Features Reporter
Photo by Michael Wong
The alarm starts blaring again, for the third time this morning. He (we’ll aptly call him Bud from here) slaps his hand over the alarm’s buttons again, but this time his feet hit the ground.
Groggy from the blunt he smoked the night before, Bud had planned for a 30-minute fight with the snooze button.
There isn’t much noise coming from his side of the table as Bud loads a pinch from his grinder to the bowl. He sparks it, inhales and breathes out. Suddenly, the gloomy look leaves his eyes.
While it’s no news that marijuana is now legal in Colorado, what may be surprising is the success that sales for recreational use have had.
Medical marijuana already has had its place in Colorado for years, with users reporting its usefulness to combat ailments such as pain, nausea and anxiety. There are even reports that it has positive results when given to patients of epilepsy or some forms of cancer.
While the latter two uses are under heavy research, Dr. David Gordon, medical director for the Community Hospital Student Health Center, questions the validity of medical marijuana use as well as the claims to its remedies.
“I think there are certain doctors that decided to become drug dealers and dispense this pseudo-medical drug before it became legal,” Gordon said. “We [throughout Colorado] had 120,000 [patients]or something like that with recommendations coming from 10 or 12 doctors total. It’s just an absurdly high number.”
“People claim it can be used for nausea, but it can cause something called Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome,” Burton said. “What it consists of is for some reason you get this cyclical vomiting, and there’s nothing you can do about it. For two to three days, you can’t keep anything down and all you do is sit at the toilet and puke. Unfortunately, we’ve seen several students come in with this issue. I know of one individual student who’s lost over 100 pounds because of that syndrome.”
Bud calls this “Green Fever.”
Although he almost always smokes before class, Bud never plans to zone out or simply go through the motions. Participation is Bud’s key to throw people off the skunk-like stench that might indicate he toked that morning. Most of the time, he says, professors enjoy his insight.
“I’m not some arrogant, a** hole pothead,” he said, quoting the words of an Atmosphere song. Bud’s Dean’s List certificate from last semester supports that claim, though he admits, “thank god I didn’t have a math class.”
“Sometimes honestly, it can make a professor seem more interesting, so I actually remember [what we’re learning],” he said. “Like in my geology class, the National Monument is over 2 billion years old. That made me feel so small, and it blew my mind. I probably wouldn’t even of given it a second thought after that [if I had been] sober.”
There is no law that says you can’t smoke and have good grades, and there is no law saying you can’t drink and have good grades. It’s generally accepted that moderation and management are vital to any kind of success in college, and, according to Bud, some people release that stress in different ways than others.
“People are too quick to judge,” Bud said. “It’s like, really? A rally for 4/20 is just like Oktoberfest. Do you think pounding shots is so much better for you?”
Well, not exactly.
“The lesser of the two evils? I can’t say,” Gordon said. “If you go out to party and drink, the next morning you can end up dead, where with marijuana that’s not going to happen. With excessive alcohol use, it can be fatal, where, with excessive marijuana use, it’s not the case. With a chronic alcoholic, you CT scan their brain. They have a small brain. You can see the atrophy and just the shrinkage of the brain. I’ve seen some 40-year-old alcoholic and their brain is about the size of what we expect an 80-year-old demented person to be. But marijuana, as far as I understand, does not shrink the brain.”
By the time Bud finishes his walk home from class, the high has worn off. After a full day of classes, he wants just to put his brain to rest. All he finds when he reaches for his stash of weed, however, is an empty jelly jar. Frustrated, he locates a paper clip and starts scraping his pipe for the resin that builds up from the smoke that is carried through the piece.
According to the Urban Dictionary, smoking “rez” is like smoking “ghetto hash” (pure THC), and it’s the “last resort of a kid with no weed.”
Almost Bud’s words exactly as his hands become progressively more covered in a putrid-smelling oil that seems as strong as glue.
“F**k this!” he shouts. “I gotta go pick up.”
Another of Dr. Gordon’s fears about frequent marijuana use is the intense craving of its high.
“It’s definitely a gateway drug,” he said. “I would say it’s because of the desire for that high. Over time, you become dependent on marijuana to become normal, so you don’t get that high as much. Once it becomes ‘I need the marijuana to feel normal,’ that’s when people start to say ‘I need the high,’ and that’s where they take that next step.”
This could mean buying sack after sack, throwing money to the Grand Junction black market or something potentially much worse.
“I’ve always wondered if I could prove, in Mesa County specifically, if you could follow the advent of heroin becoming such a big problem in the valley right now, I bet you could track it down to a one or two year delay from medical marijuana becoming a big deal,” Gordon said.
For Bud, though, there is no big concern about his habit going in a dangerous direction.
“It’s the cliché ‘I can stop whenever I want.’ But seriously, after a few days of being a d**che to deal with, I know I can.” Bud said. “When the real world hits, I’m not willing to let my dream job slip for a few hours of a bliss[ful] feeling.”
brjthomp@mavs.coloradomesa.edu
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