I started smoking cannabis when I was 12 years old, also known as weed.
And I was addicted for five years.
The way that I got into the drug was I was hanging out with a lot of
older kids at the time and someone offered me a joint and I had no
reason not to trust them because they were friends of mine. So I took it.
And that just became a part of the way that we socialised with
each other was just a part of what we did when we were hanging out.
Smoking weed definitely had an effect on my schoolwork and my school life.
I started hanging out with people that didn't really like to work,
and I fell behind quite considerably in school.
I'd literally just get by on doing the bare minimum.
I think when I was 15 was when I started to realise that I
really had a problem because I was more stoned than I was sober.
And a typical week would look like on a Monday morning,
I would smoke a joint before school. I would get stoned at lunchtime.
I would go home, have dinner and then get stoned
with my friends after that. And that was on repeat Monday to Friday.
And then the weekends were just all day sessions, basically.
And so that was when I started to realise that I couldn't really go
without it. I think perhaps one of the reasons why I got dependent in
the first place was because I was quite a strange kid growing up.
I was always quite antisocial to a certain degree.
I was always quite rebellious. I never liked anything mainstream
and smoking weed seemed like the perfect antisocial activity.
Also, I think that I was very emotional when I was younger,
and I was very aware very early on that I could get very sad
and weed provided an escape from those emotions. A lot of the time
I was 17 when cannabis started to really affect my mental health.
I remember very vividly I had been for a run in the morning and
smoked a joint straight after. And I was on my way to school
and it felt as if my brain was just falling out of my head.
And I started to develop panic attacks and anxiety,
which got progressively worse and worse.
And it was after that point that I started to develop
quite chronic anxiety and paranoid delusions as well.
So I started to believe that friends and family were trying to poison me.
And I would have to see all of my food being prepared.
I really felt like it was over for me. I thought that I had
snapped my brain in half and there was no chance of recovery.
I thought I was going to be in a cannabis induced psychosis for
the rest of my life. I was terrified.
Honestly, it was some of the scariest years of my life. And so I could I
literally just could not continue smoking weed after that point.
I think one of the problems that I had in seeking help from my friends
was that everyone was still having fun around me and there was there
never seemed to be any problems with anyone else smoking weed.
I was very good at passing off my problems as less serious than
they were, especially to myself, but that's that's quite a common
characteristic in addicts, it's justifying the behavior
by downplaying the seriousness of what you're doing.
Going to counselling was probably the best decision I ever made.
I learnt in counselling to rationalise and normalise the
things that were happening in my brain and to be able to deal
with them and manage them. And I still have residual problems,
but my mind is so much easier to manage than it was ten years ago,
and I feel really lucky for that, actually.
I mean, the biggest regret for me is that I started smoking weed so early.
And when you're in your early teens, even your mid-teens,
your brain is still developing and it's still so fragile and you only
get one brain. And you have to live in it for the rest of your life.
So you should take care of it as best you can.