Thanks very much Mike back at you!

Special Greetings just for you (-:

Since your an old man with a successful business that does things in moderation....you're good!

However, not all of us can do that:

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

 And regarding this thread, I tried it for the first and only time about 7 years ago because someone had some to share. I was wondering why the craze and gave in to curiosity. I had never tried any illegal stuff even once in my life and never had an interest in doing so.

 Well, let's just say that I'll never get addicted because that was one of the worst experiences of my life! All I had was like 7 puffs and all hell broke loose. I thought I was going to have some kind of relaxing feeling. Nope, it was the opposite. Within just a few minutes my chest felt like a motor and my pulse went up to 200! I couldn't get comfy and was thinking I might not survive. I kept telling myself that pot supposedly wasn't dangerous and hadn't been linked to deaths. That gave me hope. My mouth got very dry and I kept having very weird hearing sensations that are hard to describe. It was like my ears were inside my chest!!

 I was in a semi-conscious state, too. It was too weird to describe well. 

 Here's the weirdest thing: my sensation of time slowed to a crawl!! I kept looking at my watch and it took forever just to go 5 minutes. 5 minutes felt like 30 minutes. 3 hours felt like 12. I never got the least bit hungry. I walked to the fridge a couple of times to get some water and wasn't sure I'd be able to do so. The girl I was with told me to go lie down on the couch or even go to bed, but I felt worse lieing down and didn't want to go to my bedroom because I was too scared to be alone in there. Finally, after 2.5-3 hours, this horrible experience started to wear off and I was so happy I survived. 

 And pot is supposedly not a "hard" drug? You could have fooled me!

Never again! I'll stick to the occasional drink once in awhile, thank you. Drugs are not for me like I always thought. And to think many drive while under its influence? Scary!

Jeezz MTP, this thread sort of hints that you have a rep around here  Heeeeeeeeeeeee Haw.

And WX Follower--- must have been laced with  angel dust or some such additive.

Hey Happy Thanksgiving to ya!

   John

7475 said: 

"And WX Follower--- must have been laced with  angel dust or some such additive.'

----------------------------

 7475,

 I was wondering about that, too, but keep in mind that I had never tried it or any other drug. Also, the girl with me who shared it also smoked some and remained calm the entire time. She just sat in a recliner and kept looking at her phone (maybe playing a game??) as I recall. I mean she was acting on the outside like she hadn't smoked any. Truly bizarre. I tried to call her afterward and I never again could get her on the phone. So, I'll never know.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving to you and to all!

That's a great story Larry. Thanks for sharing! I really enjoyed that and can relate exactly. 

You had a panic attack. I know several people that this happened to as adults and so they don't smoke it. 

I smoked tons of weed in high school but it started to make me feel introverted and paranoid and anti social. So I gave it up in my early 20's. 

Alcohol did the exact opposite. Made me  extremely outgoing and fearless and risk taking and stupid. 

I gave up drinking numerous years ago and was lucky to have evolved into a very productive, successful functional alcoholic who drank excessively every weekend and on vacations for over 3 decades before giving it up. 

Between 16-25 years old, its a miracle that alcohol didn't destroy my life though.  I was in jail 3 different times for alcohol (2 Dui's). Got into a dozen bar fights and can tell you  dozens of crazy stories about my idiotic(and actually pretty funny) behavior while drunk.

If I had stuck to weed, no way would I have acted that way. 

Anyway, when my youngest son was in high school, he took after Dad and liked doing drugs too much. I confiscated his stuff numerous times, so I had a bit of his weed in our lockbox here.

I used to be a massive gardener and grew just about anything that would grow in the garden at least once. 

One Summer, I decided to take some of my sons weed seeds  and see if I could grow weed plants in pots. 

I got  4 of the seeds to germinate and turned them into 4 potted plants. After several weeks, 3 of the plants died, leaving me with only 1 plant. 

