I WAS A SKUNK ADDICT, AT LEAST I THINK I WAS

All that talk about the Myersons and drugs made me remember that I
was a stoner. But my memory is not what it used to be

Caitlin Moran

I was addicted to skunk weed for four years. That it's taken me three
weeks of shouty headlines about Julie Myerson's son to remember this
tells you pretty much everything you need to know about dope-smokers.

But then again "addicted" is quite an extreme word, isn't it? It's
quite... final. Was I "addicted"? Yes, I smoked every day, twice as
much at weekends, could not watch TV, listen to records or have my
tea without a "bifter spritzer", made a bong out of a Coke can, then
another one out of an old fish tank, had three dealers, didn't really
have any friends that weren't stoners, chose which bands I was going
to interview on the basis of whether I could get stoned with them or
not, and, once, gave a wasp a blow-back. But is that really
"addiction"? You could just say that I liked it a lot. To be honest,
I behaved almost identically when I first got into couscous. That
stuff is so fluffy.

This, of course, is another problem with dope-smokers. They can't
really take a strong line on anything - because everything's
relative, their mouth's too dry to argue, and their synapses look
like an upside-down pudding that's been smashed about with a stick.

I want to make it clear that I don't smoke now. I haven't taken
anything since I was 22 because, and I will be honest with you here,
I eventually went stark raving mad and ended up riding a bicycle up
and down Holloway Road, trying to "sweat the poison out". At the time
I was so fat from a stoner-diet of deep-fried crispy beef and mango
Soleros that I had bought the bicycle - the chunkiest, most
industrial mountain bike in the shop - on the basis that it made me
look "thinner" than all the other, smaller, more aerodynamic bicycles
available. As a consequence, I could scarcely pedal it more than 50
yards without having to lie down in someone's front garden for a
rest. I was operating on some pretty exciting and innovative logic at the time.

I started smoking weed when I was 17, because that is just what you
do if you like the Beatles. If this were America, I could probably
now sue Paul McCartney wholly on this basis.

From the very start, I was a terrible stoner. Not in any sense of
being hardcore and wild, like some crazy-eyed loner on a voyage to
Valhalla. I mean literally terrible. Every time I smoked I passed
out. I once got so stoned interviewing Radiohead that I had to be put
to bed in the bass player's spare bedroom. Except I was so stoned I
missed the door to the spare bedroom, kept walking up the stairs, and
went and slept in the loft instead - where a wasps' nest had recently
been fumigated and the floor was covered in crunchy dead wasps. In
the morning, my lovely millionaire genius host was distraught.

"You slept in the waspy loft!" he horrored.

"Oh, it's OK," I said, cheerfully. "I was stoned!"

I did a kind of "We all know what it's like when you're so stoned you
interview the biggest band in the world by just nodding at them, then
break into their loft and sleep on some insects" face. He just stared
at me like I was mad.

Of course, it's a miracle I had a job at all. Workrate-wise, a
ferocious skunk habit suits someone who can survive on the proceeds
of six, maybe seven, hours of work a week, tops. You're looking at
musicians "between albums", housewives, pre-school children, royalty,
etc. Despite Michael Phelps's admirable efforts in this area, it is
not really the ideal drug for Olympic athletes - or, indeed, anyone
who really needs to get a jiggy on in furthering their life.

Everything grinds to a halt when you start smoking. In the four years
I was chonged off my num-nuts, there was one, sole innovation in my
life: the invention of the Shoe Wall - a wall in the hall where I
banged in 20 nails, in dispiritingly uneven lines, and then hung up
all my shoes. Needless to say, when I finally did stop smoking, I
remodelled the entire house, lost four stone, took down the Shoe Wall
and quadrupled my workrate in six months flat.

Towards the end of my four-year skunk-in, signs of the End of Days
started to accumulate. A friend who had been smoking since he was 13
totally wigged out, and developed schizophrenia. Although
sympathetic, my main reaction was to think: "Some people can handle
it, and some people can't," and then smugly light up a big fat jay.

I was also starting to notice that it was taking huge amounts of
skunk to get half as wasted as before - necessitating the invention
of first the Coke-can bong, then the fish-tank bong, as my smoking
took on a borderline industrial intensity. Paranoid that I was being
ripped off, I "tested" the potency of the skunk on a wasp, by
trapping it under a glass and giving it a blow-back. The wasp just
lay on the floor, clearly considering buying a chunky bicycle, so I
knew that, sadly, it must all be down to me.

It was as I was doing bongs out of my fish tank, while watching
Later...with Jools Holland, that the end came. For some reason, as
soon as the Beautiful South came on stage, I just went mad. Not in a
"Hurrah! Amazing! The Beautiful South!" way - but in a way that meant
that within an hour I was hysterical, holding on to the kettle and
screaming "This is normal! This is normal!" at myself over and over again.

It turned out that it was "just" a panic attack - the first of a
solid 18 months of them - but, however much I tried to calm myself
down with a fish tank full of rabidly psychoactive cannabis,
bafflingly, it just seemed to make the situation worse. Eventually,
even I had to acknowledge that my stoner days were over, and I quit.

Do I regret spending four years off my face? No, not really - but
only because I can't really remember any of it. I'm not being
facetious. My memory's shot to bits. Apparently, we went to
Montpellier once, for a week. I have absolutely no recall of this.

Did I, then, learn anything from four years of wandering through the
rabbit holes of my mind, like Alice in Wonderland? To that, at least,
I can say "yes". I learnt that wasps buzz four notes lower when
they're wasted. And that I am a terrible, terrible stoner.