FCYU-Feature Story

Bound to the Earth
Weed helped me manage my bipolar disorder, but now I need to stop

By Griffin Kinard

Love at First Drag

I was 6 years old when I was first introduced to weed, or “earth” as we called it. A friend and I went inside the bushes behind our cottage in Children’s Village, a residential treatment center I was sent to because of my father’s abusive ways. My friend had gotten the weed from someone he knew on campus.

After that, my pot brother and I smoked every day whenever the opportunity showed itself. Weed helped kill time, and I hated where I was. Back then, Children’s Village seemed like a contradiction: It’s called Children’s Village but it’s run by adults. They all tried to talk to me, but never asked the right questions. I had only known pain so far, and it didn’t seem like anybody there was going to help me.

The weed had almost no effect on my consciousness: I could have been smoking a cigarette. I’d get light-headed, but I didn’t feel changed. The thrill was hiding something, to have something that was just mine. That’s the only time it felt like a true Children’s Village, when my buddy and I were getting away with smoking.

I was almost 8 when my first brother came to live at Children’s Village. I knew they wanted us to stay together because that’s what I heard the caseworker say. By 1996, all six of my brothers and I roamed that Village. After my brothers started arriving on campus, that smoking sh-t had to die quick. My brothers would not condone it, so I ditched it.

The Mind Plays Tricks

Not long after my brothers arrived I began to feel even more confused, lost, hurt, alone, troubled, hated and disrespected. I loved my brothers, but I’d never fit in with the family. They were very violent and I didn’t want to be part of that. My behavior was terrible, too, but in a different way. They would rob people, whereas I had fits, lashing out at others and destroying property. Restraining me was like the staff exercise for the day.

I made attempts on my life more then seven times. I was in and out of the psychiatric ward, doped up on heavy medication. At the age of 12, I was on Risperdal, Abilify, Paxil, Depakote, and Zyprexa.

I’d been taking medication since I first got to Children’s Village. But I never knew why I was on it. Nobody told me that I was bipolar, and no one discussed the medication with me. Nobody told me a side effect was weight gain, but I figured it out when my weight shot up to over 200 lbs. when I was still 12.

The prescription drugs didn’t make me feel better; they just made me not feel anything. All I thought about when I was on those meds was food. I only stopped trying to kill myself because I wouldn’t be able to eat when I was dead.

Those miserable years in Children’s Village were the only time of my life I didn’t take any drugs—except the ones they prescribed me. I felt like no one cared for my well-being, and at a young age I asked myself, Why should I care about me? I didn’t trust the doctors so I never told them that I hallucinated; they’d only give me more meds.

Back to Earth

Nothing made sense to me for nine years, and I was taking full doses of the meds. Then my brother was killed when I was almost 17. After my brother’s death I began to hallucinate more. I’d see this woman with no face, and I felt as if she was watching me.

Soon after my brother’s murder, I found myself in a group home in Brooklyn. A month after I moved in, I got the call saying that my mentor and best friend Dale had passed. I went into a deep depression.

One night I was feeling alone and depressed in the group home, and my roommate asked if I wanted to smoke some weed with him. I still wasn’t smoking because of my living brothers. At first I said no, but then I asked myself “What would it hurt?” So I smoked for the first time in 10 years.

This time, the high felt much more wonderful than when I was a little kid. The feeling of feeling nothing, the happiness, the calmness were spectacular. I loved it from that day on: Weed and I seemed destined for each other.

Going With the Flow

Weed relaxed my mind and it allowed my emotions to flow willingly. (The bipolar meds, which I still took occasionally, snuffed them all out.) All of what I knew I wanted to forget and what I thought was forgotten came at me fast and hard when I was floating on clouds of smoke. Emotions just coming and going made me feel weird, but weed allowed me to accept the feelings without having to make sense of them.

Being high also made me feel part of something bigger than myself. Smoking weed connected me with people and gave me confidence to see people as people and not my enemy. The confidence also allowed me to smile more and enjoy life’s little treasures.

I wanted good memories, I needed great memories, I deserved comfortable memories. On weed, I made some nice memories, and it also helped me remember that I have had people. I had my father at one time, my mother for a while after that, my brothers, and later on, my friends.

