How I Smoked My Way Sober
September 9, 2015 in News by RBN
For me, marijuana wasn’t a gateway to harder drugs. It was an exit ramp from my addiction to alcohol.
Kiersten Essenpreis for BuzzFeed News
Right after I arrived at my first and last Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, a woman in a pink teddy-bear sweatshirt clutched me to her ample breast. She was the only other person in the basement meeting of a North Carolina Methodist church, a group that I’d found online earlier that day and, apparently, wasn’t very popular. I was 25, broke, unemployed, and had realized eight hours earlier that I was a drunk.
I’d been crying for most of the day, but the shock of finding my head sandwiched between a stranger’s boobs — the bear’s googly eyes staring at me from her abdomen — knocked the tears right out of me. The woman let me go and nodded as she listened to my story. One day at a time, she said, and handed me a copy of AA’s primary text, The Big Book. She encouraged me to come back the next day,when there might be more people, she said. As I headed to my car, a predatory-looking man with a dirty camo hat and a mustache crossed the parking lot from his truck to talk to me.
“Watch out for the one in the pink sweatshirt,” he said. “She’s a predator. Come back tomorrow!”
I was positive that I wouldn’t.
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