The process of how Cannabis became my my Green Heroin

Chapter 1:  My early cannabis use as a means of treating complex PTSD

By Antonia Teresa Amore-Broccoli, LCSW

My first deliberate attempts to wean myself of cannabis was between 1975-1981.

The contributing factors that left me at a higher risk for addiction.

In 1971 at the age of nearly 12, I had moved from inner city Detroit to the agricultural landscape of strawberries, tomatoes and citrus fields in the southern California neighborhood of Chula Vista; only five miles from Mexico.

Since age 8, I had been a latchkey kid of a single, divorced mom. I was the 5th of 7 kids.

For years I purposely kept my thick wavy hair very short allowing me to often pass as a boy on my solo adventures in Detroit. I was a lesbian even in the grade school as I knew I was queer and different. I was an odd and clumsy kid because I have mild cerebral palsy since I was an infant.

I went from living by the unique ecosystem of the Great Lakes to Pacific Ocean and the imminent threat of getting lost at sea by an anticipated major earthquake.

I left my momma and siblings to live with my emotionally and physically absent estranged Papa.

I was in the middle of the sixth grade at Edison Elementary when I changed public schools to Loma Linda Elementary and gained a whole new group of friends. I Was instantly popular on the playground with my new friends and they welcome me with open arms. They didn’t bully me like the boys did in motown and they liked me. This brought me comfort as I spent most of my time alone; as my father was never home.

My multi colored auburn hair had just begun to grow due to the peer pressure to present more girly to match my group of 1970’s very cool CA kids.

When I started Loma Linda in 1971, it was the first year in CA that girls were allowed to wear pants: but only under a dress.

I often got away with wearing an oversized Michigan sweatshirt with baggy jeans or leggings under a skirt.

My new California was also triumphed with accumulative childhood trauma.

In mid March, only 2.5 months after I arrived, I experienced labor and birth (of my daughter)  alone in a strawberry field surrounded by large tomatoes plants. This was only 1 mile from my new elementary school.

I did not know that I was pregnant when I went into labor as a child myself. In Dearborn MI, I had been regularly raped by my Uncle Sam (married to my maternal Aunt)  from the age of six until I was sent to live with my father at the age of 11.

To this day I don't know if my parents knew that I was pregnant. And I do not know if that was the reason why my mother sent me to live with my father.

Cannabis use;

By that first summer, in California between 6th and 7th grade, I was introduced to cannabis for the very first time by neighborhood kids in my apartment building. Cannabis gave me an instant relief from self hatred and shame hidden deep inside me from the experiences of incest/rapes.

Being high gave me euphoric feeling of disassociation that I experienced from the trauma. 

My regular use of cannabis didn’t take off until about 1.5 yrs later.

I did smoke pot between the ages of 12-13 , 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. I had to leave all my wonderful friends i was so bonded with since i moved to CA.

My mother and sisters had joined my father and the whole family moved (once again) from Chula Vista to Bonita, CA. I was traumatized because my friends meant every thing to me.

In Bonita my sister and I found a new neighborhood full of teenage stoners and partiers. 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 eighth 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 cannabis 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 changed high schools two more times before graduation at the end if my junior year living at a home for unwed pregnant women in San Diego; “The Door of Hope.”

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 gradually and 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 around the clock with little sleep 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 as a stressed out single new mom.

 In 1977, I began working as a feminist, social activist, and a healthcare advocate. I attempted to use cannabis only recreationally and tried my best to focus on work, completing college classes and being an attentive loving mom.

By 1980 : The fact that cannabis was known to increase appetites became imperative for community members being treated for the ‘gay’ 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 on Pennsylvania Avenue in Hillcrest in 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 my family of origin; my Italian Catholic, and later born-again Christian siblings and their families.

In 1979 attended  junior college and carpenter apprentice school and on job training with the San Diego Carpenters Union. The sexism and sexual harassment in the blue color trades was unbearable and so I soon found myself smoking every night. 

In 1980,  my father became terminally ill with lung cancer.  I was only 20 years old and had just attended  MICHFEST, as we fondly called it.  I did not smoke all week in Michigan and 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 woman 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 as 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 I and other lesbians who were LG activists and built the lesbian and gay pride parade coalitions. In the late 1979’s we as lesbian women debated with gay men to add the word “Lesbian” to the phrase “Gay Pride.” 

Lesbians expressed that we felt erased and/ or excluded 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 society and financial privilege over women.  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, in those early years, by acknowledging the presence of lesbians.

When our gay brothers began to fall ill from AIDS and were dying at an unprecedented rate, cannabis use was both a political and personal activism within our communities. I was committed to ensuring that gay male community members had easy access to cannabis to ease their final days.

Vocalizing my intent or desire to get clean from cannabis sounded like a strange concept to my 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. By the early 1980’s 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 multiple times since I was three months postpartum in 1976. This was my deepest passion to complete my educational goals.

But, 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 secretly had become a pothead and this did not make me very attractive. I burned bridges with my lovers and friends. I was flighty, I wasn’t very reliable, and my life had a lot of drama as a young, poor lesbian single mom raising a son. Also, my son and I both had various disabilities which complicated our lives even further. Cannabis, I also believe, reinforced my dissociated state of existence within myself, with my relationships and with reality in general. 

I realized years after healing in recovery that my ongoing disassociated state was rooted in the undiagnosed, chronic and severe, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I never had a language for my mental health I just thought I was a crazy. I believe cannabis actually kept me alive for many years; although I was not at my best.

Cannabis allowed me to live in my body, which I was so often disassociated from ever since I was a very young girl.

34 out the last 38 years I have been free from active cannabis addiction and I have great love, regard and compassion for my younger self.