Sam Tanner: Up in Smoke

I debated whether or not to share the story I’m about to share.

It’s embarrassing. It’s sad. And it is even a little taboo. Only a little. I’m also told, by many of the people I’ve told this story to, that it is very funny. I’ll leave it up to you to judge, kind reader.

Ultimately, I figure it is better to put things out in the open. As the venerable Fred Rodgers once said, anything that is human is mentionable and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. So let that be the spirit in which I share this story that I’m tentatively titling Sam Tanner: Up in Smoke (think Cheech and Chong).

***

I’ve been anxious since moving to Iowa. Well, more anxious. And, after I learned that my blood pressure was boiling last year, I cut out alcohol. And caffeine. I’m running out of vices.

A friend of mine who shall remain nameless suggested I try a pot gummy. You know, to take the edge off. My friend lives in Colorado and got me a baggy full of mellow gummies. This would have been last spring. I never liked pot as a teenager. Made me anxious. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try it out again here in my forties. But hurt it did. Before going any further, you should know that I didn’t know that pot can degrade over time. I learned this from the paramedic. How’s that for a teaser?

Anyway, I took a couple of the gummies over the past year. The effects were mild. Sometimes I giggled. Sometimes I sunk into the couch. Mostly, I stared into the distance with a vacant expression. I can’t say I loved the experience of getting high, but I didn’t mind it either.

A few weekends ago, after feeling stressed out about my week, I decided to pop a gummy. Take the edge off. It was a Saturday night. I munched the gummy before dinner. About an hour later, I was playing a board game with my sons Solomon and Samson and my wife Katie. I felt the gummy start to kick in. But it didn’t feel good. I got panicky, my stomach hurt, and I started to feel woozy. Then I went out.

According to my family, my eyes glazed over, I started sweating profusely, and I was unresponsive for about two minutes. Think Mitch McConnell. They were calling my name, trying to get my attention. My poor wife Katie thought I was having a stroke. Which is about as scary a thing as I can think of. She called 911. I came to when she was on the phone. I told her to hang up.

“It’s the gummy!” I said.

“Sam, you were unconscious for like 2 minutes,” she said, “I think you had a stroke or something.”

Well, that terrified me. And then I looked at my boys. Their wide eyes were filled with fear.

“I’m so sorry,” I told them. “I love you so much.”

What if this was the last thing I would ever say to them?

“You looked at Theo,” Solomon told me, “and asked what that thing was.”

Theo is our cat. And well he is most certainly a thing, it is strange for me not to know what kind of thing he was.

The ambulance arrived. In Iowa City, they send a firetruck with an ambulance. To make sure the whole neighborhood is aware something is wrong. Indeed, our neighbors texted the next morning to make sure we were okay.

The first thing I told the paramedics was I had taken a gummy. They wanted to know the dosage. I didn’t know. They asked to see the packaging. I found the little baggy in my closet. They rolled their eyes at me.

“How old are these?” The paramedic asked.

“About a year,” I said.

The paramedic explained that pot can degrade. Old pot still has an effect, but often not a good one. She started to give me advice about how to do pot in the future before I tried to make a joke about her being a drug dealer.

“Am I going to prison?” I finally asked.

They laughed and assured me that what happened to me is pretty common. There are CBD stores all over Iowa City and, apparently, they get a couple calls a week about somebody who had a bad experience with pot.

They took my vitals and convinced us that I hadn’t had a stroke or a seizure. The punchline to this – well, one of the punchlines – is that my blood pressure was lower than it has been in years. In fact, that might have been what caused me to go out. Low blood pressure.

The paramedics packed up and left me alone with my family on a Saturday night, riding out a bad buzz.

***

I told the boys what happened after the paramedics left. I was honest about taking marijuana. I told them how sorry I was. I shared that I had childhood memories of scary moments with my parents that sometimes involved drugs or alcohol. I was ashamed to have given them that sort of experience.

Solomon and Samson didn’t leave my side the rest of the night. They wanted to make sure I didn’t Mitch McConnell again. We finished the board game we were playing. We played Switch. I felt terrible.

As I wrote, I never liked pot as a teenager. I tried it a handful of times. It usually made me anxious or paranoid. I don’t really remember good experiences with it. I think I ate some brownies with some hipsters in my twenties. We went and saw The King and I at the Ordway. I think that was the last time I had pot before the story I just told you. Maybe there was a Tom Petty concert in there too. The memory is hazy.

I tossed the rest of the gummies in the trash. No judgment if you are somebody who enjoys getting high, but it just isn’t for me. At least not right now. So I’ll keep making my way forward, figuring out how to make my way though things without vices. Clean cut. Not because I believe in purity, but because I don’t want my family to think I’m having a stroke again. That was terrifying.

So there it is. Most people I told this story to thought it was very funny. It wasn’t funny to Katie or the boys on Saturday. Though they are starting to come around. It wasn’t funny to me when it happened but, in retrospect, it is kind of funny. If one of the punchlines was about my blood pressure, here is another one: Sam Tanner can’t hold his shit.

Sam Tanner: Up in Smoke. I think my career as a pot comedian, unlike Cheech, Chong, or Dave Chapelle is over before it started.