I smoked for the first time my sophomore year of high school. Smoke might be generous—I took a few puffs off my crush’s gas station cart before she ditched me for a Zoom therapy appointment, leaving me to watch “The Office” with her best friend (whom I had just met, and was incidentally drop-dead gorgeous). But the speakers didn’t work, and I was too skittish and stoned to talk to her, so we sat in silence and read the captions.
Back then, I seldom smoked. To be honest, I don’t remember the time after that, or after that, or after that. I was too focused on school and tennis to get high regularly. Senior year, I wanted to win the district championships, so I quit smoking and drinking entirely. I didn’t touch anything again until the following July 4. Even then, I only smoked a few times before leaving for Harvard. But on a whim, the week before classes started, I bought my first two carts—Purple Haze and another strain I can’t remember. They sucked—constantly clogged, needing a blinker just to get a decent hit—but they got the job done. Plus, as a plugless 18-year-old, I didn’t have many options.
It wasn’t long before I learned what I could and couldn’t do while stoned. One puff would end my Math 55 and Stat 110 p-sets almost instantly, but I could cough up a Hist-Lit 10 essay as long as I could see my computer screen. Naturally, when the spring semester began, I decided to take easier classes. I swapped my math/stat ambitions for a social studies/econ double, trading my quant pipe dreams for plans to attend law school. My grades didn’t suffer—they improved—but I was working less and smoking more than ever.
Late in my freshman year—March or April—my long-distance girlfriend called me. She was worried. My sessions had crept earlier into the days, and she feared I’d end up perpetually high. Impossible. I brushed it off like ash from a joint—quickly, carelessly, devoid of a second thought. That could never happen to me, right? After the call was over, I grabbed my papers and filters, eager to blow off some steam. When we broke up weeks later, I did the same.
That summer, I taught math to high-achieving middle schoolers. I got off work at 3 p.m. and would be on my back porch, bong in hand, fifteen minutes later. This became my routine every day after work —drive home, smoke a bowl, and go to the gym. I only delayed my high on nights I was seeing my new girlfriend, and even then, I’d light up soon after she left.
When she returned to her school two weeks before I did mine, I had no reason to stay sober. Every morning, I’d wake up, pack a bowl, and smoke half of it before putting breakfast on the stove. While my meal cooked, I’d finish the bowl and pack another. After eating, I’d head to the gym, returning home to the bowl I’d prepared earlier. I’d put lunch on the stove and smoke that bowl, too. I’d smoke into the night and wake up stoned. I forgot what sober felt like.
In high school, a friend of mine was a massive Juice WRLD fan—the kind that knows the unreleased tracks like “Coraline” and “Californication.” In one of her favorite songs, “Rich and Blind,” there’s this lyric that goes, “Sometimes when I’m high, I feel high in reverse.” A green stoner then, its meaning escaped me—over time, I began to understand. It’s a nod to a fleeting high—a promise of euphoria eternally one bong rip away, an anticipation that always turns to disappointment. Sometimes, when I smoke, I feel like Tantalus, yearning for a state just out of reach.
For those two weeks before returning to Harvard, smoking weed was sobering. It numbed me. The half dozen bowls I’d smoke daily did little more than dull my senses and deafen my thoughts, and yet I’d always find myself packing another. I don’t remember much of those days—just a lingering melancholy and my pink pinstripe bong.
When I returned to school that fall, I bought myself a new bong. It sat on the window of my bedroom in Eliot House overlooking JFK Park, always half-loaded. None of my classes that semester took attendance, and I would show up to most of my sections stoned. One story sticks out: I once rolled a joint, smoked it, and then showed up to a two-hour tutorial fifteen minutes late. When I arrived at class, the only empty seat was next to the instructor. Reeking of weed, I struggled to build on my classmates’ comments, scrambling to find quotes to defend my poorly formed arguments. What would’ve been a warning sign to most, I laughed off with my friends.
Spring was more of the same. I broke bongs and bought new ones; I smoked half an ounce a week. I slept through classes and smoked outside my sections. I used to tell my friends, “Everything is better high.” I believed it. A part of me still does.
Looking back, sophomore year is a foggy montage. I can barely recall the tales my friends reminisce over, and even the ones I can feel more like stories I was told than stories I was part of.
