(Part 1/2) When I was 17, my cousin introduced me to smoking weed. It wasn’t something I did regularly, just once in a while, however when I moved back to Lagos it became a normal thing for me. It became routine and I went beyond smoking it to having it as coffee in the morning; I would boil weed and mix it with milk and sugar and drink it. It was that intense.
I used to be perpetually high for about 12 to 16 hours. Even after drinking and eating it with my food, I’d still hang out with some boys behind the Arts block at the University of Lagos to smoke. I was always high.
It got to a point where I started having hallucinations, hearing and seeing things that were not really there. I became paranoid. People would be around me just chatting and laughing and I would think they were talking about me. I realised I couldn’t go on like this. In my mind I knew I was running mad. People around me didn’t know what was going on inside me. I knew I was helpless. One night I was really high, sleep didn’t come and I cried my eyes out.
The funny thing about when I was taking drugs was that I’d smoke weed and be high but still listen to sermons in my high state. One night I wrote a one-page letter to God telling Him that I wanted out and I didn’t want to struggle with smoking weed anymore. I told him, “I can’t help myself, I surrender to you.”
I stopped and until today I still cannot explain how I quit the habit. My friends that I used to smoke with didn’t believe it and told me I’d be back smoking within one month. They had tried and relapsed time and time again. I can tell you honestly now that as I share this story with you, I have never had a craving for weed since I wrote that letter to God. I don’t know how it happened. I studied psychology so I understand relapse and the different seasons of withdrawal, but I cannot explain psychologically or scientifically how I stopped smoking weed. On several occasions, I would make myself walk past joints where I had smoked before just to be sure that the craving was really gone. Every time, I would feel nothing.
(Read the concluding part of this story on our website.)