*Disclaimer: Recreational cannabis use in Pakistan is illegal. PG does not promote, condone or advocate licit or illicit drug use. This article is for entertainment purposes only.
For this week’s #SaturdayColumn at ProperGaanda, we asked you for your weirdest experiences after smoking up. This is what you said:
‘ I ended up screaming in the middle of the university hallway ‘
We had a Model United Nations debate at our university and I wasn’t participating, which is why I wandered around and bumped into my senior who was smoking some weed outside the back gate. Out of curiosity, I asked him for a drag. He was kind enough to ask me whether I had ever smoked up before. I confidently replied, no. So I took a few drags (well he warned me to take just a few as it was my first time).
‘I ended up smoking a little too much and I totally forgot about where I was.’
I panicked a little a friend, a junior, stayed with me throughout the trip. I was fine outside the university premises but once we got inside, I lost my mind. My junior got a text from his friend, and instead of writing ‘ Kahan ho?’ he wrote ‘ khan* ho?’ I started a fight with my junior over the typo, so much so that I took away his phone and started running away. I screamed so loud in the hallway that everyone around us got worried. A little too much weed embarrassed me and my junior in front of at least 50 students who were there as delegates. Nimra is a 23 year old student.
‘I gave a black-eye to my partner’
I started smoking quite early, immediately after I entered adulthood. Luckily I found some experienced stoner friends too. But I was not into weed as such. I was mainly the friend who drives you home after you pass out. All of this changed in the 2017 winter when my ex-partner suggested that we should smoke some joint(s) together. Don’t judge, we were young and almost in love. We went to a small gathering where all of our mutual friends were smoking hash.
‘Mr. X offered me a tiny joint, I enjoyed it thoroughly. I smoked two more and ended up eating a large size hash brownie.’
I had the best trip of my life until I saw the time. It was getting late but I was unable to move at all. I could feel my hand but my legs were dead and then I started to panic. At that moment, my high brain came up with the most stupid idea. I sat there and called my own phone number. I was shouting at myself on the phone. I was struggling to move meanwhile my ex-partner started to make a snap-story. By this time I could hear people laughing at me. I looked at my partner; expecting that he will help me out, instead, he just stood there and enjoyed the show; this infuriated me. I jumped at him and started throwing punches. I don’t know how many punches he received but I did end up giving him a black eye. It got more embarrassing when he drove me back home. Yes, we are not together anymore. Shireen is a 23 year old content writer.
‘I was looted at Jinnah bagh’
Back in 2008, I shifted to Lahore from Sheikupura to pursue a better lifestyle. After a few months, my brother in law got me a receptionist job at a renowned consulting firm. I was very excited to finally get a chance to make it in a big city. At first, I loved it because I got to meet many interesting people but after a few months, I started to feel different in that place. Mainly because I was the only one there who was from a small city. This made me feel lonely and sad. An inferiority complex is a dangerous thing especially for those who have limited opportunities to make things better for themselves. I needed something to get out of this state of mind but I was too afraid to even smoke. But one day I decided to visit Bagh-e-Jinnah to take my mind off the stress. I bought some cigarettes from a khoka and sat under a tree to smoke. A few moments later a group of boys approached me to borrow a lighter. They all sat beside me and started to smoke, I don’t remember how but they all knew immediately that I wasn’t from Lahore. This started a conversation which is all I had needed for the past few months; a genuine conversation. One of the boys took out a packet from his pocket and started to melt something on a key. I was startled by his speed, he was really fast. Within a minute he made a joint and offered it to me to smoke. At first I said no but then I decided to try it.
