Daddy, can you spare a dime?

>> Middle-aged pot smokers talk about their doobie-drenched lifestyles
by CHRIS YURKIW

"There's nothing like smoking a joint around 9 or 10 in the morning on the weekend," says Keith. "You go outside and there's a bite in the air from the smell of the joint, and away you go and enjoy the city and the natural world."

For the rest of the week Keith is a mild-mannered librarian in Montreal: married, 47 years old, a real respectable citizen. But none of that prevents him from firing up a fattie with his wife every evening after work to boot. And why would it? Keith says he got "turned on, to use the phrase," to his first joint back on a heady day in 1966, and he's been smokin' like a tire fire ever since.

"There's no question about the fact that I was a hippie," he says. "I got into the drug scene. I dropped acid for four or five years. I snorted cocaine a couple of times but never found anything appealing in the drug. But I still enjoy smoking pot... I like the drug because it heightens my awareness, and I enjoy that mental state. I enjoy the high, and I like the way it enables me to interact with the world.

"I have two brothers who are roughly my age, and when we get together at family reunions and stuff we're out there smokin' pot."

Not that it's all good times. Keith hates feeling "that you're somehow breaking the law--that you're a pariah. I don't see it that way. I see it as part of my culture, my personal environment, my life. But I don't see it as necessarily associated with a cultural movement. The fact that marijuana has been consumed by a variety of cultures around the world for several thousand years suggests to me that we can't simply isolate it to a fad in the '60s.

"Somehow there's this view that when you get your hair cut and you stop wearing your Levi's and you go to work every day, you're suddenly a different person."

West Island hash man

If Keith was the '60s wild child, Neil was the '70s rec-room-rat West Island subspecies--tokin' on a number and diggin' on the radio with his friends. Today Neil is 41, a self-made business owner, divorced, father of three children, and a hash man 25 years strong. He's gone through extended periods of ragin' full on, but now smokes just two to three times a week, after the kids are asleep. Will he tell them some day that he loves his bottle tokes as much as his little bundles of joy?

"Were it to come up--probably, yes," he says, "but I wouldn't go out of my way to do so. You don't want to encourage your kids to abuse anything. However I'm sure that sometime--and my kids are quite young--it'll come up, and it's no big deal. I don't view [smoking hash] all that differently from having a few beers.

"To be smoking every day, no, I couldn't raise my kids like that. As one takes on more responsibilities one changes one's lifestyle accordingly. However, I don't know that it's all that different from any other abuse--just like you don't go out to the Bifteck 'til 4 a.m. as much. Life gets a little more serious and you have to cut down on those things."

Westmount weedhead

Well, not always. Take Gilles (but don't take his boo, as he likes to call it). He's 48 but could pass for 24 on the phone, dropping dope lyrics from Dylan to Dr. Dre ("He doesn't call it 'chronic' for nothing!").

"Somehow I smoke more than I used to," he says, "which is not a good thing because my girlfriend really doesn't like it."

Tweaked as we speak, Gilles tells me he's been getting blunted for some 35 years (est. 1965), from the schoolyard to the Asia Route ("Turkey to Indonesia") to his latter-day life as a business owner in NDG. "I guess at the age that I am now I've smoked about three tons of the shit! I'm like an old Moroccan, you know, one of those keef guys. I roll cigarettes and just sprinkle the tobacco with marijuana. I tend to smoke it everywhere now, too, so I can smoke the same amount of a pack of cigarettes but in joints."

Does he worry about any of the long-term effects of heavy use?

"Oh yeah. I'm sure that smoking anything is not good." Short-term memory loss? "Yes, no, that's, uh, I wouldn't, heh heh, no, that's true too, you know?!" Feelings of anxiety or paranoia? "Right, well, I've gotten sort of through that, though."

How about this: does he feel that marijuana has had any positive effects on his life? "Hmm... positive effects? I'm reminded of that quote from 'All Along The Watchtower': 'Businessmen drink my wine/Ploughmen dig my weed.' I mean, I'm from Westmount. I'm a bourgeois kind of guy--I look like that! But in a way, I think that weed has made me more conscious of the common man. I don't know how to say that any better, but I was born in that time where all classes converged for that brief period, you know, in the late '60s. That's a good thing! I don't think I was ever haughty--I never had that. I mean, if I was from my true roots and just continued to drink alcohol, I wouldn't be at all like I am now!"

Doobie decompressor

Finally, 48-year-old Linda breaks a bunch of spleef stereotypes, mainly that doobies are only for the brothers of the middle-age set, but also one that might say a teacher and a health professional wouldn't enjoy the reflective benefits of bud. She stopped smoking for 12 years but came back to it a decade ago.

"Because my life has become more stressful as I've gotten older and I work more hours," says Linda, "I tend to smoke it every night, after work. I find that it's extremely helpful to allow me to relax. I know I could sit there for an hour with a candle and try to meditate, but when I'm that tired I don't have the energy to do that and it's a short cut.

"Some symptoms of menopause are also easier with marijuana, because I can fall into a sleep that's deeper and hot flashes won't wake me up."

Admitting that she's as dependent on marijuana as she is on showers, Linda draws the line when it comes to the a-word.

"The nasty things that we associate with addiction are a life being out of control, it getting in the way of pursuing your goals and full potential, it getting in the way of relationships. And in fact, marijuana does none of that. Since my husband and I work so many hours and are so stressed, sometimes the marijuana just helps us both decompress and get into a state really quickly that's a lot more intimate--not just sexually, but also in terms of being together and sharing ideas." :

The Millennium Marijauna March takes place this Saturday May 6, leaving Carré St-Louis at 1 p.m.

more news...