Synthetic Pot

I'm going to tell this story in hopes that it will perhaps convince someone NOT to try this shit!  This is a long time coming...

I have to go back just a bit for some "back story" so those who know me understand... at least a little.  I met Mark in 1985 and I knew he was the rebel-type.  I knew going into this that he likes to smoke pot.  In all honesty, I really don't have a problem with it.  I don't agree with it being illegal - I don't think it's any more of a "gateway" drug than alcohol.  Therefore, if it should be illegal, so should alcohol.  That's my opinion.  And I'd rather hang out with a pot smoker than a drinker.  I mean, who ever heard of someone smoking a doobie and going out and "kicking some ass"??  Pot smokers are laid back, easy going cookie-eaters!  LOL! But... I don't do it.  I have never been a smoker and I never will be.  Not that I haven't tried it myself - but it just makes me feel like I have an elephant sitting on my chest and that's not particularly appealing to me.  So just give me a freakin' margarita, and smoke your weed and shut up!  LOL!

Anyway, fast forward to 2007...  And here's some real fast-forwarding. Mark lost his leg due to circulation issues related to smoking.  Got a prosthetic leg in mid-2007, but amazingly enough went back to work in the fall of 2007.  He's a sheet metal worker, which entails some ladder work, typically, but this job he got hired on was work off a lift, so that wasn't an issue.  The job went on for almost 2 years until summer of 2009, then it came to the last bit of the job, which DID have some ladder work, and Mark was laid off with others.  This was about the time that the economy here went to shit...

So we went through 2009...2010...unemployment ran out.  There were more union guys on the bench than working (many more, from what I found out...) and it seemed unlikely that Mark would find work, since it had to be jobs with little or no ladder work. After all, as an amputee, putting him on a ladder was almost like asking for an OSHA investigation!  He applied for non-union jobs.  Again, the prosthetic leg was a deterrent, I'm sure.  So he applied for disability.  Denied.  Applied again.  Denied.  And we hired a lawyer in 2011...

In the meantime, things were not great at my work, too, because of the economy.  Of course, I'm self employed, so little work = little pay.  And things were bad.  Our savings, which I had so diligently compiled over 20 years, was going away very fast.  I'm a master of living cheap, but I feared that our savings would run out and we would lose it all - the house I so loved and we'd been in for nearly a quarter century...  The times were tough, but we were surviving.  But, looking back, I realize Mark's ego must have been utterly crushed.  He wasn't "the man" anymore.  He wasn't contributing ANYthing, and he was having to rely on me for every minutia of his life. He had to feel totally emasculated.  And worst of all, he could not afford to buy pot to at least ease the pain... (Mark isn't a drinker, and from what I've heard about before I knew him, I don't ever want him to be a drinker!!) 

More in the next segment...