In Alcoholics Anonymous they say, “Once and addict, always and addict.”  Though I deeply admire and respect the work of this organization, I’m here to say that this is just not true.  I know.  I proved it.

I was a marijuana junkie for ten years to the second.  Yes, a stoner.  Inflicted with reefer madness. :o)  I first got stoned New Year’s Eve 1969 at 12:00 midnight and I stopped for good New Year’s Eve 1979 at 12:00 midnight.  For the first three years I was what one might call a social smoker – weekends, parties, occasionally with a friend.  For the next four years, I was a full-blown junkie, getting stoned every day around 3:00 in the afternoon and staying stoned the rest of the day.  During that time I never really thought much about my addiction.  It was just something I did, something a lot of us did in the mid-seventies.

Somewhere around the 200th anniversary of the birth of our nation I started having a rebirth.  Some voice in my inner core of goodness finally started to speak up and from a point of knowing say, “This is wrong.  This is not who I truly am.  This is not who I want to be in my life.”  At that point I started, each day, to try to stop.  This daily process of trying to stop lasted for three years.  Not a day went by where I did not want to or try to stop.  And every day I failed to do my own will.  If this ain’t addiction, I don’t know what is.  They always said that marijuana is not physically addictive.  Perhaps so, but it certainly was mentally addictive.

I believe that all afflictions – colds, being overweight, cancer, AIDS, heroin addiction, broken bones, flu, etc. are all the results of some form of negative mental activity.  I won’t get into this now, knowing that this concept may be controversial with some of my readership, but suffice it to say, I was an addict, addicted to marijuana.  It’s inarguable.  I lived it.  I tried to stop every day for three years and could not.

But then I did stop New Year’s Eve 1979 at 12:00 midnight.  Why ten years to the second?  I dunno, seemed like the thing to do.  Call it a goal fulfilled.

Here’s how I did it:  I began to understand that my life did not work.  Getting stoned brought an instant flash of creativity to my work as a composer.  During this time I wrote the music for many Broadway shows quite successfully.  I would get stoned and for 45 minutes to an hour be wildly creative.  But then, the rest of the day I would feel drugged, listless, unfocused.  I would take a “hit” from time to time and get a burst of high, but there was always the law of diminishing returns in effect until the “hits” meant little to my energies.  At that, I would go to bed wasted only to wake up the next morning and repeat the process.

The difference between then and now is that now, it might take me 15-30 minutes to warm up, but then I can always write with great creativity and focus for 8-12 hours.  It’s a world of difference and I’m clear that I’m a much better artist in my “straight” mind.

But I digress…

I decided to look at why I did this stoned thing and where it really got me.  So I began each day, when I would first smoke a joint, to then ask myself, “Pete, what are you getting out of this?”  Day after day I was surprised to find that the answer was increasingly ‘nothing’.  Oh, there were enjoyments to the addiction.  I loved listening to music stoned, I certainly loved eating and it made for a fun social time with my other friends who would get stoned with me.  But slowly but surely I began to realize and see that the benefits did not equal the subtractions.

This “Once and addict, always and addict.” AA phrase, quite honestly, scared me, because, though I knew I wanted to stop, I dreaded stopping and then wanting it every day after I did stop and living with that desire and lifetime of Herculean effort and challenge every day for the rest of my life.  I did not believe that I was really up to it, that I had the strength to “just say no” day after day.

So I decided to heal the wanting, to absolve myself of the desire.

Every day I asked myself what I was getting out of the experience and every day, more and more, the answer came up ‘nothing’.  I looked at this wanting from a hundred different angles until I worked completely through the logic of the act.  Over time I realized that the act of getting stoned was illogical.  It had no positive relevance to my life.  It had ceased to give me anything positive and I began to see it as a completely negative act for me.

I understand today that this was prayer.  I was getting in touch with the perfect image and likeness of God in me – the man that I really am, reuniting with my own spiritual man, that place in me that is goodness, clarity, pure creativity, innocence, God’s own child.  The more I focused on this me, the more I saw the truth or, in fact, the error of the stoned me.

And this me, the stoned me, I did not want.  Through my daily work and prayer I began to live more and more as a spiritual man and less and less as a mortal addicted man.  I was tough with myself, not tough enough to stop, but tough enough to challenge my thinking every day for three years.  Had I been stronger or clearer, I know now that it would have taken less time, but I had to work through each want, each desire, and see it for what it really was – false.

At last, I saw no point to the drug.  It was clearly not for me, clearly not benefiting my life in any way.  I understood this so completely through my daily work and prayer that one day I realized that I had completely healed the wanting.  I simply did not want to do this any more.  This realization came around Christmas of 1979.  I then remembered starting almost ten years ago on that fateful New Years Eve and decided to make it an even 10.

Those next two weeks were miserable for me because, in my childishness of making it an even 10, I lived in a mind and body that was completely false.  I continued to get stoned every day and I couldn’t wait till New Years.

And so I stopped.

When I stopped, I never looked back.  Since I had completely healed the wanting, I never wanted.  There was not one single time that I thought, “I wish I could smoke a joint, I wish I could get stoned.”  I was no longer addicted.  I would be at a party and the joint would come around.  I would take it from one person and immediately hand it on to the next with no regrets whatsoever.

I have been straight, clean and free for nearly four decades now – completely healed.  The desire, the want does not exist.  I do not have to work on this daily nor have I ever had to readjust my thinking since that last New Years Eve.  I was completely healed.

That man who was an addict no longer exists.