GCSE PSHE / Citizenship: Lorne's experience of smoking cannabis

I’d been kicked out of my home. None of my old friends wanted to know me. And my chances of becoming a professional footballer died.

I’m Lorne. I’m a football fanatic. I like to keep busy. Jogging when I have the spare time, gym. And I think I’m a friendly guy.

As a teenager, I played football at professional level. For me personally it was a huge achievement.

I started a new college to pursue my dreams of being a footballer. A lot of my other friends they weren’t with me and I was alone. So I had to find a new group of friends. I could tell that they weren’t all like me but I had no one else there so I was willing to just hang out with them at break or lunch because I didn’t want to be alone.

I remember it was one lunchtime, they were smoking weed. One of them asked me if I wanted some. At first I said no. But then after a while they kept asking. I think peer pressure just built on me and eventually I just said, yeah, and from there everything went wrong really.

The first couple of times I got high, you know, I didn’t like it. It was OK - it made my head go lightheaded and I got heavy eyes and then my body just relaxed.

Voice over:
Cannabis increases the release of dopamine – which affects the brain’s reward pathways, reinforcing pleasurable behaviour. As cannabis can make users feel more relaxed and less anxious, or high, it can also cause them to want to maintain these sensations, leading to longer-term use, and even addiction.

Lorne:
I went from doing it once a week to maybe three times a week now. It was weird because I didn’t expect it to happen, and I didn’t even notice how much I was using it at the time.

I started to feel the need to bunk off college a bit. Which is something I would never have done before, to go chill out with these boys and smoke weed. And it started to get worse and worse. It got to a stage where I was getting in trouble at college. I mean it got really bad.

I started smoking so much weed I started to get lazy.
They kicked me out of college.
And then for my semi-professional team… It affected me big time.

I was always walking around on the football pitch and that wasn’t me. Fitness… I couldn’t run for more than five minutes at once. I started missing training. Only turning up when I wanted to, when I felt in the mood for it. And, er, they kicked me out as well.

My decision-making was terrible at that point. Because I became a lazy person, I was always taking the lazy option.

Voice over:
Although cannabis makes users feel high, it also has a number of physical and psychological side effects. As the body relaxes, its co-ordination is impaired, and reaction times decrease, affecting the user’s attention and concentration, leading to a feeling of inactivity or laziness.

Lorne:
At this point in my life now I was smoking every day. So I’m always high, you know, I didn’t think much about what I was doing.

The effect at home, it was messing everything up. Because my grandmother, living with her, she knew something was wrong. So we started to fall out. I grew distant from my sisters, brothers. I started to feel like I couldn’t go without it. I was at a stage in my life where I needed to do it, so I was dependent on it. As soon as I woke up I was thinking about it, so that’s dependency right there in itself, no?

I think at this point I was addicted.

I’ve gone from a positive person to a very, very negative person in the space of a couple of months and it was only getting worse. I mean, I’m arguing with my grandmother everyday and then I don’t think she had another choice, she had to kick me out.

And one of my friends said I could come and stay with him. At this point when I’m living with my friend and was smoking every day I gave up on wanting to be a professional footballer. I wasn’t talking to none of my family at this stage. I could have been sleeping under a bridge, like and they wouldn’t have known.

The paranoia that was the worst for me. I couldn’t go in to public places because I thought that people were staring at me and constantly staring and talking about me. Walking home at night I was always looking over my shoulder.

So I’m at this point in my life with my friend, living at his. Smoking weed every day. We’re driving around and I was smoking cannabis in the car with him, getting up to no good. Then out of nowhere we’ve gone off the road and crashed… Really bad crash… Gone to hospital from there and found out that I’ve broken my arm in five places.

That day for me was the scariest point because I thought that my whole life could have finished there. And I wasn’t even 20 yet, you know, I still had so much to offer and it wasn’t going the way I wanted it to go.

I was just sitting in a hospital bed day and night, you know, not smoking, it gave me a chance to think about things. Think about what I was doing and what I should be doing and how to change.

One of my old football friends, he turned up and he had a football and his football boots in his hand and that gave me a feeling that I wanted to walk around in my football boots again rather than with a spliff in my hand.

Smoking weed yeah, you’re having fun, you’re enjoying yourself, but there’s so many consequences. I lost a lot of things that I shouldn’t have, shouldn’t have let myself get that low.

If I had a second chance, what would I have done differently?..

I would have walked away that first day they asked me if I wanted to try it. A hundred per cent.