized into the Ganja church. If there’s anything for you to take away from this piece other than entertainment is this: do your research beforehand, start slow, make sure you’re in a physically and mentally safe space, don’t freak out, and DO NOT DO IT ON AN EMPTY STOMACH BECAUSE YOU WILL MOST CERTAINLY DIE ON THE SPOT (I assume).
This essay is part of Alberto's first book "Today I Turn 30... And I'm Terrified".
You can get it NOW by searching for it on Amazon or easily by clicking this LINK . Or the button below.
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