Flying high: a flight attendant's journey with weed

I smoked almost pot every day from age eighteen to age forty. I smoked it all day. I believed I was the 'real' me when I was high on it. From the very first day I smoked it, I can easily say, I spent my waking hours waiting for the next time I could do it and in pursuit of it.

Interestingly enough, the girls on my hall in the college dorm who were smoking it, were terrified of me. I made a remark about turning anyone in who smoked it, because in North Carolina at the time, I was an ignorant freshman who had absolutely NO life experience.

Then I went off and won a beauty contest, at my mother’s behest and came back fairly disillusioned. It was spring of 1969. But that’s another story unto itself. My friend and her friend took me out and taught me how to smoke pot. They felt a desperate need to save me when they saw the roses and the crown. Rest assured, being Miss America lost its appeal.

My love affair began. I made it through college with a fairly good grade point average. Yes, it led to other drugs. (Peyote, LSD, Cocaine) But pot was my drug. I would sleep with men for it. And I’m ashamed to say I have stolen it. I dumped my high school sweetheart for it and ultimately chose a career which enabled me to smoke more pot than not. I became a flight attendant. Going to work everyday would have certainly interfered with my real life, which was my pot. I only smoked cigarettes on the side.

I fell in love with a bar owner in Negril, Jamaica. Big surprise. For two years, I flew a schedule which enabled me to commute to Jamaica and smoke spliffs in banana leaves in the mid 70s. My girlfriends with the airline had a notebook where they’d hidden joints in the fire hoses in all the hotels we stayed in all over the country.

If I was leaving the country, I would tape a stash underneath the sink in the ladies room in the New York hotel lobby for my return. We would fix brownies to eat on five-day international trips. I had a car pipe with a top and a clear tube I could light in the lower galley of the DC-10, and blow the smoke down the sink. At any given time, three of us with Sony Walkmens would be laying on the floor on the way to London or Paris down below in galley. This was way before drug testing or security.

After the boyfriend in Jamaica, the logical succession was a handsome, ex-Navy Vietnam pilot smuggler with his own DC-3 who flew bales of pot in from Colombia under the U.S. radar. We smoked joints on the Concorde in 1979 on Air France on the way to Paris. He’s dead now. I was in heaven. I hope he is. At least neither of us is in jail.

After he died, I moved to London, thinking I needed to cut back. I graduated to hashish. I also stayed with pot but I did stop driving. And my drinking took off. After the Lockerbie disaster, pot combined with drinking beat me, and I knew the game was up. I can write all this now because I’m 25 years clean and sober.

Now that I’ve said all of this, I will say, I do not think marijuana is a bad drug.

I think smoking it is horrific for your lungs—worse than cigarettes, because it burns really hot. And it’s extremely dangerous mixed with alcohol, in that it keeps you from throwing up—the natural way to keep from dying from alcohol poisoning. Hence, we have tons of college kids dying from alcohol poisoning because no one warns them of the anti nausea properties of the weed as they throw back the shots.

But if you are an addict—if you have an addictive bone in your body—you can become addicted to pot, even though in the conventional sense, I don’t believe it has the “addictive” effects on the brain and body that coke and heroin does scientifically.

For those of you who aren’t alcoholics and have only one glass of wine with dinner—I consider you an apple and I am an orange. You will never understand what it’s like to be an orange—to not be able to stop drinking or to pursue a substance with your mind, soul and body for no other reason than you have to have it because you think you are the “real you.”

And that joint you have been saving for a special occasion?

I think that’s absolutely impossible to do.

You’re an apple after all.