My Early Cannabis use as a Teenager and Young adult; for treating complex PTSD (unbeknownst to me)
By Terry
Feb. 2023
My deliberate attempts to wean myself of cannabis dependency was between 1975-1981. In 1971 at the age of nearly 12, I had moved from inner city Detroit to the agricultural landscape full of strawberries, tomatoes, and citrus orchards in Chula Vista, California, near theMexico border. I went from living by the most unique ecosystem of the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean and the imminent threat of getting lost at sea by an anticipated major earthquake. I was in the middle of the sixth grade when I changed public schools and gained a whole new group of friends. I was an odd kid because ofb mild cerebral palsy. It was the first year in California that girls were allowed to wear pants: but only under a dress. I often got away with wearing an oversized Michigan sweatshirt above my knees, with baggy jeans or leggings,aka tights. My multi colored auburn hair had just begun to grow long after years of a pixie cut allowing me to often pass as a boy on my solo adventures in inner city Detroit.
Since age 8, I had been a latchkey kid of a single, divorced mom. I was the 5th of seven kids. I went from that reality to living with my emotionally and physically absent, estranged Papa in a small apartment in Chula Vista, California. California was also triumphed with ongoing childhood trauma. In mid March, only 2.5 months after I arrived in California, I experienced labor and birth (of my daughter) alone in a strawberry field only 1 mile from my elementary school. I did not know that I was pregnant when I went into labor as a child. I had been regularly raped by my uncle Sam (by marriage) from the age of six until I left Michigan at the age of 11.
By that same summer between 6th and 7th grade I was introduced to cannabis for the very first time by neighborhood kids. Cannabis gave me a relief from self hatred and shame and being high gave me a more euphoric feeling of disassociation that I regularly experienced from the trauma.
My regular use of cannabis didn’t take off until two years later. I did smoke pot between the ages of 12-14, but only a few times: mostly due to peer pressure. I started to smoke pot every day in earnest when I was forced to change junior high schools when our family moved once again from Chula Vista to Bonita, CA. There I found a new neighborhood full of teenage stoners. I was introduced to the culture of chronic cannabis use which I believe gave me a sense of purpose and the ability to survive my harsh childhood and my ongoing adolescent trauma.
By the end of eight grade, I learned to roll doobies and supply myself with two to four finger bags of Mexican shake every week. I purchased pot with the money I earned from my hard work as a babysitter. My friends were determined by my pot use. We smoked it before we picked up the bus in the morning, during recess and lunch at school, and after school and all weekend long. The THC level in our Mexican grown shake was 1-2%. It was always so much fun to go to the drive-in movies with our friends piled in the trunk or pickup truck with lots of candies and treats, to satisfy our increased appetites. Cannabis affected my schoolwork profoundly and it stunted my growth emotionally and psychologically.
In 1975; I deliberately quit cannabis for the first time when I discovered I was pregnant with my second child at age 16. I graduated HS living at a home for unwed pregnant women and other women transitioning from jail or working the streets as sex workers. I was motivated to get an education and be financially self-sufficient as a teen single mom. After my son was born in 1976, I started smoking pot again but a lot less than I did as a younger teenager. By the time my newborn was six weeks old we moved into an apartment. The stress of being a full-time mom with a colicky baby that nursed all the time around the clock forced me to turn to cannabis. Pot had been my only copy mechanism as I didn’t have any other tools. I used recreational pot at night and on the weekends for stress and postpartum anxiety relief. This seemed appropriate.
I also attended junior college and carpenter apprentice school and on job training with the San Diego Carpenters Union. The sexism and sexual harassment in the trades was stressful so I found myself smoking every night.
In 1977, I began working as a feminist, social activist, and a healthcare advocate. The fact that cannabis was known to increase appetites became imperative for those being treated for cancer or AIDS. I worked within the LGBTQ2SI+ community advocating for our sexual freedom and our rights while working within a collective of the Feminist Women’s Health Care Centers. WomanCare was in Hillcrest, San Diego’s hipster gay and lesbian friendly neighborhood, just blocks from the Balboa Park.