On the last day of the year, I woke up at 4 a.m. for a sunrise session with my best friends. They all slept through it. Not that it mattered—I doubt I would’ve remembered anyway.
Soon after the summer started, I bought myself another cart—the first I had owned since the pair I bought freshman year. Straight from the dispensary, it delivered smooth hits that sent me spinning into a synthetic high. And since I was just researching, I could indulge as much as I wanted—which meant incessantly. I spent most days on FaceTime with my friends, smoking for hours as if we were still in the same Eliot common room.
Even in that haze, reality lurked in the background. I had missed a final exam due to illness and was scheduled to make it up in August; but every time I sat down to study, I ended up hitting the cart instead. Soon, the test was less than a month away, and I hadn’t glanced at the material in months—and given I did most of the work stoned, I remembered almost none of it.
Somehow, I mustered up the willpower to take three weeks off. It was my longest break since arriving at Harvard. I hated every second of it. I had insomnia, and the little sleep I got was riddled with nightmares that left me waking up in puddles of sweat. In those moments, I saw just how deeply I’d come to rely on that smoky escape. It was terrifying—I remember confessing to my father that I would lie in bed for two, sometimes three hours each night, staring at my ceiling and longing for rest. But just hours after I finished my final, there I was: bong in hand, blazed as can be.
People think weed isn’t addictive. Ask any stoner—they’ll tell you otherwise. Teenage smokers face a 17% chance of weed addiction; for daily smokers, that figure is up to 50%. But long before I took my first cart rip back in high school, I thought this wasn’t the case—I was convinced weed addiction was a myth. As semesters passed, that myth shattered like my pink pinstripe bong and the dreams it took with it. Even when I pack a bowl with my friends now, I can’t help but acknowledge the irony: what I once saw as a harmless escape has come to dominate my existence, a bittersweet reminder of solace and surrender.
This year, my roommates and I tried to cut back. In September, we established rules: “No smoking after 10:30 p.m. on school nights” and “Only smoke three days between Sunday and Thursday.” But, predictably, those rules proved futile. We found ourselves bending the guidelines—stealing an extra day on a Thursday night or sneaking a late bowl after a long day of classes. We told each other that we would get serious the following week, but that promise evaporated as quickly as our kief.
Sometimes I wonder where I’d be if I had never taken that cart back in high school, or if I’d never bought my own before college. Would I have found the clarity I so often smoke for? In chasing a fleeting euphoria, I traded a sharp reality for a comfort that masked the true weight of my days. Now, I can’t help but think that maybe I sacrificed a part of me that, in its absence, leaves a gap of unremembered possibilities and lost dreams. Maybe, like A$AP Rocky says, “I smoked away my brain.” The math and stat p-sets I spent hours poring over freshman year are foreign to me now. I wonder what a younger me would think if he knew the reality he’d conjure for himself.
As I’ve written and reflected on my smoking habits, I’ve found myself confronting every lingering inhale of my hazy past. Each word feels like a puff of smoke, drifting through memories that aren’t mine. Coming to terms with the lows my habit has created is daunting, like staring at a sketch of my future that never made it off the page. Throughout writing this article, I’ve wondered if admitting that truth might just be the first step towards reversing my high. And yet, I’ve been baked this whole time.
It’s not as if I lack reasons to quit. I have family and friends I want to show up sober for, internships and ambitions that require a clear head, and the possibility of someday having a spouse and children who deserve a fully present father—not one clouded by smoke or, worse yet, debilitated by years of tar caked in his lungs finally taking their toll. But those reasons feel abstract, distant somehow, like they belong to a future version of myself. They aren’t yet tangible, rendering them incapable of combating the immediate comfort that weed provides.
One day, I’ll quit weed. I’ll have a wife and kids, a family and a job—a million real reasons not to find myself stoned at 9 a.m. on a Saturday (like I did today). So I’ll smoke when I see my very best friends—the same ones that spent all those days with me in that Eliot common room. We’ll reminisce over the memories we barely recall—the ones we smoked away. We’ll marvel over how much we used to smoke; we’ll look at our kids and hope they never do the same. But right now, I don’t have that family, those responsibilities, or even a clear picture of the person I’ll become. How could I quit for someone I can’t yet imagine? For now, I’ll smoke.
Sir Galahad writes annually for the Independent’s 4/20 issue.