Gareth O'Callaghan: I consider myself fortunate that cannabis didn't 'agree' with me
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They say your sense of smell is like a portal to forgotten memories. I was sheltering from heavy rain last weekend in the doorway of a busy shop when I got a familiar smell hanging in the air — earthy, woody, with a tinge of citrus, almost skunkish.
I realised the guy standing beside me was smoking cannabis, taking long drags from the joint and blowing the smoke out into other people’s faces. So if he was smoking weed, then inadvertently so was everyone else standing in the doorway. To avoid it, I either had to step back out into the torrential rain, or stand there and inhale.
For a moment it brought me back to a time when I was 22, when I was offered cannabis from someone I worked with. Let’s call him Dan. He smoked weed day and night, at every opportunity he got for as long as I’d known him.
I recall taking three long inhalations from the joint. Its effects were not what I’d expected. Within seconds, I was living inside an unfamiliar space in my mind that was on the verge of freaking out.
I can’t recall feeling such a level of fear in my young life as I felt for almost 15 minutes, and then paranoia set in. I felt locked inside a body that was no longer familiar to me, inhabiting some ghostly space where everything had become deeply hostile and irrationally anxious.
We had been sitting in a quiet corner of a pub up to that point, enjoying a few pints that Friday night after work. I started to get this feeling that I was about to be attacked.
The pub was packed. I looked around at people sitting at other tables, chatting and laughing. None of them seemed interested in me, but that simply added to my suspicion that they were all pretending not to notice me. It was a conspiracy, they were all part of a much bigger plan. By then, I was convinced they had weapons in their bags, knives, possibly even guns under their jackets.
I left the pub, and finding myself on the busy street I started to run, faster and faster. I wasn’t even sure where I was, even though I walked that same street to and from work everyday. I looked back. There were two men chasing me. They were shouting after me to stop. I was convinced they were going to murder me.
I ran faster.
I ducked left into a side lane that connected two main streets, and emerged on the other side. I started chasing a slow-moving bus, waving my hands in the hope that the driver might see me, but he drove on. I was soaked in sweat.
Eventually, I tripped and fell flat on my face in a pool of flood water. The two men who had been chasing me were now standing over me. They were gardaí.
I told them what had happened. One of them, the older one, reassured me that no one was following me, and not to smoke “that shit”, as he called it, ever again. It was to be a lifelong warning that I heeded, not because it came from the law, but because of what the drug had done to my brain.
Years later, I learned what had happened to me was called a psychotic episode as a result of the marijuana, causing disorganised thinking and wildly irrational behaviour.
Dan informed me a few days later that weed didn’t “agree” with me. He explained that some people are fine taking it, that it helps them to relax and chill, while others should steer clear of it. I was one of the latter, he told me.
Almost 20 years later, after a long battle with cannabis addiction, paranoia and hallucinations, Dan took his own life.
Since my one-off experience with marijuana 40 years ago, I’ve spent a long time learning about the power for good of the human brain, and also about its ability to turn our lives into a horror film: a mine field of delusions, anxiety and paranoia — also the results of long-term marijuana use.
The human brain is the most beautiful creation we will ever know in our lives.
Physicist Michio Kaku said: “Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.”
It is humankind’s perpetual mystery, whose powers to perform in tens of thousands of different ways instantaneously will never be fully solved.
Despite what we know about its role in our lives, we’ll only ever be scratching the surface. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. Many say it is more complex than anything in the universe.
We are the only living creatures on earth who have a conscious awareness of ourselves and the world around us, and it’s because of our brains that we are able to identify with our 'I-ness'.
We spend our formative years learning how to live, to learn, to survive, to be fully alive and connected, only for some to then go and destroy the sources of these abstract brain functions with cannabis.
Parts of the brain we rely on as children to learn the complex processes of memory, learning, decision-making, co-ordination and emotions are the same functions that are damaged by marijuana.
It also changes brain areas that enable us to form new memories and shift our attentional focus. It causes impaired thinking and interferes with the ability to perform complicated tasks. Balance, posture, and reaction time are all affected.
Advocates of marijuana claim it’s not addictive. There are those who say the science supporting its inherent dangers is not true.
If we really care about the wellbeing of our children, then we need to educate them in the very ‘un-cool’ aspects of marijuana use. No one else will.
Users will argue cannabis alleviates anxiety, shyness, even OCD. It doesn’t.
It’s a narcotic, not a cure. It exacerbates these symptoms, while increasing the risk of depression. It burns out the brain regions that naturally regulate these emotions.
If you include research that proves the links between cannabis and schizophrenia, psychosis, and dementia, it paints a picture of self-destruction.
Some 3,000 people in Ireland were hospitalised for mental and behavioural disorders between 2019 and 2022 as a result of taking cannabis, including cookies and jellies laced with the drug, according to HSE figures published last July. There were more hospital admissions due to cannabis use than from the use of cocaine in 2022.
So let’s assume for a moment that cannabis could be legalised. Will there be a plan in place to educate people? Will users be permitted to grow their own cannabis plants? If so, how much will they be allowed to harvest? If not, where will it be sold and how?
Unlike alcohol, will there be an imposed limit on how much you can buy? Will you require a medical prescription, or will it be sold openly?
What about the dangers of mixing it with other drugs, including prescription-based medications and alcohol?
What happens if its legalisation causes an epidemic among teenagers, which many doctors believe it will? A higher percentage of younger age groups are already using the drug. How will our emergency departments cope with an increase in marijuana-related overdoses?
Considering what happened when heroin flooded Dublin’s inner city in 1980, younger age groups could be exposed to a devastating epidemic caused by freely-available legalised cannabis, since no one can possibly predict what the outcome of decriminalisation will look like over time.
Trial records of many court cases in recent years show that the accused had been or claimed to be taking marijuana before committing the crime.
One such case involved Richard Kirk, from Denver, who fatally shot his wife in 2014. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming he was intoxicated after eating “pot candy”.
Moments before he shot her in the head, Kristine Kirk told the emergency dispatcher her husband was hallucinating and had gone to get his gun after eating the pot candy.
At his trial, he told the judge he was intoxicated with THC, marijuana’s psychoactive agent. However, he changed his plea to guilty to spare his children having to go through a trial, so his defence was never tested in court. Marijuana was licensed for recreational use in the state of Colorado in 2012, two years before Kirk killed his wife.
Considering the chronic problem this country has with alcohol, and how it also underlies so many crimes, it’s even more worrying to imagine a drug as unpredictable as marijuana being freely available to buy.
The old saying “if we all had a bong, we’d all get along” is like saying if we could all get stoned, we’d all agree with each other. We wouldn’t, nor will we, ever.