Turns out that there are male and female plants and only the male plants flower and make buds that have all the THC. I had no idea how to tell and hoped the 1 surviving plant was a male. I was not planning on smoking weed though. I just like to grow things and found it fascinating/challenging.

So I really nurtured this plant. I had a fan blowing on it much of the time,  because wind blowing on trees and plants will cause them to develop stronger stems. We are surrounded by trees that block the sun but get sun in different places as the day passes.

So every day, I would move the plant to 4 different locations to maximize the amount of sun. I also had a 4 foot mirror set up on the backside to reflect sunshine on the side of the plant facing away from the sun to really boost the amount of sun it got. I found out  what day the gas/electric meter reader was coming to make sure the plant was hidden on those days since growing weed was illegal here in IN. 

I also loaded it up with miracle grow and gave it the perfect amount of water.

So this one plant got massive!. After a couple of months, I had transferred it into a huge pot and was using a wheel barrow to move it to the 4 different locations around our house(moving the mirror each time too). 

Then it flowered and I knew it was a male!  After the blooms fell off, the buds developed and there were tons of them. They were pretty big too. Before we had our first frost,, I pulled the plant up and hung it upside down in the basement with a fan blowing on it to dry for a couple of weeks.

Then I filled up around 8 jars with the dried buds. I gave away, I think 6 of them and I think 2 are left in the lock box from 10 years ago. From what I was told, it was extremely good stuff. My son said that the seeds came from some really good stuff, so that makes sense.

I actually got a chance to find out. I hadn't smoke weed in something like 35+ years but decided that since I grew it, I might as well try it. I hear that some people use it for pain. I have a serious auto immune disorder and have had 18 surgeries with all sorts of pain, so I figured it couldn't hurt to try it. Maybe  this would help.

I used a pipe that had been confiscated from my son and took just one massive inhale, then held it in for almost a minute. 

I figured that wouldn't be enough to go very far and  expected some mild affects. Got on my computer and noticed after a minute that I couldn't concentrate, so I went to the living room and turned on the tv. By then, it had turned into your experience Larry. My heart was pounding and racing fast. I tried to take my pulse but couldn't do it. I was counting 2 beats for every one beat and thought I was going to have a heart attack because it seemed like my heart rate was 200/minute(though I think that it was 100 and I was counting double from the return flow, 2nd beat). I considered calling 911 but realized as the chess coach at 5 different schools, if news got out about this it would look bad and embarrass them. 

It was in the evening when my wife normally comes home and she always calls first. I hoped she wouldn't call because she would be able to tell that I was having a bad panic attack and it would upset her. 

2 places where I was having pain were causing excruciating pain. One was my right shoulder. It felt like somebody had tied a 150 lb dumbbell to my right arm and it  was ripping it right out of its socket...............but I was sitting on the couch with my arm supported by a pillow!!

I have degenerative disc disease(lost 3 inches of height) and frequent pain in my back. When I got up, it felt like there was 300 lbs crushing my spine and I could barely walk.

The entire time, I knew that I was imagining all of this and that it would go away but still thought that I might have a heart attack first and like Larry said, 1 hour, seemed like 3 hours. I just wanted this stuff to wear off ASAP. 

I was trapped in that world until the affects wore off. 

Finally, after around 90 minutes of hell, I suddenly started getting glimpses of reality mixed in with the panic attack frame of mind. 

Whew. I lived and my wife didn't have to see me that way. 

I told the story to everybody in the family at least a couple of times and we roared laughing about it each time.

My 62 year old wife has never smoked weed in her life but recently, said that she might be interested in trying it. She used to suffer from frequent panic attacks as did my oldest son, who couldn't smoke weed because of panic attacks. 

If I'm ever tempted to try this stuff again, it will be a very tiny puff so that its not enough to have any affect except a very tiny one. 

My son, who lived in Colorado for 6 years, tells me that they sell a dozen+ different kinds of weed. If you have panic attacks, you can buy the type that is least likely to cause a panic attack. 

Jeez mm,

Given that this is Thanksgiving weekend,I'd have to say your story rivals Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant".

