- Asilomar State Beach on the Central California Coast. Pacific Grove. For the past nine months or so, I’d been 13; puberty, the age of anxiety, had hit me hard. Wanted very much live a life that was nothing like my six-cocktails-a-night parents. Grass was an intoxicant, like alcohol. Scary. Didn’t want to be high. I was always high on my own anxiety planet; I didn’t need to take trips to others. And look what being high on alcohol had done to my parents! I was then, and still am, a very cautious person. I was a nerdy kid who kept to his books and records (vinyl, LP’s), lived a life of quiet desperation memorizing poetry because I thought it might impress a girl or two. Or three or a hundred. I was a hopeful kid despite my anxiety.
Then somehow I ended up sitting in the dunes one night with my older brother and couple of his friends. It was a place where you could go and hide from the fuzz; you could light up out there among the sand and ice plant and they wouldn’t see the glow of your joint. Down in a hollow. And the wind would blow the smoke to kingdom come, or out to sea. That night a joint was passed around and I took it but didn’t inhale. Pretended I did.
Then three or four weeks later, we happened to find ourselves out there again (it was better to be out of the house away from my parents, than it was to be at home in my room surrounded by my books). This time I inhaled. And shortly afterward everything changed. I had the first and probably the worst panic attack of my young life. I didn’t know what to call it back then, but for a long time now I know that’s what it was. I’ve had other panic attacks since, but it’s always the first you remember the most.
The first time wasn’t a good experience. And as a result I was for decades against the plant.
Then, in my early 50’s, long after I’d given up the alcohol that chased my tail for years, and just after I had begun weaning myself off an SSRI, I took up the kindly herb on my own to see if it could help. Got a med rec letter just to be on the safe side. My kids were using it–why shouldn’t I? And I was older; I could handle the panicky stuff if it were to happen again. It did happen again, but I faced it down. (Doing that–handling the panic grass can bring on–is somehow therapeutic.)
Today, I smoke or vape everyday. It’s medicine. I use more or less depending on how I’m feeling. Sometimes I decide not to have any and I go two to three weeks without it. I always return. It evens me out, smooths out the wrinkles, gives me a reason to smile. And I can do it in my own backyard. If a cop car drives by on the street outside and he or she smells the waft, I’m hoping it reminds him or her to pick up a bong of his own once the shift is over.
and laughed so hard… 
Thanks for the story