Cigarettes Lose Another Point to Cannabis

My wife and I took our son on a road trip a few weeks ago. It was just a short trip to the other side of the state where a new amusement park had opened that we wanted to check out. We only had the time to stay for a single night and we found a pretty decent hotel nearby.

My wife is a former cigarette smoker, about 9 months removed from quitting. We checked into the hotel and headed to our room on the top floor. Once the elevator doors opened up, we were immediately punched with the stale smell of old tobacco smoke. It was in the curtains, the walls and the carpet. It was gross. Inside of our room, we opened the windows wide and turned on the AC. After about an hour, it was okay in our room (if you were close to the window). We figured it must have once been a smoking floor and the smell was residual.

So, we got changed and refreshed and headed out to the amusement park. At the park, my son and I peeled off to the Bumper Boats and my wife went to go look for something to drink. After the boats, we found her sitting on a bench, looking ill and unhappy. She hadn’t eaten all day and we assumed she just needed to go get some grub, so we left.

She began to feel a little better on the drive back to the hotel, but once we entered our room, she immediately got a crippling migraine and collapsed on the bed in tears. My son and I frantically went on a drive through the town to find a place to get medicine for her.

When we returned, my wife was on the phone with the front desk requesting a different room as she thought that maybe it was the old cigarette smell that was making her sick. We moved down two floors. When we booked the room, we asked for the top floor.

Apparently, this hotel still had a smoking floor and it was the top one. We were flabbergasted that such a thing still existed and learned that only 75% of the rooms have to be non-smoking. So, we moved to a non-smoking floor. There wasn’t a hint of cigarette smoke on the floor, it smelled fresh and clean. Our room smelled even better after we opened the windows and let in the cool mountain air.

My wife looked instantly relieved. Her headache vanished and she was able to breathe clearly. We discerned that it was the cigarette smell that was creating such a sickness in her. As we traced back the day, we realized that what we thought was hunger pains at the amusement park was actually a reaction to cigarettes as well. She had been sitting near people who were smoking.

And finally, after we returned home we went for a drive through the city. It was a warm day, the windows were down. At a stoplight, my wife started to feel ill again. There was a man walking nearly 70 feet from our car smoking a cigarette and she could smell it right away. From that far away, I couldn’t smell anything whatsoever, but she picked it up like a bloodhound.

I hear it is common for former tobacco smokers to have a very strong reaction to the smell once they’ve quit.

Thank you for sticking with me, I promise this has something to do with cannabis!

I had never seen my wife have a reaction like that, so when she asked me to bring her a little bit of marijuana to smoke later that evening, I was apprehensive. I wondered if the smoke might trigger a similar reaction. Well, she smoked that bowl and another one without even so much as a hint of a negative reaction.

I just wanted to share this because it was such a clear difference in two products that many anti-marijuana activists would like to lump together. We all know that pot is safe and, used responsibly, can actually be a boon to a healthy lifestyle. But we’ve also heard the prohibitionist boogeymen run about saying shit like this:

Is “joint” a euphemism for “20 cigarettes rolled into one”?

I just thought it was amazing that my wife could have such a violent reaction to cigarettes without even smoking them and be completely fine (eager, even) to smoke weed.

Color me impressed.