My medical social work training is rooted in these early years of passion for the advocacy of people: especially women, lesbians, and the entire LGBTQI+ community. My young son and I found refuge, grew up, and even thrived within these communities, after being scapegoated and barely tolerated by our original community, my Italian Catholic, and later born-again Christian siblings and their families.
In 1980, I was personally affected by cancer when my father became terminally ill from lung cancer at the age of 57. I was only 20 years old and had just attended the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival for the first time. MICHFEST, as we fondly called it, was the first place I had ever experienced on earth where it was ok just to be me. There I was encircled by all kinds of women, women who transgressed society’s gender expectation of what a women should be. We were butch, femme, and everything in between. Lesbians paved the way for gender expansive and non-binary identities as we know them today. Lesbians and gay men were practicing this decades before the linguistics of gender became so politicized, as it is today. Michfest gave us women a temporary refuge each year from the usual oppressive, dominant, militantly heterosexual world where just walking down the street, or living alone with a small child, as I did, was very dangerous for me and for young lesbians. For one week a year we were free from the risk of being raped or any other male on female violence. We created a sacred haven of safety among women for one week in the woods. When I returned from Michfest in 1980 my father passed away and I started smoking pot more regularly again.
I was part of the subculture of the lesbian and gay community in San Diego. The gay men I knew who contracted HIV/AIDS were some of the same men with whom other lesbians and myself were L&G activists and we built the lesbian and gay pride parade coalitions of San Diego in those early days. Back then, in the mid to later 1970’s (year after year) we argued in favor of adding the word “Lesbian” to the phrase “Gay Pride.” Lesbians expressed that we felt erased by the word “Gay.” We felt our issues as women loving women, and the other social and economic factors affecting us as lesbians and women were and still are different from those of gay men. Men who still have substantial privilege as men. For many gay men there is also white male economic privilege. In 1979, we finally came to some agreement to add the word “Lesbian” to the phrase “Gay Pride.” That's how the San Diego LGBTQI+ alphabet first began by acknowledging the presence of lesbians and differentiating lesbian and gay men's identities and issues.
When my gay brothers began to fall ill from HIV/AIDS and were dying at an unprecedented rate, cannabis medical use rights was both a political and personal activism within my communities. I was committed to ensuring that my gay male friends had easy access to cannabis to ease their final days.
On the other hand, vocalizing my intent to cut down or get clean from cannabis sounded like a strange concept to my close friends and to other social activists. In fact, I too felt strange. I felt indifferent, and I felt like there was something wrong with me because at that time I couldn’t control or moderate my cannabis use like everyone else seemed to be doing. I was quietly, and not so quietly, using it or at least craving it whenever I could afford it or find it—that is, morning, noon, and night.
I had dreams of becoming a certified nurse midwife, I attempted junior college three months postpartum. This was my deepest passion. Yet, I could not see how my cannabis use was profoundly affecting my ability to complete executive cognitive functions, such as finishing college courses and sustaining employment. I did better with psychology, woodworking, and child development, but when it came to anatomy and chemistry, I was at a complete loss due to my foggy, cannabis-filled head.
I thought I secretly had become a pothead but it was obviously to everyone else and this did not make me very attractive. I burned bridges with my lovers and friends in San Diego. I was flighty, I wasn’t very reliable, and my life had a lot of chaos as a young, poor lesbian single mom raising a son.
This was the start of Reaganomics and as a result we fell even further below the federal level of poverty as did many vulnerable families namely women and children. My son and I both physical disabilities which complicated our lives even further.
Cannabis, I believe, reinforced my dissociated state of existence within myself, with my relationships and with reality in general. I realized years later that my ongoing disassociated state was rooted in the undiagnosed, chronic and severe, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, from which I was suffering. It would be 5 more years before I found my first 12 step meetings in Santa Cruz and 7 more years before we started MA in Santa Cruz.
Ironically, I believe cannabis actually kept me alive for many years, although I was not at my best. It allowed me to function and it allowed me to live in my body, which I was so often disassociated from ever since I was a very young girl.