Love affair ended with tobacco

now "smokers stop" tea is my best friend

My body stinks.

I wake up every day in a pool of sweat.

My chest hurts.

The sudden bouts of nausea are unreal, like just gagging and coughing for no reason.

It’s been over a week since I decided to give up smoking for good and it’s been quite a ride so far.

“I didn’t even think you had that much of a problem,” Jesse said to me when I told him that I quit.

Is four spliffs a day a lot? I don’t know what to compare it against, most smoking cessation websites talk about pack a day smokers and chain smokers and offer no tips for spliff smokers. Four spliffs seems like a lot. But even if it’s not a lot, it was a habit I knew I needed to give up.

I was thinking of quitting for months. I was sick of my clothes and my hair smelling like garbage. Every time I sat outside with my spliff I felt gross, childish. I would time my smoke breaks around whenever my landlady’s car left the driveway so as not to disturb her. I would try to find a place where the wind wouldn’t blow my smoke into a neighbor’s window. I was very aware of the annoyance I was causing to others, and I felt shame for it. Every time I heard a neighbor abruptly, loudly, shut their window I winced with embarrassment. I’ve got to stop doing this, I’d say in my head, flicking my ash into a small jar by my potted plants.

It was a ritual for me. Grinding the bud and rolling the spliff on my little desk, stepping outside with a cup of coffee in the morning before my neighbors were awake enough to open their windows, sitting on my stoop and watching the crows gather in the big fir tree in the yard next door, then later in the day waiting for my landlady’s car leave the driveway and thinking now is my chance and rolling another spliff to take outside and burn, then watching the sun start to set and preparing another spliff for the evening time, then rolling another spliff before bed, my midnight routine indicating the end of another day. It was a big habit. It was a bad habit.

It was a crutch, is what I realized five days after stopping. A crutch for avoiding feeling something, maybe. I’m still trying to figure it out.

I used to smoke cigarettes. I started when I was 21, to be “cool” and so that I could take extra breaks at my grocery store job. These are not good reasons, but is there ever a good reason to start smoking? 21 was also the year I started smoking weed everyday, turning my occasional joint enjoyment into a daily Dutch Master blunt habit.

At 22 I visited a friend in San Francisco and we went to a trance party where I met an attractive man. He and I spent the whole night together, rolling and chainsmoking spliffs on a couch away from the devil stick dancers. We bonded over how much we could both smoke, and we decided we liked each other. A month later I left my hometown of Philly and moved in with him. He was a daily spliff smoker, a wake and baker, and we got along nicely for a while. He rolled bulk spliffs for me before leaving on his weeklong business trips and later taught me his technique so I could roll my own. It wasn’t a perfect relationship but we always had spliffs to unite us. A few years after I moved in, he turned 30 and decided to quit smoking but I kept at it. I was 25 and directionless and that eventually wore on him. We broke up and I moved out and switched from Bali Shag to organic American Spirit rolling tobacco.

Spliffs became a part of my personality. I had quit smoking cigarettes at this point, but I just substituted the practice with smoking spliffs. I always had weed on me, wherever I went I brought my gold pouch with papers, grinder, and the whole works. I preferred smoking to drinking because I never felt out of control when I was spliffed out. And when I turned 30 and quit drinking, spliffs were there to keep me company. They kept me grounded, I felt. They were my anti-anxiety meds. I don’t take antidepressants or prescription drugs, I just smoke spliffs, I would say when confronted about why I was perpetually stoned. Sometimes I would feel self conscious about my habit, but I was also brazen. I rolled and smoked in public, I would roll spliffs while walking down the street in downtown San Francisco during my lunch hour, that’s how adept I had become. Smoking spliffs for me was a way to mark the passage of time. If I started jonesing I knew that at least two hours had passed.

A year ago I grew cognizant that my habit was actually more of an addiction, and how unhealthy it was. I was rolling a spliff while crouched in an alleyway before heading to the YMCA to workout and thought, why am I doing this? I didn’t think it was that big of a deal, but I knew others thought it was weird.

“Don’t you want to quit,” a friend asked me once. “Why should I quit when the apocalypse is pending,” I asked her. “Well, don’t you want to be able to have strong lungs so you can run for cover when shit starts going down,” she said, and I understood where she was coming from but it pissed me off. It felt condescending. I was an adult, I knew that what I was doing was not good for me, but it was not my choice to quit at that time. It doesn’t matter how disapproving the people around you are, if you’re not ready to do something you’re not going to stick with it.

Last Tuesday I ran out of rolling tobacco and I said to myself, okay then that’s it. I smoked my last spliff at midnight that night. I woke up the next day and I felt fine. I waited until 9pm Wednesday night to roll a joint, and used some dried lavender to supplement my usual tobacco to cannabis ratio. The next day I didn’t smoke at all, and on Friday night I packed and lit a bong and took two hits and thought, wow weed by itself is fucking crazy. I don’t think I’ve been that stoned since I was 20 years old, back when I was getting lifted off joints by myself in my dorm room in England and listening to ATLiens by OutKast on my computer stereo feeling mesmerized and trying to isolate all the different sounds and beat tracks I could hear in the songs. Smoking weed on its own is a completely different experience to smoking spliffs. I was never that high when I was smoking spliffs, just slightly altered. Calmer maybe. Those bong hits got me mad paranoid. I came back inside afterward and tried watching an episode of Longmire and felt very disturbed by the image of a horse trapped in a burning barn in the opening scene and I thought to myself, I’m definitely not going to be doing this everyday.

So it’s been over a week. I am drinking a “stop smoking” tea to combat my tobacco cravings and an estrogen replacement tea to restore my hormonal balance (tobacco apparently does weird things to your natural estrogen levels), both recommended to me by Catch Breath (who also used the teas to successfully quit smoking spliffs). It tastes good and it’s kept any physical cravings for tobacco/nicotine at bay. My ears still perk up every time I hear my landlady’s car leave the driveway. I shake it off, but it’s a Pavlovian response that will take some time to break.

I feel more productive, I’m finally putting time in on projects that I’ve let sit by the wayside for months, like this new Be About It zine issue. I’m drinking more water and trying to exercise more to keep my energy levels up because I have some concerns over my metabolism going down. I’m showering every day because my body stinks, it seems like all the toxins I put in my body for the past 14 years are slowly creeping out of my pores. It’s pretty vile. My mouth doesn’t taste disgusting when I wake up anymore. My teeth look less yellow. They say the first two weeks are the hardest, and I’m almost there. Thank you to everyone for your support and encouragement.