Fruity Pebbles: The Next Drug (MN7)

Hello all! Welcome back to the weekly check-in. Today’s post will delve deeply into drug addiction, including alcoholism, 24/7 pot smoking, working out and binge eating junk food. Buckle in and I’ll get you updated on the week! It’s great to see you.

cigarettes, alcohol, pot, deadlifts and fruity pebbles

I have been thinking back on my drinking days recently. I think I understand why this is; I am in the early days of marijuana sobriety. Some would also call it the early days of being ‘totally sober’, as I don’t do any drugs other than caffeine anymore. We’ll dissect that more soon.

It is day 160 of being off pot. And for the uninitiated, I wasn’t having a 5mg gummy before bedtime. I was smoking pot 24/7, 365 days a year for years. In the unlikely event that I chose to eat pot, I would eat 100mg at a time.

I say this not to brag but to set the scene. I am an addict at my core. It’s one of those things that might be a little tough to understand if you’re not an addict at your core. If you know, you know. For that reason, I tend to get along well with other addicts - reformed or not. I also tend to get along with addicts, regardless of what it is they are addicted to. In my opinion, addictions are all much, much more similar to each other than they are different.

During the cigarette era, I smoked a pack a day. During my drinking era I drank every day. Cigarettes and alcohol coexisted for most of their run. After I quit those two, pot became the star of the addiction show. During the cigarette and alcohol era, I didn’t really smoke much pot. It was more a situational thing. I wasn’t smoking every day or even every week. I think that an addict’s addict (I use this term in the way you hear ‘a comic’s comic’ - or a comic that other comics consider especially funny) will easily get addicted to something new, especially if the old addition is no longer available.

In the 160 days since I quit smoking pot, junk food has volunteered to become the new star of the show. I will give a brief history of my weight alongside my active addictions for the purpose of illustrating the effect this is having.

From the onset of adulthood until I gained an interest in weightlifting, my body weight always fell in the range of 155 - 165. For my height, 155 is the dead center of the ‘healthy weight’ range. These are the cigarette and alcohol years. Eventually cigarettes and alcohol became marijuana and weightlifting. At this point, my body weight started to regularly fall in the 170 - 180 range. I gained weight, but it was good weight gain. I spent these years being in incredibly good fitness shape. Exercise has always lingered on the periphery as the non-substance addiction I have. During 2017 - COVID, and then again from the start of post COVID until I tore my rotator cuff, I was lifting 6 days a week, and also going on 7 mile runs a couple times a week alongside that weightlifting. Again, the addict’s addict.

Anyway, then there was COVID. COVID shut down the gyms, and with it my weightlifting ended for about a year and a half. My running ended too, even though you can obviously run during lockdown, but it went hand-in-hand with my weightlifting in a way that encouraged the running to die with COVID too. Looking back, I think my weightlifting got replaced by junk food eating in my addiction-based mind during this time. This led to my first major weight gain; during this timeframe, my weight jumps up to 220. 220 is around the start of where my BMI would be classified as obese.

Next, the gyms reopen, and my weight steadily drops back down to 180. Junk food eating fades in acuity as working out regains its spot in the addiction rotation. I get pretty jacked again.

Next, we get toward the modern day. I tear my rotator cuff, which causes a rift between me and weightlifting that I think I am still processing. The injury comes on slowly over time. By the time I am ready to accept that I need to go to the hospital, I feel betrayed. I used a lot of effort checking form, removing non-essential lifts, trying to listen to my body, and all sorts of other injury-prevention stuff. The injury still comes, and I am left feeling like there was no way to avoid it. I have not lifted weights since then - July 2023.

This starts an era of pot and junkfood being the two active addictions. My weight moves from 180 up to 200. Next, I quit weed - the date now being January 2025. Since quitting weed, my weight has found its way back to the maximum its ever been, the 220-225 range.

Cigarettes

Cigarettes, alcohol, pot and junk food all share a lot of commonality in how they feature or previously featured in my life. Exercise has only a partial overlap, as it is not a substance in the same way. It’s also the most ‘accepted’ of these addicted behaviors, and often seen as a good thing (as a side note - the societal norm of praising working out is part of why I feel betrayed by weightlifting. It eventually was ‘bad’ for me once I got injured, which, again, I think is something that remains not fully processed).

In college, over time, a group of people who smoked cigarettes outside of my 24-floor dormitory met each other. As you approached the dorm, there was commonly someone smoking a cigarette out front - different people at different times on different days. It was a fun social carousel.