I would get so lost in myself that I sometimes would just walk with no destination and end up at my childhood home in Brooklyn, New York. When I got high there was an urge to wander back to the beginning.

150 Blunts

When I was 18, I moved to a group home in downtown Manhattan and began to sell weed, first within the group home, then in a park on the Lower East Side. The business took off.

I started pinching the bags, so I always had as much weed as I could smoke. If I remember correctly, in one week I smoked 150 blunts. I woke up smoking weed and went to sleep high. The staff at the group home gave me the name China Man, because my eyes were bloodshot red and I always looked as if I was sleeping.

That’s when I really got addicted: I always had it and I smoked with my customers. I felt connected to people I smoked with. Black or white or purple, they all seemed like me, going through the same bullsh-t. That feeling of connection was comforting even though those people didn’t really know and understand me like family or long-term friends do.

The Best Medicine?

I dealt for almost two years, until a friend asked me to stop. Not long after that, I got into it with one of the staff in my group home. He called the hospital and told them I was off my medication. The EMS came and took me to Bellevue Hospital. I spent the next 14 days in the psychiatric ward, almost missing Christmas. I was released with the stipulation that I had to do an outpatient program. This required that I take my medication, see a caseworker once a week, and stop smoking weed.

This was the first time I was told that I was bipolar. They said it had something to do with my emotions and my lack of control over them. I didn’t care to learn any more about it because I knew I didn’t want to take those meds anymore.

I knew something was wrong with me: I was always switching up when it came to personality and feelings. I’d have emotional breakdowns, get confused and overwhelmed, and sometimes just need to cry my eyes out. Every emotion I felt seemed to get magnified as soon as I recognized it. Still, I didn’t think meds could help. I’d known since I was 12 that my medication did nothing but hide my emotions. Life on weed was way better than life on medication.

The outpatient program rules did not work for me. I kept smoking weed, did not take the medication, and the caseworker and I never made a real connection. He never won my trust. So I never dealt with the hardest parts of my life.

The Escape Kept Me Stuck

In 2005, someone I was smoking with asked me why I smoked so much, and I said because I didn’t want to face my problems. He said, “Your problems will always be there, but the weed won’t.” He had a good point, and it made me think.

It’s true that weed helped me experience my emotions, but it also allowed me to escape from the real problem—needing love and affection from my mother. I last saw my mother in 1998 and last spoke to her in 2004. I now refer to her as the Road Runner, because she ran out of my life, and my every attempt to catch her has failed.

My mother’s disappearance is just one loss of many: my father’s death in 1995, my sisters being adopted in 2000, and my brother’s and mentor’s deaths in 2003. With each loss, especially my mother leaving, I felt left out in the darkness. The weed made me feel a part of something other than loneliness, sadness, and depression.

I always had what seemed to be legitimate reasons to smoke weed, but I have to admit they were also excuses. I thought I had to smoke weed, when in reality, I needed to be honest with myself and I needed to seek help. On weed, I wouldn’t answer questions or explain myself. The people I smoked with didn’t ask any questions. You didn’t have to be straightforward.

But you do have to be straightforward with people you ask for help. I asked some friends who don’t get high, staff members, family members, and a therapist for their support and for praise when I do well.

I still don’t take my bipolar meds regularly. I only take them when I feel that fire building within, an uncontrollable rage that the earth can’t heal and that I recognize as the bipolar. Then I’ll take Depakote or Abilify or both and just eat and go to sleep.

But I’m trying to get help in other ways. In 2006, I returned to a therapist who’d helped me a lot in Children’s Village. I also took a helping hand from a social worker named Erin, who won my respect with her dedication and with the harmony between her words, her actions, and the way she lived her life.

Being Real

Being straightforward with people who were kind to me made me feel comfortable in myself, and feeling this comfort made me seek more of it. And being real with people who are kind to me is only possible when I’m not high.

Not being high made me search for another high, and that was emotional and mental growth and discovery. Seeking help or asking for it led me to things longer-lasting than getting high: the joys of accomplishment and self-forgiveness and not giving up on myself.

When I felt trapped in places like Children’s Village and trapped by sadness, anger, depression, loneliness, doubt, then I needed the escape of weed. I didn’t feel any possibility of growth. Now I do. The more I’m straight, the more I accomplish, the more I connect with people in a real way, and the more I see that growth and believe in me.

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