I have been thinking about giving cannabis a go again lately, but I’m honestly pretty frightened of the stuff nowadays. I was fine with it for years, but it slowly started manifesting thoughts of existentialism, consciousness, the nature of reality, and solipsism, among other deeply-unanswerable questions. It got to the point where almost immediately after the effects came on, I’d become paralyzed with fear over the fact that anything exists at all, but I kept using it because it helped my insomnia better than anything else.

I’ve only recently come out of that existential crisis after really having to work on myself to get back to where I was before that, which for the most part, I am. The only lingering change is that my firm atheism was shattered and I now find myself seeing the universe, consciousness and death very differently (largely in a good way.)

I want to get along with weed, but it’s just too much for me. I have ADHD, and all it does is make me think even more than I already do, as one errant thought will always send me down a cascading sequence of increasingly more terrifying philosophical possibilities about the universe and nature of infinity. Alcohol manifests itself as pure bliss and anti anxiety. It allows me to actually switch off for a few hours and then sleep.

Trust me, I wish I could love cannabis, but I just don’t think it’s worth the risk for me personally. I’ve never had a drug fuck me up so hard mentally (and I’ve previously experimented with psychedelics and dissociatives as a younger guy.) There’s something about THC specifically that fucks me up.