I was 13. I had gotten 20 bucks from my grandmother, and rode my bike down to the now-nonexistant 'Cafe 101' just off the college campus in Lafayette, LA, where I met up with the more 'shady' of my compatriots (high school sophomores of the metal-head genre, 14-15) and we scored a lid of some weed from this fat DJ guy in his 30s who made his living by slinging weed at the parties he DJed. He kept his weed in the gas door of his car (where the gas cap is) so it reeked like gasoline. We scored the ounce (for 20 bucks!) and it was wrapped in foil, ghetto style. We retreated to an abandoned camper trailer a block away that we used for drinking (since that would get us run off from the Cafe) and other activities. The camper is still there today, but fallen in on itself.

It was my first time but my buddy was an old pro (or so he claimed) and proceeded to roll up a joint I now know to be called the 'pregnant guppy' type. Stems, seeds, all of it went into the joint. He wound up using like 3 papers to make the thing burnable, the stems he left in kept poking through the papers. The seeds popped like mad, the stems were bitter and nasty, and I coughed like it was torture to smoke the stuff.

I didn't even get high. It took a second joint, that _I_ rolled, cleaning the weed of seeds and stems, which also took a second paper to hold it together but was a tad more even (I still suck at joint rolling to this day.) No matter how nice the roll, though, it still tasted like gasoline. Gasoline and ass, because it was some of the nastiest brick schwag ever. Got me high, though :)

I was 24 .. grew up in a small, more rural town .. didn't have a clue it existed until '68 or so .. back home on leave before heading over to Vietnam .. came home drunk and asked my youngest brother if he had some .. suspected he did .. lit up and a little while later became paralized .. figured best thing to do was go to sleep .. no problem .. woke up knowing I needed to try that again, sans alcohol :) .. and did over a year later when I got back to the states.

Don't remember! It was the anti-gateway for me. I had tried coke, ludes (only the old guys will know what those are) crystal myth, yellow jackets, black beauties, LSD, even PHP. One doob and I was done with all that other crap. Sometime in the late 70's.

I was 18 and my friend was a huge stoner and i didnt even know it. One day i was talking him home from work since his car was broke down and we worked at the same place and he was like "Wanna smoke some weed?" Now, I was one of the Dare kids and i thought it would kill me and he reassured me that i wouldn't die. So we get to his place and he rolls a joint and we smoke it. I spent the next few hours laughing and reading the phone book since it had funny names.

1968, I was 24. The first did absolutely nothing for me. The second was a whole nother story. I liked the "high", I was in control. The only other "high" I knew at that time was alcohol. I was not in control with alcohol, in fact I became a violent raving idiot. One night I had a man on the ground, my left hand locked around his throat, my right hand drawn back ready to shove his nose into his brain. Luckily the owner of the bar dragged me off of him before I could strike. Because of that incident I quit drinking. I made the Safer Choice.