by Joshua Simmet

Created on: July 03, 2009   Last Updated: July 06, 2009

Personally I have never done any drugs, including marijuana. People like to argue that weed is not a drug, using the "drugs are man made" argument, but to me a drug is any substance that alters your state of mind, be it man made or found in nature. I grew up in a rural area where there was very little to occupy a person's time so many of the people I grew up with turned to drugs as a source of entertainment.

I think that the reason I never actually tried to do any types of drugs is because I saw what it could do to someone. Some of my friends who started doing pot at a young age, around 8th grade never made it out of high school, never made it past their sophomore year in fact. They liked to say that it was the teachers' fault or that they wouldn't need to know the subjects anyways, but instead of doing any of their homework or studying they would just go and get stoned every night, and yet they still acted surprised over all the F's on their report cards. They maintained that they would do better next time, that they would make it all up, but in most cases they never did. Sure I had some friends who smoked weed and still graduated in the top ten of our class, but that was definitely a minority.

In my high school it was almost a requirement though; to not smoke weed was almost unheard of. But for much of my high school career it was easy to avoid the temptation. I was one of the nerdy kids that didn't have many friends, never went out to parties despite the fact that I played many sports. But around mid junior year I hit sort of a growth spurt, I lost a ton of fat and gained a ton of muscle (this was right around the time I started doing parkour). With my new look came new attention from my peers. I started getting invited to parties and hanging out with new people, the more popular groups. It was at these parties that I was first offered weed, which I turned down. After I had refused a few different offers it became a goal of theirs to get me high. Fortunately they did not achieve this goal, graduation came and went and I remained clean. The summer after graduation proved the most difficult, what with all the open houses that I had to attend, yet I persevered and managed to make it through without doing any.

So far in college I have had fewer encounters with the drug, perhaps because there is more to do on campus, perhaps because I have been avoiding the right people. That does not mean I do not still run into it however, whenever I return home and hang out with friends from the olden days they still occasionally try to get me to take a hit. But I continue to refuse, and have no plans of stopping.

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