High Price

some deserted street and together smoked a couple of joints, listening to the mellow sounds of The Quiet Storm on 99.1 WEDR.
    “Shit, I don’t feel nothin’,” I declared. “This ain’t shit.”
    Snake and Derrick looked at me and then at each other. Laughing, someone said, “Yeah, he fucked-up.” I continued to insist I was fine and that I really didn’t feel any different from usual, but both of them just laughed and repeated, “That nigga fuuuucked-up.” Everything I said, every time I laughed or just looked at one of those guys only confirmed for them that I was actually high. I still didn’t think so.
    In fact, I didn’t notice anything unusual at all until they dropped me off back at home. My sister Joyce took one look at me and said, “Damn, you must be fucked-up.” I’d heard that same line earlier. I brushed her off. But I think I must’ve been acting a bit cautious and tentative, not like my usual bold self. My eyes were probably red or maybe I reeked of weed. I didn’t yet understand how marijuana affects consciousness.
    I went into my room and then things started getting strange. I put on some music and tried to fall asleep. But suddenly, I felt like I was inside the beat. I thought to myself, “What the fuck is this?” The song was surrounding me, throbbing, inescapable. That wasn’t the way music was supposed to sound. My heart seemed to have sped up, too. I felt as though it were keeping time with the R&B rhythm. Was it unhealthy if it did that? Could it kill me?
    It was thoroughly disconcerting. I knew I wasn’t usually so conscious of my heartbeat; I knew I didn’t usually find music so intense. I didn’t understand at all that this was what was supposed to be enjoyable. I didn’t like having my senses or consciousness altered. I found it disorienting and even slightly frightening—the idea that people would deliberately seek substances that changed the way they saw the world mystified me.
    Indeed, I’d never even thought before about the possibility that drugs could change the way you see things. The idea hadn’t occurred to me. When I’d watched people get “fucked-up,” I’d seen it wholly from the outside, not realizing that from the inside, it could be an entirely different way of experiencing life. All I was aware of was people’s outwardly strange behavior.
    And as a teenager, I didn’t spend much time thinking about how other people saw things; that was part of what allowed me to do things like mess with the white guy on the street. It hadn’t occurred to me that perceptions could vary much in one person or from one person to another. Later, I’d recognize how understanding the idea of differences in consciousness and changing sensory experiences might let you get a sense of other people’s points of view and allow you to empathize with situations that were unlike your own. At the time, however, I was simply distressed by the loss of control. Reefer didn’t seem fun or enlightening. If anything, it was kind of disturbing.
    Curiously, when I later read sociologist Howard Becker’s research on how marijuana users actually have to learn how to enjoy the high, I initially didn’t buy it. By that point, I myself had become so caught up in viewing drugs through the prism of how the brain is affected, I’d forgotten the role that social forces can play. Thinking back on my own early experience, however, I realized that I’d been just like Becker’s subjects whose first high wasn’t memorable or pleasant. It was only when they had smoked multiple times with other users who taught them how to detect and appreciate the sensory distortions and other effects that they began to interpret them positively. Only much later in my career would I begin to recognize that factors like prior experience with drugs and the environment in which they are taken are extremely important for understanding and experiencing drug effects.
    During my high school years, however, I just didn’t like marijuana. But there was, I soon discovered, a way that I could use the drug to stay on top of things. My cousin Sandra had started dating a guy we called Jamaican Mike, who had a direct connection to a supplier of some of that island’s best quality weed. Usually, the Jamaicans and the African Americans didn’t mix much in my circle. We looked down on them and vice versa. The same was also true between us and the Cubans and Haitians who were also such a big part of South Florida life.