Like many people that haphazardly wandered into the cannabis lifestyle, I picked up a few bad habits along the way. And while some of them--an ability to relax into a near comatose state often confused as laziness and simply enjoy things and an unhealthy fixation on eating potato chips--have been easy to re-contextualize and mitigate, the nastiest of them, smoking, has been an unavoidable and predominantly negative consequence of the fateful decision.

Blame it on the refocusing effect of that post-toke smoke, the easy bar-adjacent socializing, the stimulation of dopaminergic reward pathways in my brain or blame it on a simple lack of willpower, through the year or so I have been smoking I have been waxing and waning through alternate states of enjoyment, despair and hatred, all the while unwilling or unable to give it up and all the while the pain in my lungs getting worse.