After four puffs, my mind stopped and I started laughing. I found everything funny, it was the best feeling of my life. At a distance, I could see a mother playing with her kid and that struck me really hard. I started to cry like a baby. Everyone was shocked to see that. I was a 28 year old adult back then so you can imagine how it would feel to see an adult man crying in a park. By that time all the boys left. I cried for at least another 2 hours. When I got back to my senses I realised that I didn’t have my wallet with me and it was getting late. I walked from Jinnah-Bagh to Jail Road with a heavy head and empty pockets. Ahtesham is a 40 year old property dealer and a father of two
‘The trip to hell’
It’s nothing like what you see on YouTube and words can simply not explain it. Good trips can be absolutely heavenly but a bad trip can scar you for the rest of your life. Like everyone else my age, I wanted to try it too. And my first trip wasn’t as good as my friends had told me it’d be. It felt like I was in hell. I was stuck in a dream that wasn’t ending, as if I was stuck in a time loop for millions and millions of years. When I took my first puff, I didn’t feel anything. So I took a few more and that’s when it started to kick in. Everything around me started to slow down. And my vision started becoming blurry. After that, I blacked out. When I opened my eyes, I was in my car and I could hear my friends saying “Maar kyun rahay ho bhai” I realized that I must have hit them which made them say this. I didn’t remember it though. My friend’s voice kept running through my mind and I saw him beside me. And a second later I punched him for some reason.
An hour later the sentence changed and I heard the voice “Do you remember me. I’m your friend. We just smoked up.”
I’ve seen my friends smoke up and even people on YouTube. As soon as they get high they get really excited and really happy. Feels like they start noticing the good in everything. Their feelings of happiness are amplified. For me, it was an entirely different case. My feelings of sadness and regret were amplified. I felt so sad. I had never been this sad in my life. Ever before.
I said to my friends “You guys don’t understand where I am. I have died and I’m in hell” which made them really worried.
Slowly I started to accept the fact that I was in hell and I had to move on with my life. I had to accept that God was punishing me for my bad deeds. I had to accept the fact that this punishment was going to last a million years after which I was going to go to heaven. Soon, I started reasoning about my punishment. I was like wait a minute.
If God didn’t question me before sending me to hell that means that I’m not actually in hell. I’m just really really stoned.
Anonymous
‘I legitimately thought I’d forgotten how to breathe’
It was just a normal Saturday, and as was customary during my university days I was spending it with my friends. Now, at the start of this day, I didn’t anticipate that I would be in for quite an ordeal, but life has a way of surprising you. Things started out fairly innocuous, we were in Regent’s Park in London, just hanging out after lunch, reading, talking, and listening to music. My friend, Evie, got a call from one of her friends asking her to come to hang out, her friend tried to entice her to come by saying they could smoke up but she turned him down. From there the conversation amongst us turned to weed and everyone’s experience with it and my other friend, Masu, revealed that she had never tried it. After the usual exclamations of shock and surprise on our part— because who hasn’t tried a joint by the end of high school— Masu said she wanted to take a walk on the wild side, so to speak, and try it.
None of us are hardcore stoners so we didn’t have any on us.
So, of course, we then ended up in an alley off Baker Street, meeting with some shady dealer who also offered to take us for a drive to ‘sample’ his product (ew). Gross innuendos aside, we finally found our way back to Evie’s place all set to guide Masu on her trip.
But, we ran into an unexpected problem, Masu didn’t know how to inhale. So, being the good friend I am I decided to show her how to smoke it. I ended up smoking around 4 joints, all quietly rolled and passed on so smoothly by Evie that I didn’t even notice when I was smoking a new one. Initially, it was fun. I felt like time was a thick jelly and I was sliding in and out of it. But, slowly that mellow, pleasant feeling was replaced by this odd sort of vibration in my bones. I felt jittery and nauseous. I went to lie down on the sofa and that’s when things really started going downhill. A sharp, piercing pain started happening in my chest, at frequent intervals. This worried all of us but the fact that I had just been smoking like a chimney pointed more towards a bad trip than an actual heart attack. Normally, most bad trips end here. You either sleep it off or you throw up if you’re really doing poorly. In this case, I forgot how to breathe. Logically I knew it was just a bad trip but on the off chance an actual heart attack decided to coincide with the day I smoked up, I decided to go to the hospital. Evie was on the phone yelling at emergency services who couldn’t send an ambulance in under an hour. And, Masu was busy kneeling by my side crying whilst showing me how to breathe. Given that I would literally stop breathing anytime Masu stopped doing the breathing exercises we decided to Uber to the hospital instead.
