Tobacco and Cannabis — An Addictive Relationship Between Two Humans Using Different Drugs

Photo by Dad Grass on Unsplash

I was in a connection with a man I met online. We met once, and then proceeded to connect virtually for several years, on and off, though we never again met.

The instant we met, I felt like I had recognized him from a past life — though I didn’t believe in those sorts of things until we met. It was as if fate had brought us together.

I knew he had smoked cigarettes though it wasn’t apparent to me how frequently. He told me he was trying to quit, then that he had quit, and that he was proud. My mother had been a smoker as well, though she had passed away several years prior. Knowing her patterns, he was likely in a similar on-again-off-again pattern with his own tobacco use. Something about his energy felt familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I’d been frequently using marijuana at the time. From my virtual stalking of him, I found out that his father was also a marijuana user.

When we connected, it felt like another sort of high that I hadn’t been able to find in anyone else. It felt like I was in another dimension, and perhaps I was. Our chats would fuel me to do crazy things — traveling to England, Israel, hiking alone, befriending new people all over the world, one night stands, moving to different cities for brief stints of time. I took all sorts of photos, and even though we never met again, and we stopped talking at one point, the wild adventures and moving continued.

It wasn’t until the rush calmed and I began to desire more stability that I started to feel an intensity of anger in my own mind that I had not been aware of before. I was angry at so many things. I was angry at him because he wouldn’t see me again, I was angry at the falling out over the loss of my mom, I was angry at my family, I was angry at men, and women alike. I was afraid. I was hopeless. All sorts of things.

I began to recall my mom’s tobacco use. It was in my veins. Mother, grandmother, and likely others down the line had smoked cigarettes. I began to viscerally remember the clouds of smoke — as if I could smell them again. I never wanted to smoke a cigarette because I felt so traumatized by my own mom’s…