Thanks, Mike, for your very interesting post!

 You said I had a panic attack. But when I think of panic attack, I think of fear taking over and then causing panic related symptoms. That happened to me twice in my younger years (nothing to do with drugs) when I hyperventilated. I had panicked over nothing because of being a hypochondriac back then. Looking back, those two incidences were silly. But in this case, I started having the very rapid pulse BEFORE I started getting very worried. I had been very relaxed just before and at the start and was looking forward to what I expected to be a relaxing and enjoyable experience. Then suddenly the symptoms took over! So, do you still think it was a panic attack that brought his on? If so, I don't understand.

 Now, AFTER my pulse zoomed way up to `200, I then did start panicking or at least I was getting very scared for my life. 

Larry,

Interesting points.

I actually know a thing or 3 about panic attacks because my wife had them for years(not anymore- long story on her winning that battle) and so did our oldest son(which is why he can't smoke weed). 4 of my wife's siblings have/had panic attacks as did her Dad, so clearly there are genetics involved related especially to personality traits.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2691589/

Regardless, even a top authority wouldn't be able to say for sure how much of your reaction was caused by a panic attack because we don't know for sure what was in the stuff that you smoked. The fact that the other person did not have the same affects after smoking the same stuff suggests strongly that your unique response came from your mind. 

If 2 people drink a couple of cups of strong coffee for instance, both are likely to be greatly stimulated. One isn't going to get sleepy because caffeine has the opposite affect of making you sleepy. 

If one of them is Larry, he might be trying to increase demand for his long coffee position that he just made a ton of money on(just kidding).

Your partner could have been more experienced with the feelings this pot gave her and they didn't trigger the same response as yours or for other reasons. But I think your response came from your mind and you created the physical responses that way. 

Panic attacks can come out of the blue(like mine) even for people that normally don't have them.

Panic attacks are not always the same in everybody either.  One persons could be triggered by things that don't trigger a panic attack in somebody that has alot of them. 

For my wife(and many others) it is not unusual to think that they are going to have a heart attack because their heart is  beating so fast. And there is a massive positive feedback that takes place. Once the heart starts beating fast and they notice it, that immediately leads to emotional fears that pump adrenaline and accelerate the heart rate............which gets scary and causes more adrenaline and a faster heart rate and this  can escalate to an extreme level. 

I have taken my wife and sons blood pressure a zillion times when they were having panic attacks. There were some amazingly high readings that their bodies had never experienced before outside the peak period of a panic attack.

When they are having a panic attack and scared of a heart attack,  if you tell them their bp is 170/110, its like holy sheet, I'm going to die! The next reading is likely to be 180/120 because hearing/seeing 170/110 just caused an increase in adrenaline release.

My dad was having panic attacks for around 5 years in older age and they would be caused by having his blood pressure taken. You've heard of white coat syndrome. He had it. For a long time, he needed to have his bp taken numerous times/day and just having this done would add 20 points to the numbers. So he insisted that he never be told what the reading was and after awhile, he got over it.

For my wife, I actually drove her to the parking lot of a hospital a few times and this calmed her, thinking that if she had a heart attack, she would not die because help was a minute away, not an hour away. 

Let me tell you why I know that mine was at least partly a panic attack and all of it started in my mind(which starts the panic attack, which pumps in the adrenaline and it then turns into a physical/chemical reaction in your body that everyones body would experience even if they were not having a panic attack that started it).

I also thought that I was going to have a pleasant experience and didn't think that I had enough to have a big affect, so you don't have to be afraid or have a certain mindset/anticipation to trigger a panic attack. 

I'm an extremely rational/logical person and was understanding what was going on but still could not control my mind.

When I could not concentrate on the computer,  I decided to watch tv instead. I have what was diagnosed as an "athletic heart" from over exercising in my younger years(competing power lifting and body building). Its an enlarged heart and it beats really strongly. If I'm hugging my wife, she can feel it beat(not just because I love her so much!) I can take my pulse sometimes by just feeling my heart beat sitting in a chair and not using a hand to take my pulse. 