I stumbled into the ER where my friends proceeded to prop me up against the window of the nurse’s desk.
The doctor comes in and asks me routine questions and I think he had an inkling of what was going on given the time and our age. So despite us trying to avoid saying what exactly happened, due to it being illegal, he figured it out. He laughed quite a bit that I thought I was having a heart attack before he gave me a sedative to calm me down. And, that worked like a charm. Looking back at it now it’s hilarious that I legitimately thought I’d forgotten how to breathe. Or that somehow I was having a heart attack on the same day that I smoked way more than I ever have before. In the end, at least, I ended up with a funny story to tell. Alizah is a 24 year old writer and content curator.
‘Covid-19 and smoking up do not mix’
I have been in the U.S for the past 3 months now. I reside here. I really enjoy getting high or drunk every now and then with my brother and my best friend. One day, I was home alone for a night and had no rolling papers so I just ate 2 buds of weed (straight up swallowed) and waited for it to hit. It didn’t hit for shit. I got greedy and just rolled the weed in my cigarette and started smoking it. Sidenote: I had gone for my COVID test a day before and was awaiting the results the next morning since I was flying out in like 2 days tops.
I got so high that an hour later and out of the blue, I asked myself the following question, “What if I test positive for COVID-19?” and yeah, there you go. I started spiraling like a numbnut. It was the worst of trips. The baddest, the saddest. I went so far away from my body, I could practically see myself and I cried for 30 mins and spent the next 2 hours contemplating and realising how often we get tested for COVID-19. Anonymous
‘Smoking up made me more moral’
I got high all by myself but soon after I completed my joint, my morality kicked in. I end up giving a 5-minute lecture to a little innocent kid at a khoka , on how he shouldn’t do charas while his parents were away and not grow up to be a disappointment like me. Then I got into a fight with the khokay wala guy because I was trying to pay him Rs. 1000 for a coffee and he wouldn’t accept it. He ended up snatching it and kicking me out. Anonymous
‘A near death experience’
Earlier this year was the last time I ever smoked up in my life. I was sharing a joint with my friend in his street at night and as soon as we were done it felt like something popped in my heart. My heart started racing, I was finding it hard to breathe and talk, my whole body went cold and numb and I was sweating for some reason. I was convinced I was going to die and I was probably having a heart attack or something.
My friend and his dad rushed me to the cardia center in PIMS, but it was full and the sight of people actually dying of heart problems (one guy literally flat-lined in front of us) made me so much worse. Eventually, they took me to a private hospital where my mom and mamu showed up, and after several tests (I had calmed down a bit) they concluded what I experienced was just a severe panic attack. I quit that night and a week or 2 later I was diagnosed with a heart disorder after actually almost dying from a heart attack, courtesy of smoking cigarettes laced with hash for who knows how long. Shaheer is a 25 year old student.
‘ Delayed flights and regrets ‘
Back in the summer of 2019, my family planned to go to London. We stayed there for a while but I decided to leave early. A day before I left London I planned a sleepover with my friends. In the morning I made myself a joint to get me through the trip. I put my phone on charge and slept in the meantime. When I woke up I was already late and my flight was in 4 hours. I had to collect my stuff from my place which was in East London. I took the train and finished my joint immediately.
By the time I reached the airport, I was already pretty high.
I lost a sense of time by then and got really hungry. Airport food is not an ideal choice before a 7-hour long flight but at that moment I couldn’t control my hunger pangs at all. I got myself something to eat and finally made it to the plane. The moment I sat on the plane, I fell asleep. After I woke up I saw another plane out of my window. I soon realized that the plane had not even taken off yet. Turns out that I have been sleeping for five hours on the plane. Unfortunately, I had to wait another 7 hours for the flight to take off. Those 7 hours were the longest hour of my life. Hussain is a 26 year old creative junkie.