I remember one day, there randomly happened to be every single person from this loosely-connected group of smokers in front of the building, all at once. For one moment in time, everyone happened to be having a cigarette simultaneously. We all acknowledged that it was neat and a bit funny.

During this smoking session, someone raised a question - who in this group do you think you smoke the most cigarettes with? We all see each other from time to time, but with differing schedules, habits and whatnot, you probably tended to see certain people in the group more than others.

Every single person in the group named me as the person they thought they smoked the most cigarettes with. Again, the addict’s addict.

While society tends to associate addiction most with the poor, the reality is that being a true-blue addict also requires quite a bit of privilege. This isn’t just because you need to be able to afford your addictive substance, but also because you need to be able to absorb the negative consequences that come with it.

My cigarettes smoking ended in 2014, mostly because of how incompatible it got with work. At the time, I was working in management consulting and traveling all over the country. I would work from our clients’ offices, our clients always being Fortune 500 companies with massive headquarters.

For example, I might be working on the 25th floor of the Comcast building in Philadelphia. What does this mean for smoking? Well, it requires taking an elevator down a long way, only to have to take it back up when you’re done. In the unfortunate event that you were doing work for a healthcare-adjacent company, well, get your hiking shoes on. I remember having to walk around a mile round trip in order to smoke a cigarette at GlaxoSmithKline. I worked toward the back of the building, and they wouldn’t let you smoke anywhere remotely near the ‘campus’.

This is a massive time-sink at a hyper-competitive job where things like sitting at your desk mean a lot, since you don’t actually do any important work. I would work on 20+ person consulting teams where I was the only person who used nicotine. It was not fashionable at all at this point in time in this line of work. It was a major, major career deterrent.

Doing this type of work is what got me to switch over to the electronic cigarettes, which is much easier to use stealthily. I would use the ecig in the bathroom, or in an empty conference room. I always wore a suit, so I would keep it in that breast-pocket on the inside of the suit jacket and practiced using it as stealthily as possible. Not that this wasn’t a nerve-wracking thing to do; you’re always concerned that someone will walk into the empty room you’re in and catch you in the act. I also spent a ton of time flying during this time period. I had airline status a few times over. I’d also use the ecig in the airport - flying being another experience where being a nicotine addict was really, really taxing.

If this sounds ridiculously reckless, one thing to consider is that ecigs barely existed at this point in time. They were not mainstream at all. There were no physical stores at all, anywhere. I’m talking 0 physical stores selling ecigs in the entire city of Boston. They were nascent tech. You ordered parts online and put these things together yourself. You studied Ohm’s law to understand what combination of voltage, current and resistance would keep the device from exploding in your hand. I’m not kidding. We called them ‘ecigs’, not ‘vapes’. I was the only person I knew who used an ecig for the first several years that I used one. This means that there was some plausible deniability with my reckless usage that stopped existing as the technology became mainstream. The punishments associated with ecig use weren’t concrete yet. The average person who saw it had no idea what it was.

At this point, I was also in my 20’s with no safety net at all. This relates to what I was saying earlier about being able to absorb the negative consequences of your addiction. If I were a rich kid whose parents could absorb my bad decisions, maybe I’d still be smoking. But, at the time, I had to totally support myself. I knew I was pushing the envelope more and more, and fear of losing my job and becoming homeless set me on the path to quitting.

I should also mention that as an addict, you don’t spend much time happy about the addiction you have. It isn’t fun, really. The vast majority of the time I spent addicted to nicotine, I wished I wasn’t addicted to nicotine. So, it’s not that my career was the only thing that got me to quit. It’s more like, I wanted to quit all along, but my career scared me enough to push me over the edge and actually do it. In December 2014, I stopped for good. RIP nicotine, 2006 - 2014.

alcohol and pot

I remember always hearing that drinking alone was one of the major red flags for having an alcohol problem. This was something I found extremely confusing in my youth. Drinking was clearly really fun - everyone on earth was doing it all the time. So, if it’s so fun, why would it not be a fun thing to do alone? It made no sense to me whatsoever. It turns out that the missing piece of this puzzle was that I had an alcohol problem. Oh.

The addictive substance that is most similar to junk food to me is without a doubt alcohol. The reason for this is the binging cycle that each one generates. Neither cigarettes nor pot can be binged in quite the same way. Cigarettes and pot are things you can just consume all day, and eventually it just becomes your baseline.

