CRAIG GLAZER TALKS WEED TONIGHT!!!

TKC Note: Tonight, our pal Craig Glazer shares a thoughtful story from his younger days which offers perspective on the current efforts on marijuana law reform.

One Toke Over The Line

‘One Toke over the line, Sweet Jesus,
One toke over the line…’ ‘One Toke over the Line’ – Brewer and Shipley

I must have been at least fourteen years old when I asked my mom, ‘Hey mom, what’s marijuana?’ She asked me where I heard about marijuana…and not in a casual tone either. I responded, ‘I was at the Drive-In movies and saw Clint Eastwood in a picture called ‘A Fistful of Dollars’. My buddy said that the stubby cigar he was smoking was not, in fact a cigar. It was marijuana. He told me if you smoked it, it would make you drunk, or dizzy or just feel really cool.’ My mom went off, ‘I don’t ever want to see or hear anything about you and marijuana, Mister! You stay far away from that stuff,’ she screamed.

It was the late sixties and after my brief conversation with Mom, all I could think about was trying marijuana. I was a ninth grader and nobody in my school had ever tried the ‘demon weed’. I know, because I asked around. I went to my best pal, Jeff who had an older brother named Doug, he was kind of a beatnik, or what people were just beginning to call a ‘hippy’. You know, long beard, long hair, army jacket. My buddy and I ponied up and bought one gram of hashish. Yup, we were going to start out big-time. We went to the dime store, bought a corncob pipe, grabbed some aluminum foil, covered the pipe, poked pinholes in the foil, I took that little chunk of hash, busted in half and stuffed one of the halves into the pipe. I lit a match, lit the hash and took my first big toke. Doug had not given us very good directions. Then Jeff took a big toke and the garage was full of smoke. We hit it again. Jeff said, ‘I think we’re supposed to see the colors on the walls and ceiling melt, or maybe the cat will look like a lion, things are supposed to look really weird.’ I replied, ‘I think we’re really supposed to feel kinda drunk.’ What did I know? I had been drunk twice in my life at that point. As it turned out, we went through the entire gram and felt nothing except sore throats. See as it turned out, neither me nor Jeff smoked cigarettes, so neither of us knew to hold the smoke in our lungs and thus get high.


We complained to Doug about losing our eight bucks on that worthless hash. Feeling bad he gave us about a quarter bag of Mexican pot, or what we called in those days a quarter of a ‘lid’. (As in the old Cheech and Chong bit, ‘How Many Joints are in a Lid?’) This time we would do it right. We bought rolling papers, Zig Zags. We bought tickets to the big concert, Paul Revere and the Raiders, in fact my little brother Jack got the last ticket available to the sold out show. As memory serves, the show was at the Music Hall and me and my friend disappeared to the bathroom where we smoked an entire joint to no effect whatsoever. I thought, ‘Dammit, this whole getting high thing might be bull shit.’ In those days, I didn’t know anyone at school or elsewhere who had ever been high.

A few weeks later, I was at my favorite hang out, Winstead’s on The Plaza, I was fortunate because I had an older buddy named Marc whose Dad owned a car dealership so he had a brand new sports car. I’d sit in the back seat while the older guys were in the front as we’d cruise Winstead’s, Allen’s and Waid’s back in the day. Always hoping to pick up hot chicks, the truth is that almost never happened. What did happen one cloudy cool evening was that I spotted what appeared to be a US Soldier leaning against his muscle car (back then, they were all muscle cars). He was long past his military release date as evidenced by his weather-beaten army jacket and nearly shoulder length long hair. He stopped us as we passed by and asked if we had a light for his cigarette. Vietnam was still a fairly fresh battle of good versus evil, this time those ‘dirty commies’ of North Vietnam who were clearly plotting to take over America eventually and had to be stopped. The guy told me his name, confirmed he’d been in ‘Nam, and then proceeded to tell me about all the good drugs he brought back from overseas. Bottom line, he had weed for sale. I figured third time’s the charm and this time I went all out. I spent fifteen dollars for one entire ‘lid’. The soldier told me the weed was from Vietnam and would knock me on my ass. He said it was ‘killer’. Up to now, all I had killed was my wallet. I ran home and called my buddy Jeff and this time he was going to bring over two more buddies, O’Flynn and Fogel.

We waited til the following Friday night, me and the rest of my friends went down into the basement of our apartment complex. I was going to do everything right this time. I put on a Moody Blues album and cranked up the black lights so the posters would look cool, and I had even smoked so I could practice holding the potent smoke in my lungs for longer than half a second. We ground up that Asian green grass into a fine smokeable powder. We even used a cigarette rolling machine to do it right. We rolled three marijuana cigarettes as I started to light the first one for all four of us to partake, Fogel blurted out ‘You guys are crazy, my older sister told me if you smoke Mary Jane, you can jump out a window and kill yourself.’ ‘Yeah,’ O’Flynn chimed in, ‘My neighbor has a friend who smoked some of this shit and wound up in an insane asylum and is still strapped to his bed to this day!’ Truth be known, none of us had any idea what was going to happen because none of us knew anyone who had ever done this. We were Shawnee Mission pioneers in the true sense of the word. Well, there was Jeff’s older brother Doug, but he never told us shit about anything.

Fogel and O’Flynn decided to go upstairs and wait in the living room just in case Jeff and I both died. They didn’t want that on their conscience. I figured the good news is, we’re in the basement, so if I want to jump out of a window, I’d have to climb up on a washing machine to even reach one and I couldn’t fall any further than about twelve inches. Jeff and I were alone with three marijuana cigarettes, I lit the first one and began to inhale.

As we passed the joint back and forth, I noticed we both had trouble keeping the smoke down for any length of time in our lungs and this time we were able to hold it longer than we ever had before. Jeff and I laid down on the couch and the strangest thing began to happen. We both began to laugh uncontrollably for no reason at all. We just couldn’t stop laughing. Every sentence we spoke was the greatest joke I ever heard. The music sounded fantastic. The basement had the perfect lighting. I felt kind of dizzy, but also still in control. I turned to Jeff and said, ‘This is going to be the most fun weekend night we’ve ever had, let’s go out, get some girls, get laid, share this smoke with the girls and get some pizza on the way back. We are going to have the party to end all parties, but before we go, let’s take a few more tokes…for the road.’

It must have been about one in the afternoon Saturday when Jeff and I woke up, the black lights were still on, but totally ineffective since the sun was up. The needle on my record player was broken and with the record still spinning, it had become scratched beyond repair by the broken needle. There had been no girls, no party, no pizza. The two of us had fallen asleep in our clothing and had gone nowhere and done nothing but sleep. I said to Jeff, ‘Was that cool or what?’ He said, ‘Moron, we missed the entire weekend, we lost the weekend!’ I said, ‘Jeff, I think we’ve discovered something really huge here. I still have most of the weed left. Let’s wait til next weekend, invite two girls over and see what happens next.’ Jeff thought for a moment, then a big smile came over his face. ‘Yeah, brother,’ he said, ‘I totally see where you are coming from. Next weekend. You. Me. A couple of girls and our green little buddy from Vietnam!’ On that first Friday, my buddy and I had truly gone more than one toke over the line. Little did we know the adventures that would lie ahead for all of us.
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