I'll tell you a story the Mowl..
I get it: you met a boy and he got you high, then you became paranoid for reasons unexplained but were most likely down to you feeling a bit queer about getting so stoned with a total stranger who was really just a kid and that you ought to have known better and told him to sling his hook as soon as you understood what he wanted. But you didn't, and you've regretted it ever since.
Your actions, in a public place, are/were disgraceful: you're a grown man, this happened within the last couple of years, so you were no kid - he was though.
I wouldn't give a kid tobacco to smoke, let alone tobacco for a spliff.
I don't smoke or roll spliffs in public places.
If I choose to bring a few spliffs with me for whatever reason (studio/gig/dinner/etc) I roll them at home before leaving.
I roll fairly lightweight doobs because it's never taken much to get me high due to my metabolism.
I was offered a spliff by a gaggle of girls I met on the night of May Day, so I had a toke and immediately started coughing intensely.
They thought it was hilarious, but I made a point of saying to them to be careful and to look out for each other as their night went along.
Yeah, I felt a bit old but I also felt I did the right thing to tell them that if their spliffs were enough to topple me, then mixed with alcohol it might do the same to any of the four or five of them. So they offered me a few reassurances and then each one of them lined up to give me a hug and a kiss after I guided them to a nearby bar with good credentials (they were from out of town) and went on my way.
Smoking with kids is a line I wouldn't cross.
Yes, I've been smoking since my teens but never heavily and never until my day is fully done and it's time to relax after sauna.
Then dinner/supper and a spliff afterwards to wind down.
But rolling and then smoking a joint with some kid in a public place?
Fuck no.
In September, not the last one, the one before that, we had here in ireland I suppose what you'd call an Indian summer
So fairly recently then.
What age was the boy?
So I was going somewhere one day (in late September) and it was such a nice day that I decided that I'd walk to the train station from my house, which is about a forty minute or so walk, and go by train..
You took a forty minute walk to take a five minute train journey?
You might as well have eaten the spliff.
By the time I got to the train station I was pretty heated up and so I sat down on a bench in a small shelter on the platform, not for shelter from the wind and rain in winter, as it would normally be used, but because the Sun was splitting the stones and I was hot..
I see that the next train on the electronic timetable is about twenty minutes away <sigh> so I roll a smoke and start smoking it and while I'm doing that and waiting for the train, I notice that there's a kid standing beside me and then he asks me - Gotta a smoke, mista?
You used to smoke didn't you Mowl?
Yes, I did - in the mornings in particular, which was a habit I always wanted to break but found too difficult.
Then my heart began to ask me to do it sooner and so I did: I used 0% weed with a little cigarette tobacco for the first few weeks.
Then I used less and less actual tobacco and eventually ended up smoking only the 0% hemp leaf.
Gradually staving off the nicotine urge was the goal, and it worked a treat.
Not a method I've heard of anyone else using, but it worked for me.
I don't understand vapes, have never used one, same with CBD and all those other new-fangled items the head shops sell.
The hemp I use is packaged as pot potpourri and I buy it at a local headshop at half price.
A ten gram bag would last me at least a month, maybe more - not bad for €5.00.
One aspect of my stay at the cardiac wing was nicotine patches: they also worked a treat and I didn't go outside even once for a smoke during that whole week.
That was the kick-off of quitting: '
if I can endure a week in (self-imposed) solitary without tobacco, then I don't need it after I leave.'
And so it was, is, and will continue to be.
(before your heart attack) so you probably know that it's a little annoying when random strangers ask you for a smoke when they see you smoking one..
Any sucker looking to bum off me knows by the look on my face not to approach me: if I see you looking, then making a move, my eyes will tell you to fuck off.
I replied - No, it's a rollie. The kid, who was in school uniform, replied - I need the tobacco
And you gave it to him.
A school-going child.
You're an idiot.
At that point, I was just thinking to myself that I should tell this kid to fuck off and then he says - For this. Opening the palm of his hand and in it is a little bar of hash
Quick thinkingly, I said - Take a seat son
There's a name for that, Jambo - and it's called a bum.
You're a lousy fucking bum.
So he sat down beside me on the bench, I handed him the pouch of tobacco, he didn't need papers, he had his own (long) ones and he got to making the joint, quite skillfully I might add
So I was chatting to him and he seemed a little bothered with school and stuff (I presume he was bunking off) and I tried to be understanding and we smoked the joint together
You tried to be understanding? How so? By doing drugs with a schoolboy in a train station in the middle of the afternoon? Tobacco. Hash. With a kid. While he was on the hop and you were out for a stroll? For fuck's sake, Jimmy.
I hadn't actually smoked in quite a while and I admit that I was taking some long, hard drags on that puppy and when the train pulled in I got up to go but he was going nowhere. Tbh, the joint wasn't even finished and I was tempted to say, ahh, yeah, I'll wait till the next one too
but I felt a little bit guilty that he had been generous enough with his hash (for some tobacco) and I should just leave him to it..
What you should have felt guilty about was your normalizing the kid's habit with him, in public.
I've never been bad with cannabis, not paranoid much
Why on earth would you use a drug that causes you to shift into paranoia?
but after I had got on the train I did start to feel a little bit paranoid, I mean, I could hear every conversation that was being had on the twenty meter carriage, know what I mean?
Were they all talking about you?
Or about what they just saw you doing?
Of course you should have felt paranoid after doing drugs with a boy.
You also should have felt leather impacting on your crotch from a copper's boot.
Then, after only a few stops later (I was close to my destination) I get off the train and I'm walking (about ten minutes) to where I have to go, the Sun still blazing. At this point, I'm having a ball, I'm high as f*ck but my mouth has gone as dry as the Sahara desert. When I get to the shop I can't find water and I ask a shopkeep where it is and he's like - It's right behind you sir
I swear, until about nine or ten PM that night, I was still f*cking stoned
Imagine the state of the kid so?
Or that of his parents when he came home, ashen of face and with a heart rate at ninety?
And yeah, it did get me to thinking - If the kids are smoking stuff that strong at such a young age..
..with adults'.
Is that what you left out of the above sentence?
Honestly, if I saw an adult do what you did at a train/metro/bus station with that boy, I'd certainly mention it to security and have you checked over.
Yes, kids today have access to far stronger drugs than we could get in our youth, but it's the role of the adult to explain exactly that to kids, to warn them of the dangers of what they're doing. If the boy offered you quality E's and whizz, would you do business with him? Where's the bottom line in your behaviour, Jimmy? Did it occur to you to consider yourself in his shoes and what you'd do in his place if you met someone like you at a train station? Or what would happen to the both of you if the cameras picked up on your little session in the sun?
That's your next trips to Oz an the US struck off for a few years.
That's a permanent mark on your record for child abuse.
Taking advantage of a young boy with drugs isn't a good look, Dawson.
You need to seriously examine your conscience about this.
Frankly, you deserve a box in the chops for that one.
