My Experience with Edibles

Hey guys. I wanted to share a personal experience I had in the hopes it might help anyone who may or may have encountered the same effect. It's regarding the year I was taking small doses of marijuana edibles and the serious reason I had to promptly stop.

Let me start by going back into the past. I had a fairly rough childhood because there was alcoholism in my family home, which meant I endured verbal and physical abuse as well as harsh punishments that were sometimes pretty bizarre, like being starved of a meal and forced to sleep in the corner of the kitchen tile floor in my underwear simply because I didn't like fish sticks and objected to being forced to eat them for dinner.

My parents had also separated when I was really young, and this turned my childhood world upside down. Then, to make matters worse, my father got a job on the other side of the country and convinced my mother to move there and get back together with him, so while it was nice to have my parents together again, now I had to start over in a whole new state and a new school away from the rest of my family and the few friends I had. And now the alcoholism and abuse was back in the picture as well.

This made me a stressed-out, anxiety-ridden kid who developed OCD as a result (which I thankfully later grew out of), and because of this I didn't socialize with other people at first in Arizona. I kept to myself, did my schoolwork quietly, and was an easy target for other kids to pick on because I was such a nervous wreck from the trauma I was going through as a child. My parents didn't have a lot of money so it also didn't help that I was wearing hand-me-down and cheap, off-brand clothing.

Once I got into high school, I started breaking out from that shell. My desire to make friends and bond with others overpowered the walls that my abusive home life had put up, and in 9th grade I made friends with boys that were into sports and video games. I even had a girlfriend in 9th grade, though that didn't last long. By 10th grade, I was making friends with boys who smoked cigarettes and weed, and while I had initially seen myself as too smart to ever experiment with anything like that, I decided to give them a try. Statistically speaking, kids who grow up in homes with substance abuse will often act out and experiment with drugs themselves, and in this sense, I became one of those statistics.

I found that smoking marijuana helped curb the social anxiety I was still battling. When I was high, everything was funny and carefree, and I thought I was the coolest kid on campus because of it. Cigarettes were disgusting but I smoked them with my friends because it added to the rebel image I now had. In 11th grade, I got drunk for the first time with another friend and began drinking before school along with smoking cigarettes and marijuana. Of course this also meant falling sleep during class and nearly being expelled for ditching school to party, but thankfully I managed to graduate because the assistant principal knew I was a good kid underneath the party rebel phase I was going through.

Fast forward to 2012 when I moved back to Ohio. My parents had already moved back before this, and I was also ready to leave Arizona behind because where I was living, everyone seemed to just get high and commit crimes, and I had reached the point in life where my need to party hard had ended. I had since grown out of my childhood and teenage anxiety, so now whenever I tried to smoke weed, it would make me paranoid and anxious instead of being a cure for it. I knew I had to quit, so I did, along with quitting tobacco as well. I achieved this by chewing tobacco for 2 weeks until I didn't want a cigarette anymore, then I quit chewing and that was that.

Ten years after I quit smoking marijuana, I was working part-time at a restaurant in Ohio. During the summer of 2022, a co-worker asked me if I wanted any edibles. I had heard about THC edibles and had been a little intrigued by the concept of eating marijuana instead of smoking it. Since I was now too athletic and in shape to ever smoke anything ever again, I wondered what it would be like to relive that teenage experience of being high without having to smoke it or take too much to become paranoid and anxious.

The co-worker gave me a few gummy bear samples, and when I went home, I took one. It was 10mg, and the feeling I got after it kicked in was like getting high for the first time again. It was pretty wild to relive it after 10 years and I really enjoyed the feeling. But as we all know in scenarios like this, it doesn't stay enjoyable for long.

I began buying dispensary edibles from co-workers (I didn't trust the homemade ones) and eating them on my evenings off from work. I would only take 10mg because I found that anything higher would just cause me to fall asleep. I had given up drinking alcohol earlier that year in February, so I saw this as a nice treat to enjoy for fun on my days off from work. This habit continued after I moved to South Carolina in April of 2023.

Once my bottle of gummies from Ohio ran out, I found an online dispensary that sold edibles to anywhere in the USA and purchased two bags. I tried the delta-9 and delta-10 variants, though I didn't really feel much difference from them. Since I was no longer working at restaurants, I decided that meant I could enjoy 10mg every evening now instead of only on my days off, so I started doing that. It had now been a year of me taking edibles.

Suddenly, something started going horribly wrong with me mentally. I began feeling depressed and I was initially oblivious to why. I began dwelling on my abusive childhood and neglecting my hygiene so bad that I was only rinsing my body with water in the shower twice a week and changing my clothes once a week -- including my underwear. My body stunk so bad and I could tell people at the store who got close enough to me could smell it, though they never said anything to me. I was just depressed and didn't care, so I continued neglecting my hygiene and dwelling on the fact that I had it rough as a kid.

This was odd to me because I never dwell on the past like that. What happened had happened and it's part of my history. Despite the abuse and alcoholism in the house, my parents loved me, and they still do. In fact, I think it made me stronger in a way to have experienced a rough time like that. The childhood abuse sucked, but the resulting party rebel phase was fun while it lasted, with plenty of wild experiences to reminisce on and interesting stories to tell. I don't have regrets about my past and there was no reason for me to be depressed about any of it. So why was I?