People who have dabbled with pot but are not addicts might have trouble conceptualizing this being true of pot. It’s a bit like how the first time you see professional table tennis, it seems impossible that what you’re seeing is real. If you’re 16 and you’ve bounced the ball back and forth with your high school friends in someone’s childhood basement, professional table tennis is so many levels removed from your version of table tennis that it is entirely unrecognizable.

That’s kind of what pot is like. If you’ve just started smoking pot, you’re playing ping pong in the childhood basement. You might get sleepy, you might get the munchies, you might start laughing uncontrollably at something mundane, and you might have a great epiphany about the true nature of life itself.

Once you’ve smoked pot 24/7 for years and years and years, pot isn’t that different from nicotine, or even caffeine honestly. It does nothing unless you don’t consume it, in which case you’ll go into withdrawal, which is unpleasant.

One side note to bring up with pot, is that the nature of it is changing a lot with technology and legality. When I was in college, there were no THC concentrates. No one was ‘dabbing’ - the term for smoking a THC concentrate. Marijuana was illegal in a different way back then, and we’re witnessing the emergence of THC as a legal recreational drug right now in real time. Part of that emergence includes the normalization of THC concentrates, which can be 4x the potency or more of a marijuana flower. Such a concentrate can be purchased at a a recreational pot store if your area has those, or a medical dispensary otherwise. Even if you’re in an area where pot remains totally illegal, the increase in its legality in surrounding areas will make concentrates many times more accessible than ever before.

I bring this up alongside my commentary about pot not really being conducive to ‘binge’ behavior, and eventually mellowing out to resemble a cup of coffee. I never got into the THC concentrate world. If you expand your THC addiction to include concentrates, you’ll be in an area that to me is uncharted. It’d be a bit like an alcoholic who only drinks beer vs. an alcoholic who has access to spirits. The amount of fucked up you can get would go up, the propensity to fall asleep or black out after use would go up (this is part of what enables a ‘binge’ usage pattern - more on that shortly), and the withdrawal effects would greatly intensify.

At any rate, back to alcohol, my alcohol use spiked in my early 20s. I used to start drinking at 5pm every day, and drink until I fell asleep. Upon waking up, I would either work until 5pm and repeat the prior day, or if it was the weekend, I would drink during the day.

Alcohol ended for a reason pretty similar to cigarettes - it was endangering my ability to keep my job. I never explicitly got in any trouble for drinking with my work, but it’s like I said previously - part of the ability to keep an addiction going is privilege. I couldn’t lose my job. I had no safety net. On multiple occasions I had to excuse myself from an 8am or 9am meeting at the client site to puke in their bathroom. I could see the situation escalating, and it eventually scared me into quitting. RIP alcohol, 2005 - 2013.

The end of pot was a scare of a different nature. I quit shortly after Trump got elected for the second time and the fascist takeover of the US intensified. I am already brown and trans, so again there is an issue of privilege. If I were a white cis male, maybe I’d feel comfortable enough to continue buying pot from our government. As a brown trans woman, I don’t. It won’t surprise me in the least if in the near future, buying pot from legal dispensaries gets you thrown in jail. We live in scary times, and the darker your skin and more queer you are, (and if you’re female) the scarier it is. RIP pot, 2016 - 2025 (I started smoking pot in high school, but these are the peak addiction years).

junk food

I’m moving past the honeymoon phase of quitting pot. It’s day 160. The novelty of the accomplishment is wearing off. Simultaneously, the pattern of destructive junk food eating is on my mind more frequently. With no other addictions taking precedent, the insidious nature of junk food is bothering me more and more.

First, just as a general declaration, I officially think that pot is less harmful than junk food. Depending on who you are this may or may not be surprising. Your opinion may vary, but the Schedule 1 drug marijuana, in my opinion, is less harmful than Fruity Pebbles or Oreos. Yes, this is really my honest opinion. One tweak I could make to this opinion to perhaps make it more palatable is to add the phrase, ‘for an addict’. As in, for an addict who is liable to abuse any and all drugs they come into contact with, I think that marijuana is much less harmful than processed junk food like Fruity Pebbles or Oreos.

Why do I think this? Well, I guess first of all, it’s not a competition. It doesn’t really matter which is more harmful. I’m just telling you about my personal addiction experience. Addictions are interesting in part because they are truly unique from person to person and substance to substance. They are unique, while also sharing some core features in common. They all feel the same or they all feel unique and special, depending on what it is you want to talk about.

