FOUR TWENTY FOR THE YEAR 2019

Whats the big deal on four twenty?

The easy answer is smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em, and it’s not cigarettes.

How easy is it to score weed in Oregon?

Score used to be the cool word for buying ditch weed in the old days, as in, “Dude, I scored some weed,” and they show a full sandwich bag of yard clippings.

Scoring weed included too many odd turns before the cannabis industry stepped up.

“Man, check out my score,” says the new guy, and they show you a damp bag of yard clippings pretending to be weed.

“It’s good weight man, four fingers. I can get more,” as if more was a good idea. It wasn’t.

That can’t happen in a four twenty store today.

“Wanna buy some weed? Give me your money,” says a stranger who walks down an alley never to return.

Now the customer walks into a weed store on four twenty or any other day and walks out with a solid purchase.

“You seen Thai stick? This is Thai stick,” says the guy who balled up yard clippings and tied them to a shish kabob stick.

Today you don’t get a stick for your money.

What do you get on four twenty

I see St. Pat’s and four twenty in the same light. Take a step back from the norm and get a bigger picture. Raise a glass, bong, or brownie, which brings me to my own revelation.

What is ‘recreational marijuana?’ Is that where you toke up and play a game, take a run, go to the library? What sort of recreation goes best with weed?

A better question: what is medical marijuana? For this I’ve got a better answer.

Not so long ago I stared down the options for pain management. In front of me sat oxy pills, liquid oxy, and weed brownies. One doesn’t belong in the mix, but there it is.

Which did I use to ease the pain of neck cancer radiation treatment? All them. Here’s how it went:

I held off taking anything to the moment of torment because I’m not sure I’d be able to kick an opioid addiction if I started taking oxy. Once the intense pain reached new levels of anguish, I took a pill and waited. And waited.

Nothing

Take another pill? Oh, hell no, that’s the start I was avoiding, so I gave up on oxy.

I backed it down for three more days before taking a spoonful of liquid oxy. Did it work? No, it didn’t, but it dropped me, and when I woke up everything was worse.

It was an out of the pan and into the fire moment. No more liquid oxy for this one, but something had to change and change fast.

Instead of a drug addict intervention, I got a non-drug addict intervention. The end result was either get my shit together or I’d be someplace where professionals would do it for me.

I bet on myself and hauled out weed brownies, thinking they’d have little effect and the threat of hospitalization was my last chance.

Guess what? Instead of a nothing effect, the weed brownies kicked in with something altogether different. They actually had a medicinal effect and changed the trajectory of my recovery.

Turns out I wasn’t trapped in a cycle of remorse and regret if I got the right break. Medical marijuana weakened the grip of interior neck burn enough to let me focus on something other than the fire burning in there.

Medical marijuana to the rescue

This is called anecdotal evidence by the smart crowd, but I got a handle on my burden with weed. The science explained to me was the high part of weed goes to the brain if there’s nothing else going on. And it goes to the area of distress if something is going on, like radiation therapy for neck cancer.

I’ll say it loud and proud that weed brownies boosted my interest in survival beyond the cure phase of cancer. I shared my news with doctors, who showed no interest, and nurses who did show interest.

The nurses, the first line of care, knew the drill. They also knew oxy. They wouldn’t say eat the brownie, but did comment on the effort to take, then kick, oxy.

The pill mills used oxy as a first resort for quite awhile. I read the news, I know addicts, and adding everything up I feared for my future.

For this fan, four twenty is a celebration over the pharmaceutical industry. Their formula didn’t work for me; the four twenty formula did.

Last word? Hallelujah the hell out of four twenty.