Constable: After decades of abstinence, I gave pot a try

As a teen who played high school baseball, basketball and football, I didn't want to run afoul of the rules.

Coaches were tolerant of players who imbibed in Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, or impregnated a cheerleader. But marijuana was the devil's weed.

During the showing of the film "Marijuana" in health class, the narrator - a very mellow Sonny Bono, wearing what appeared to be silk pajamas - calmly warned us kids how pot was more dangerous than alcohol or tobacco. I recently re-watched that 1968 public service movie with a more discerning eye.

"Unlike alcohol, when you take too much at one time, you don't pass out," Bono said as a drunk peacefully slept with his head on the bar and a "pothead" experienced an "unpleasant bummer" where he looked into a mirror and recoiled when he saw his face as an old man and then as a monster.

"And no one who just finished smoking a cigarette ever forgot she was driving a car as she tripped out on the beauty of a back-road nature trip," Bono said as the film showed a young woman standing up and grooving as her convertible sailed off a cliff. Just in case we weren't paying attention, or had short-term memory issues from "grass," later in the movie a man smoking marijuana also drove his convertible off a cliff.

There were plenty of us who just said no to marijuana in high school during the 1970s. But by the time I got to college, I was in such a minority that my college roommate and I were paired up simply because neither of us owned a bong. While marijuana often is labeled a "gateway drug" that leads people to more dangerous vices, my lack of weed proved to be a "dead-end drug" for me.

People learned I hadn't done pot and assumed I wouldn't want to try speed, cocaine, LSD, quaaludes, mushrooms or whatever else was available at parties.

After college, I didn't run in circles where marijuana was that prevalent, and I needed no help to be slothful or hungry, so it was easy to keep my weed virginity for the next 40 years.

Until now.

With Illinois awash in legal weed, I wanted to see what all the buzz was about. Newsman Dan Rather once injected himself with heroin in the name of reporting. To research this column, I chewed an edible, slightly smaller than my Centrum Silver daily vitamin, containing a small amount of THC, the compound that gets people high.

Then, making sure there were no convertibles or cliffs to tempt me, I played the board game Catan at home with my wife and two of our grown sons. I put a pint of Ben & Jerry's Wake and "No Bake" cookie dough core ice cream on the table in case I was overcome by a case of the munchies.

More than two hours later, I was underwhelmed by my first marijuana experience. No one thought I was funnier, mellower, more insightful, more annoying, more talkative or any different from normal, including maintaining my streak of having never won a game of Catan. I ate a bit of the ice cream to be a good sport, but I didn't crave it. I listened to Cheech & Chong, and their "Dave's not here, man" bit seemed funnier when I was a sober teenager.

Even with the edible, I still struggled to see any genius in songs by the Grateful Dead. I felt no different at all.

Results vary, and my results may not be typical. Some people rave about the benefits. I know marijuana, same as alcohol, can be a problem for some people and even ruin lives. I saw that in college, and I still see those sad cases. But I also see people who smoked marijuana who are now doctors, lawyers, law enforcement officials, Supreme Court justices and U.S. presidents.

"While it's true that some of you will go to the moon, and perhaps other planets, it's also true that in a few short years, this world will be your establishment ... and what you do or don't do about it will be your scene," Bono said at the end of his film. "Let's hope your teenage children don't have too much criticism about what you did or didn't do because you were on pot."

Speaking only for myself, my personal decadeslong prohibition about weed ended the way my teenage self feared it might - in a bust.