As for my experience with junk food, I’ve made reference to binge behavior a few times in this post. The way I think of a binge strays a little from the commonly-accepted definition. Society tends to think of a binge as a period of excessive consumption. I think that’s part of it, but I think there’s also more nuance available to add to that.

Even though I smoked pot 24/7 for many years, I wouldn’t say that I ever ‘binged’ on pot. Neither would I say that I ever binged on cigarettes. In contrast, I would say that I binge drank, and I would say that I binge eat. Why is this?

Honestly, I think it’s complicated any I haven’t totally wrapped my head around it. At least part of it has to do with the fallout from using the substances in question. Cigarettes and pot (and even caffeine) were all things that I used from the moment I woke up, until the moment I went to bed. Once I am awake the next day, that use continues. The use is the same day-in and day-out. What enables the use to be the same day-in and day-out? The relatively small consequence of using the drug in the first place. Since you don’t get hungover or worn out after excessive smoking of either pot or nicotine, you can be using the drugs at full throttle at all times.

Alcohol and junk food are not like that. Even if you’re drinking every day or eating junk food every day, there’s still a tide to what is happening. That tide is the characteristic that makes me think of it as a binge. Using these substances produces a natural crash, either blacking out or falling asleep. When you smoke pot and nicotine, your sleep is just sleep. Yeah, it’ll get fucked up if you stop using and go into withdrawal, but otherwise you just sleep when you need to sleep.

With alcohol and junk food, your sleep is embedded within the drug addiction. Your use brings on sleep, and so sleep and the addiction inevitably get intertwined. Sleeping is part of the fabric of the addiction. This then creates a cycle - after your use peaks, you will crash, which will cause you to go into withdrawal, which will set up the continuation of the binge once you’re back awake. A binge gets worse and worse the more cycles that it manages to live on.

I’m probably missing some of the similarities and differences among these drugs - and really I’m not an expert I’m only speaking from my experience - but the point I am trying to make is that junk food really reminds me a lot of alcohol. These past seven weeks where I have been doing the weekly check-in most remind me of when I was working full time, but still drinking. I was the ‘functional alcoholic’, which people generally use to mean an alcoholic who can hold down a job. It’s a deceptive term - really alcoholics aren’t functional at all. They are barely surviving. In a similar vein, these past seven weeks I’ve been the ‘functional junk food eater’ - I have been posting weight loss week after week, but I am still addicted to junk food.

This tightrope cannot be walked forever. Unlike my drinking though, today I am in a more privileged position. I can afford to balloon up to 600 pounds if I really want to, since I don’t have to work. I have security - or at least as much security as you can get in this dangerous world we live in. I also have a partner; seeking a partner is a second common reason why people will bite the bullet and change their eating habits. Unlike past drug addictions, I don’t think I am going to get scared into quitting junk food. On the flip side, I have quit enough other addictions that maybe this time I can accomplish it with less outside pressure.

what does it all mean?

My point with all of this is to basically say that now that I am off all other drugs, I can very clearly see that junk food is just as destructive, if not more destructive, than any of the drug addictions I have faced in my past. Because of this, I am going to start quitting a new drug: junk food. I do not think I can be happy with junk food in my life.

One of the hallmarks of an addiction is that while you’re in it, it feels like a sacrifice to give it up. Once you’re outside of the addiction, it’s plain to see that being inside the addiction is the real sacrifice; you sacrifice your time, your health, your money, your self-esteem, your relationships, and more.

One of the other hallmarks is the inability to moderate or taper. I am simply not built that way. This has to be an all or nothing venture to work. If you know you know, and if you don’t, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

So, starting today, I am going to make my first ever real attempt to quit processed junk food. This post is already really long and I like to limit myself to only one day to write these weekly posts, since otherwise I will fall behind on my work, so what exactly the rules are is something I will have to elaborate on in a future post. For now, I will say that at a minimum, I am quitting all processed foods made in factories that are not ingredients. An example of an ingredient would be sugar, or flour, which are processed foods in their own way, but are allowed for now. Oreos are not an ingredient, even if you crumble them. Sorry Robbie.

Wish me luck!

work stuff

We will check back in on work stuff next week. Both progressed nicely this week. I should be able to stream speedrun attempts of Mr. Nutz in the next 1-2 weeks, which has me excited. In game dev I’ve made a lot of graphical updates in the last week; hopefully I’ll be able to show you some of those next week.

Have a great week everyone! You can do it! I will talk to you next week <3