Love at First Smokeout

Beautiful fresh purple flowers, ready to be trimmed.  

It was the beginning of 2012 and I was a freshman in college, just having become vice president of my local chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy.  I joined the group after a friend told me about it, citing it as the only stoner club she knew of.  I got involved with the club and almost immediately after got involved with the local medical marijuana initiative, which I later realized was absolute shit.  By the end of my first semester in the group, I was more qualified than anyone else for the position.  We had our meetings on Tuesdays in the Student Center, with me and the president at that time as head of the meeting.  We were trying to pull a somewhat broken group back together and expand it so it could once again be the legendary chapter everyone loved once again.  

It was the third meeting of the semester that I met John and in many ways my world got turned upside down.  We started the meeting like any other, waiting for all people to come in before starting.  It seemed like there were quite a few people there, something I noticed as I scanned the room.  It was then that I noticed him, wearing a Ron Paul hat with a blue drug rug and rasta themed shoes. I stared, as I had never seen him on campus that I knew of before that point.  Considering how he looked, it seemed like he'd be a hard sight to miss. The fact that I stared with the length of time and intensity that I did has actually been a joke throughout the relationship.

We started the meeting with introductions, in which we said our names and why we came to the meeting.  We went around in a circle, eventually landing on this mystery stoner.  "Hi my name is John, and I'm a victim of the drug war. I just got out of prison for growing pot." he said.  And there we had it, I was hooked. From what I understand, I stared at him the rest of the way through the meeting.  It being almost 5 years later, I honestly can't remember what we talked about that meeting other than maybe the medical initiative.

After the meeting, he came up to talk. I talked to him about getting out of prison and some other small talk that at this point.  I invited him to come on the weekly after meeting smoke out with the core members, done in a sketchy spot on campus. It was something we all could have been arrested for, but we risked it every week for the sake of tradition.

Not a fruit roll up, its a dab roll up.

It was realistically the back door entrance to one of the buildings on campus.  It had a glass face on the back, with these glass box indents where there were double doors entering into classrooms. I actually had gone there before by myself to smoke, only to find it brightly lit as class was in session.  But at night it had a certain reflective quality that for some reason made us feel safe, at least we could see our pursuers. We were somewhat responsible as we carried air purifying spray and had a rule to put the weed and grinders and such away before lighting up, lest we have to stow our pipes quickly. I never once got caught smoking there, but I was probably lucky.

We walked to the smoke spot and got down to business.  Soon we were all stoned, talking and laughing, resolving it was time to leave before we got arrested. John walked next to me the whole way to my dorm and we talked along the way.  I got to my dorm, we said goodbye and that was that. 

I finished the rest of the week, and ended up going to stay with some family stoner friends for the weekend.  I thought about John repeatedly and finally resolved to find him on Facebook and gain contact with him.  He wasn't terribly hard to find and soon we were chatting through messenger. Within a few messages he gave me his phone number and jumped offline.  We texted and resolved to hang out the next day, which was a monday, after classes. 

We met up on campus and walked to his house. He had his roommate with him who had a joined that we smoked on the way.  He happened to have rented a house with one of the nicest backyards I had ever seen. He had two other roommates who paid him rent to live there. We hung out upstairs until that evening when he showed me something truly special.  

I had mentioned I was a botany major with the end goal of growing pot.  At the time, I was looking for an apartment with my friend, the girl who had gotten me into SSDP.  We were going to grow pot for personal needs in whatever place we ended up, and I shared these plans with John, as I could tell I could trust him with the information.  He offered to teach me to grow, as he had years of professional experience at that point.  Finally, it seemed like I was going to learn something about plants!  

That night he took me and showed me his growroom, which at the time was fairly small.  He had two grow tents, one large one small in the room.  The large one had fairly small, but very healthy pot plants that he said he had just flipped to the flower cycle, that is changing the light schedule from 24 hours or 18 hours a day of lights to only 12, with a 12 hour dark cycle.  This triggers the plants to produce the flowers we all know and love.  There wasn't much happening at that time, save for a few white hairs that he pointed out to me. 

And here begins the adventure that is my life in many ways.  Before I met John, life was fairly boring, despite being in college, the supposed most exciting time of my life.  I had few interests, and fewer hobbies.  I spent my free time watching netflix.  SSDP gave me something to do, which was smoke pot and talk to people about how it should be legalized.  I wanted something more and with John I got it.  He was the first person I've met who's been truly honest about who he said he was, from the beginning.  I was out there, getting signatures thinking I was doing something special.  There he was, overgrowing the government, truly doing something special. I had already been looking into Ron Paul and decided to support him, before meeting John, but it wasn't until I was with him that I looked into Libertarianism at all.  I had never really read, or enjoyed reading at least, anything remotely non-fiction, but I spent the first several months of our relationship reading all sorts of non-fiction, from glassblowing textbooks to libertarian philosophy books.  

It was also here that I truly dedicated my life to cannabis, as I soon after broke my face like a jackass.  It was then and still is necessary for what I consider to be good life quality. I moved in not long after and was essentially balls deep in a highly illegal, but exciting situation.  I stuck with it, and while places changed, we were always either growing or in pursuit of growing again.  I've not looked back as I've got a love for this plant that makes it worth dedicating my life to it.