Why I prefer smoking marijuana to drinking alcohol

In the first years after finishing high school, I got really into smoking and drinking heavily. And also into doing a fair amount of drugs. I'd spend half the week partying, and the other half I'd manage to perform well at work, attend classes, and recover some weight. I suppose I was very angry or that I wanted to prove something to myself. Or maybe it was just that, as Sara Hebe sings, I like it when it makes me dizzy.

Regardless, for four or five years I devoted myself to exploring the secondary drug market in Buenos Aires city and province with a stealth I still can't believe, so that no cop and almost nobody in my straight-laced circle would notice. I was living in turbo mode, but showing myself in ninja mode. I came out of it just in time, I think, with the idea that if you don't get something out of the party scene in four or five seasons, you still have to grab hold of the good stories and leave. For your own good and for the good of other people's parties.

By the time I could finally extract myself from worse messes, after a couple of failed attempts, weed became urgent in the face of the need to reduce harm, to cut ties, to delete numbers, to uninstall apps, to get my life in order, to empty bags, to change the flow without falling into some evangelical church.

It's hard for people who've never gone through an addiction to give its real dimension to the harm reduction perspective. The hard part isn't understanding its principles or applications, but rather being able to empathize with the psychology of the addict. Most of us fell in through escapism and became addicted to having an escape channel we could manage on demand, like a permit to drive on the shoulder but also with the spirituality of an arcane device that channels our energy. I believe cannabis is one of the least harmful tools for undertaking a harm reduction process. Although I may have overdone mine.

Harm reduction Joint increase

What I didn't account for was that in order to reduce the harm, I was going to end up increasing the joints. I started smoking more joints, bigger ones and more often. That forced me to cut back the quantity or quality of booze for economic reasons and also because, in high doses, the two combined no longer sat well with me. Disassociated from other substances, drinking started to lose its charm for me, and I became selective.

There are studies and surveys from all over the world pointing out that the popularization of cannabis use is resulting in a reduction of alcoholic beverage consumption. I don't have a moral judgment on that statistic, because it's also true that alcohol is magical and that being drunk is a different league from being stoned. But coming back from drinking as a lifestyle gets heavier and heavier.

The way we manage our affairs always, always comes down to solving for X. Study logic and algebra. And study the market too: you have to earn really well to smoke good-genetics weed, without paranoia or tachycardia, and simultaneously drink quality alcohol, nicely prepared and in pleasant settings. That doesn't happen often, especially if you're in your twenties and deep into the scene.

Why I choose marijuana over alcohol

Today, roughly fifteen years later, I've developed an exaggerated esteem for cannabis, unbearable even by stoner standards. If there's an Opus Dei of weed, I'm in the Opus Dei of weed. If there's a joint, I'm the one with the joint. If there's only a roach left, there isn't anymore because I just smoked it. And in that increasingly symbiotic relationship, I gradually stopped drinking alcohol regularly in a progressive way, first accidentally and then more and more consciously. The combined smell of booze and weed was reserved for special occasions only.

The survival factor

When you're trying to get out of an addiction, the last thing you need is frustration, and alcohol can set up a combo of heightened anxiety plus exposure to frustration, on top of being a great inhibitor of your resistance. Drinking alcohol outside the house puts too many elements into play, and waiting at bars always put me in a foul mood. And then there's the matter of how it's prepared, which changes from venue to venue, from bartender to bartender, from day to day. The flavor isn't the same, the hit isn't either, the expectation goes unmet, and the cost keeps climbing.

Weed, however, offered me total consistency, insofar as I'd bring from home a predictable experience that could give me just the right dose of headspace. The number of joints I'd take with me also imposed a limit, a ceiling. Even today I greatly value that consistency of weed over alcohol, which is nothing more or less than another expression of the constancy of your own supply versus the variability of what you might find out there.

The economic factor

The above is somewhat related to the fact that an acceptable cocktail in Buenos Aires has always cost more or less the same as 1 to 2 grams of acceptable weed: today around 8,000 to 14,000 pesos. Nobody goes out for just one drink, and having two or three costs the same as about 5g of weed, almost guaranteed. That's two hours of drinking versus several days of smoking. In a country where planning costs is impossible, that difference became abysmal for me. Especially when I started feeling that for every poorly made, warm, or flavorless drink, I was missing out on a couple of nice joints.

The sensory factor

From a more gourmet standpoint, marijuana can also have great advantages over alcohol, or at least match it in the palette of flavor and scent experiences, with the difference that the next morning the smell of weed is still pleasant while the smell of booze can turn unpleasant.

The operational factor

Those of us who maintain such heavy and constant marijuana use may look like clueless zombies, but in reality we never fully lose our lucidity. It's extremely rare to have a weed blackout, while everyone can count at least a couple of blackouts from overdoing it with alcohol. I've woken up very sluggish after heavily smoky late nights, but never, ever with a weed hangover. It's never wrecked my stomach. And it's never been hard to get back to work the next day.

The competitive factor

The activities I've enjoyed doing the most since I was a kid are writing, playing drums, and playing video games, and all three pair wonderfully with cannabis, with some beverages and with other elements of the periodic table too, but that's beside the point. However, in general weed always outperforms booze and turns out to be a much better key to entering "the zone" than the buzz that drinking offers.

By "the zone" I mean that metaphysical-chemical-mental state where you truly flow while playing a video game, while getting into a story, while making music, while practicing a sport, while making love. For repetitively performing familiar tasks (riding a bike, handling a controller, playing an instrument), marijuana also comparatively produces fewer unforced errors than alcohol.

The masquerade factor

In that context, coming clean at home about smoking weed also reduced the damage with my mom: it offered her an explanation that spared her the impact of the complete reasons for absences from certain family events or the uselessness during some key moments. Being messed up had always been the real story. But how do you tell your mom that? You'd be a brute!