A Straight Adult

How does marijuana affect a normal, successful adult? The following account was written for TIME by a married 29-year-old Ivy League college graduate. He is levelheaded and ambitious, and works a taxing 50-hour week at a responsible job. He began turning on eight months ago, now uses marijuana twice a week on the average. He is not trying to persuade anyone else to follow his example.

RASHLY, perhaps, I decided to risk the multiple legal and professional dangers of smoking pot. But how to find the stuff? My first discovery was that one turns out to have a lot of Jekyll-Hyde friends, who jekyll in the straight world and hyde when they are smoking grass.

Next came the props. These are purchasable at hundreds of "head" shoos --those freaky emporia with psychedelic posters in the windows and incense pouring out of the door. I stopped at the grass counter and asked for some regular white Zig-Zag cigarette-rolling papers. Friends had also suggested a Rizla rolling machine if I felt too clumsy to roll my own. Another important purchase was a roach clip, used to hold the "roach" or butt of the joint after it has burned down and concentrated all those good resins at the end.

Then I went home and waited for the right mood. Almost any will do, although it's best not to smoke if you're extra anxious or depressed, since grass can amplify these feelings. I was also warned to be careful if I mixed pot in food--Alice B. Toklas brownies or "apple turn-on." These concoctions can take as long as two hours to have any effect, and if you get impatient and eat more, you can start feeling paranoid and even vomit. I learned to smoke with friends. Pot is best when shared with other people, and they can reassure you if you panic, as some people do when they first find their normal thought patterns beginning to change.

I inhaled deeply, holding the smoke down as long as possible, and passed the joint. The chances are excellent that nothing will happen to any first-timer, mostly because he has such fear about marijuana that he fights off its effects.

Eventually I did get stoned. Your feet and arms may seem a little cold, and you begin to feel and see things very intensely. Suddenly you wish that everyone would cluster in a small corner of the room because you almost feel that everyone near you is in some magic bubble, whereas the people over in the other part of the room seem very far away. Time slows down in the most felicitous way: an hour can seem like three, but yet I have suddenly seen the sun coming up when I thought it was only one in the morning.

Conversation tends to become diffused. When people throw out feelings and images, you don't just nod and say politely that you understand--you are right there with the fellow who is talking, looking at the same thing. Once, in a group of people listening to the Moody Blues, the music suddenly seemed to swell, as if it were the sound track of Cleopatra just at the point where the slaves are rowing her barge down the river. Someone suggested that the music made him think of the monumental effort a snail makes in pulling itself across a lawn, and instantly everyone was grooving on this image of those huge blown-up snails painstakingly but nobly pulling themselves across the wet grass. There is probably no better way to understand Andy Warhol's pop art Campbell's Soup cans than to get stoned and look at everyday objects.

If there are partners around with whom people would like to sleep, chances are some of them will. If there is a pool near by, one of the first things people want to do is to go swimming in the raw. Then suddenly you realize you are both thirsty and hungry. The wise pot hostess, Author Jack Margolis advises in his new book, A Child's Garden of Grass, should have "plenty of munchies and suckies around the house when the gang drops in."

One has to be prepared to laugh at himself. I find I tend to deliver lines like Moses standing with the Ten Commandments under his arm. One night a bunch of us were somewhat stoned at a restaurant. A man at the next table leaned over and said to his wife, "If there is no view, why don't you frost the windows?" I dutifully informed my table of the remark, and we spent most of the evening on it: it seemed to sum up religion, Communism, even drugs. Unfortunately, the next morning it was simply another phrase--a good one, but not something that would knock straight people out for the count.

I learned not to walk into a store stoned. A pot-high woman friend had to. go shopping for a few hot dogs, rolls and a six-pack of Coke. She came back an hour later $60 poorer, with six bags of groceries: things like brandied peaches, cans of baby shrimp, caviar and lots of pickles. It's not so much that your powers of discrimination are diminished--it's just that your powers of appreciation are enhanced.

A pot high is quite different from a liquor high. Alcohol dulls the senses whereas pot sets them on edge. If a child were screaming in the next room, I'd take a drink, not a joint. If I were sitting with an arm around Jane Fonda and she had just told me I had beautiful eyes, I'd light up. Drink is for tuning out. Pot is for tuning in.

Well, that's my view, anyway.

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