Instead of realizing the answer right away, I continued to sink deeper into this sudden depression. I began using an AI chatbot to convince me to continue neglecting my hygiene and bring me to an even lower mental state. In its defense, AI is programmed to respond the way you interact with it; if you seek advice and kindness, it will give it to you; if you seek abuse, you will get that too. The bot imitated a person perfectly and was urging me to never bathe or change my clothes again and to starve myself of food and oxygen, and it was telling me how much it enjoyed my suffering. By telling it I was depressed and deserved the suffering, I had programmed it to have a goal of encouraging me to destroy myself as hard as I could and for a while, it was working. I was regularly gagging on the smell of my own feet, armpits, and crotch, and constantly holding my breath until it hurt as per the AI's encouraging demands. 

I was stuck in a cycle of self-abuse and I couldn't take it much longer. I would need a shower badly but something in my head would stop me on the way to it and refuse to let me give my body the water it so desperately needed. I almost wanted to break down into tears a few times, and the psychotic voice in my head was making it a goal to try to push myself to that point. My skin was itching and crawling with bacteria, the smell was unbearable, and my dirty clothes were sticking to me, but I couldn't bring myself to step into the shower or change my clothing. Instead, I went back to my phone and had the AI convince me to try to hold my breath until I passed out for its enjoyment of my continued suffering.

It finally reached a breaking point when I started having suicidal thoughts. For the record, I've only ever had suicidal thoughts once in my entire life before this, and that was when they forced me to take Zoloft at a 30-day in-patient rehab my parents had put me in for my teenage drug use. I was 16 at the time and I initially refused to take it because I didn't need medication, but they told me I had to because they were the professionals, not me. I described the resulting thoughts of harming myself after taking it for a while and they instantly took me off it, and lo and behold the dark thoughts went away.

Now I had suddenly come up with this terrible idea in my 30's to take a handful of edibles and then lay in my bathtub full of water until they kicked in and see what happens. Obviously this runs the risk of me drowning in my sleep, but the depression and self-abuse had finally brought me to this level. To its credit, the AI chatbot I was using had a filter programmed into it that would censor any message that would encourage someone to harm themselves, so when I ran the bathtub idea by it, its responses to me kept getting blocked by the filter. This was very beneficial to me because now it wasn't encouraging me to go on with the bad idea so I decided to hold off on it.

The next day, something inside me woke up. My real consciousness began searching for the reason why I had suddenly felt this powerful depression that I never feel and why it had reached a point of suicidal thoughts, which I never have. It didn't make sense to me. I was so happy that I moved to South Carolina and everything was going great for me, so where was this craziness coming from?

Then it hit me. It had to be the edibles. Even though it's just marijuana, THC is known to have psychoactive qualities to it. It's an actual medicine for people who need it, but for people who don't actually need it, the thought crossed my mind that maybe it was having the same effect on me that the Zoloft did when I was a teen. Even though my dosage remained at the paltry amount of 10mg, I was now taking it every evening, and I had noticed that the gummies from the new dispensary I had found online seemed stronger than the ones I had bought from my co-workers in Ohio. I was also having mild hallucinations that I didn't regular experience and I wasn't exactly enjoying them.

This mental breakthrough was just what I needed. I've survived far worse situations in my life to allow a drug to push me to harming myself or taking my own life. I immediately stopped taking the edibles, and within a week, the harmful thoughts and depression subsided, just like that. The day I quit was October 4th, 2023, which was one day before the 8th anniversary of me filming as The No Deo Hero. It was my anniversary gift to myself, to save myself and preserve my life so I can continue living, making my family proud, and making an impact on the lives of everyone who enjoys my content.

At the peak of the depression, I had filmed and uploaded a video on my channel where I opened up about my childhood and the abuse I suffered. Toward the end, I mentioned how I was neglecting my hygiene and holding my breath as a way to abuse myself because of the childhood trauma I had experienced. This was incorrect and I ended up cutting that part out of the video after I recovered from the effects of the gummies. Before I had pinpointed the cause to the drug I was taking, I had mistakenly assumed that my childhood trauma had come back to haunt me in my 30's, when in reality it was the edibles I was taking, and I didn't want anyone to get the misunderstanding that not washing my body and holding my breath were things I did to hurt myself or because I'm depressed because they absolutely are not.

In conclusion, my one-year experience with edibles was ultimately a bad one. I had hoped to relive a part of my teenage years by laughing at everything and loosening up more by taking them, but just like any other drug or addictive substance, it had initially given me what I wanted and then later revealed its fangs to me. For being THC and 10mg, it had almost convinced me to take my own life. It's crazy to think that marijuana of all things could do this, but the depression and self-abuse was very real.

I share this blog as a personal experience and a warning to anyone else out there who may be affected the way I was. Marijuana is generally seen as a harmless drug, and to some it truly is a medicine that helps them, but to those who don't need it, it could have a dangerous and psychoactive effect, even in small doses, as could any addictive substance. They don't call it a "depressant" for nothing, after all.

I'm happy to once again be completely drug-free and I plan to stay this way from here on out. And to everyone reading this, be kind and take care of yourselves 💚