When you take your pulse, you count the one distinct pulse and usually can't detect the other one from the return flow, which is the "lub-dub" lub-dub' lub-dub" 3 heartbeats but with 3 major pulses and a very minor one that follows.

With my heart, I can actually detect the minor one because its so strong. When I got high on this weed and my mind/imagination took over, I counted the lub-dub as 2 beats and could feel/detect both of them very clearly. The weed was causing my brain to be super duper sensitive to feeling that 2nd DUB and I thought it was another beat, not the 2nd part of the first beat.

I'm guessing that my actual heart rate was around 90 but when I tried to count, I couldnt even keep track because there were so many beats and I was high. This caused it to increase and I figured it was approaching 200 beats a minute(but was probably 100). For a man my age even in good shape that meant a quick heart attack for sure. 

I wondering if thats what you were doing Larry because 200 beats/minute is almost impossible for an older person.

The max heart rate of a person is considered to be 220-age. If you are 50,then your max heart rate is 170.

Being at 200 for a period of time at your age would be incredible. 

So I became panicked, thinking the near 200 was real and I would likely die and my heart rate likely increased but I just couldn't even count it anymore and decided to stop trying. I would  have called 911but realized it would be too late for them to do anything and as the chess coach at 5 schools, didn't want to embarrass those schools if news hit that their chess coach had taken a puff of weed and had a panic attack.  Best to ride this one out by myself at home even if I die, I thought. 

My right shoulder felt like it was being ripped out of its socket, even as I looked at my right arm resting/supported by a pillow. I knew my mind was playing tricks on me but the pain was real to me. 

Same thing with the pain in my spine, 10 on a scale of 10. It's a good lesson on how your mind has such control over your body and sometimes pain. 

And I knew that my physical condition had not suddenly changed and this was all in my mind but could not control it and the panic attack was feeding it.

I tried to focus on other things and to fight it. Actually, after around an hour, as if I had been in the Twilight Zone of my mind for that hour, I was still high(and not used to being high for sure)  but suddenly stepped outside the Twilight Zone, back to reality..able to see things clearly and felt instant relief psychologically.

It was suddenly like, hey my heart isn't really beating this fast, I'm not going to die and my shoulder and back don't really feel like that........so when I stepped back and forth into the last 30 minutes of the Twilight Zone of being high, I was sort of chuckling to myself about how crazy the last hour was and understanding it instead of being traumatized by it(and being glad it was finally coming to an end).

So Larry, whether your heart was actually beating at 200 beats/minute which would be a totally insane thing, your girlfriends heart was doing nothing like that. 

Maybe yours was beating at 100 and you imagined the 2nd lighter pulse was another beat and double the real count. Either way, if the weed was spiked with something to cause this physically, she would have experienced it too. She didn't , so it must have been generated by your mind.

If it really was 200 beats/minute without a physical/chemical/stimulant reason, then it came from your mind..............which is what a panic attack does.

If it was just 100 and you imagined it was 200(like I know must have happened because there is a 0% chance that my heart was really beating at 200 beats/minute at my age and I somehow stayed conscious with no heart attack or even 1 pain in my chest that entire time)....than it was also your mind.

So either way, it was what the drug did to your mind, not what the drug did to your body if that makes sense. 

So if anybody might worry that  a person would come here and read this discussion and think, "hey smoking weed sounds like a great idea!" then they must be brain dead already (-:

I actually am  for legalizing marijuana nationally. Tax it instead of taxing the beneficial gas CO2. It does far less harm than alcohol. 

For sure decriminalize it in states where its still not legal. 

But it sure as heck is not for me!!!

Mikekempt should chime in here. He knows as much about this stuff(he prefers purple diesel)  as I do about the weather (-:

I can't  participate in this discussion about marijuana, since my brain is like a blank memory stick. However, the original post was from our old friend mikempt, and I certainly want to wish him, and all of our forum friends a belated Happy Thanksgiving