Kicking a Lifelong Habit

"Pick your poison," my mom would always say. Lots of moms said it, I'm sure. It seems like a popular enough phrase, simply meaning here are your options, maybe they aren't great, but... pick one. She always said it, even if none of my options were "poison" per se.

"Broccoli or Brussel Sprouts, pick your poison."

"Pick your poison, you read to me or I read to you."

"Go to church or no TV for a week. Pick your poison."

Sometimes, every option felt like a potential death.

My mother had her poisons, too. Eventually, they killed her at the ripe old age of sixty-three. Most of her family members died from their poisons at a relatively young age, fifties or sixties, interestingly enough. She talked about "the family curse" for years before she died. Her sisters, her parents, her uncles and aunts, all deaths that proved the infallibility of her theory:

"Gepharts die young."

As I aged, I realized that just about anything can be poison if you let it. It didn't matter if it was good for you, what mattered was how you used it and how it impacted your life.

I've had plenty of what you might consider metaphorical poisons: work, theater, friends, and other all-consuming things. But, I also had the literal poisons. And I loved it.

My addictive relationship to pharmaceuticals started early, but this was born from necessity and was nipped early. It would be after high school when I finally found the substances I would stick with for most of my life.

I started smoking cigarettes at seventeen years old. I started smoking weed at eighteen. I didn't try alcohol until I was twenty; it didn't sit quite right. My vices were already chosen—the devil's lettuce and good ol' fashioned tobacco. Everything else was just noise.

My first cigarette was a Marlboro Menthol Light. I wouldn't like it or choose it for myself later, but when the opportunity presented itself to smoke a friend's, I took it. The first puff made me cough uncontrollably. I didn't even inhale correctly and I still choked on it. I would pretend to take a few more drags before passing it back to my friend and thanking them for the experience.

The next cigarette I would try would be a Djarum Clove. These cigarettes would have a death grip on my cravings until their banning in 2009. Ah–the glory days of smoking a clove cigarette in the bar of Bennigan's restaurant. I wasn't old enough to drink alcohol, so I would order my lil' Shirley Temple and smoke my nicotine. They banned indoor smoking in Michigan in 2010. The glory days were short.

I grew my vice as the years passed. Cultivated it. Ritualized it. I learned how to roll my cigarettes. I developed a preference for rice paper and Norwegian Shag, initially without filters because I didn't know how to roll one up with the tobacco. Years of practice later and I can roll a filtered cigarette or joint on the move with one hand.

Devastatingly, this skill has not earned me a job or income of any kind.

I'm a terrible insomniac, so I began smoking alone at night and early into the morning. This only deepened my habit as my tolerance soared. Suddenly, I needed a cigarette first thing in the morning, and frequently throughout the day, or risked becoming a colossal grump.

I would smoke after every meal, sometimes after every snack. I'd smoke when I drank coffee, when I drank alcohol, and whenever I drove my car.

The list was getting longer with each passing day.

College wrought havoc on me in many ways. Most notably, my addiction was rampant. Active in the way that volcanoes level entire cities. Not only did I smoke more than I ever had in my whole life (and likely more than I ever will again), but I introduced substances to my repertoire that I previously had thought untouchable. I stuck to my favorite sensation of dissociation while self-medicating, which is to say I loved a familiar opioid or exciting new barbiturate.

But through it all, and long after I quit everything else, the smoking persisted.

Spliffs became a feature in my day-to-day life. A little 50/50 tobacco/weed action? The best of both worlds. Amiright?

Blunts? An iconically wasteful period of my life. One marked by desperate attempts to roll up old blunts in new ones because I went through too much weed rolling blunts in the first place.

Sadly, the development of pleurisy and chronic upper respiratory infections didn't change my smoking habits immediately. It would take several more years for me to make my first attempt at quitting cigarettes, and several more after that for me to even consider quitting smoking weed.

Quit attempt number three was going pretty well. I had four months without a cigarette under my belt. I even spent the last two weeks of my mother's life caring for her at home on hospice. I never left her side. Not even for a cigarette. But the second the funeral directors took her body out of the house, I went to the gas station and bought a pack.

I sat on the back patio of my childhood home and smoked a Marlboro Red in my mother's scarf. Her perfume mixed sweetly with the tobacco– jasmine, bitter almond, and vanilla.

Sick relief can flood the body in a way that confounds the senses, and in that moment I didn't know whether I wanted to laugh or cry or roll over and wait to die.

I smoked another.

I have a much healthier and therapeutic relationship with weed now. Between osteoporosis (and all the fractures that come with it) and fibromyalgia, to name only two of the conditions I deal with, I experience a fair amount of daily pain. Weed is essential to the healthy and safe management of this pain. A little sativa in the morning goes a long way, but the heavy indica comes into play when day is done.

Without the beautiful marriage of THC, CBD, and all the other delightful cannabinoids that I know little to nothing about, I would not be nearly as functional or content as I am today.

I love it all: tinctures, balms, flower, edibles, concentrate. You name it. I will find the way that it serves me best and use it—anything to keep me away from that damn Vicodin. I'm not even supposed to take ibuprofen or acetaminophen anymore from all the liver damage I caused taking that schedule II shit.

Back in the day? It was schedule III. I'm sure you all remember. It wasn't that long ago that they made the change. Only 2014.

I still smoke cigarettes like a chimney, though. I want to quit that. I made another attempt to quit recently and fell off pretty quickly. But this is my vow to keep trying. To never quit quitting. And! To give edibles a more important role in my life. Save the flower for weekends.

I don't want cancer. I don't want emphysema. I don't want to struggle to breathe, wheeze when I walk up stairs, or generally feel like my lungs are tattered curtains over an open window in a hurricane.

And honestly, I'd like to break that pesky familial curse.

So, here's to healthier choices and forty more years! At the very least.