Most bad experiences on marijuana are directly related to the fears and insecurities of the user. For obvious reasons, the novice is especially susceptible. Bad trips can result from smoking too much marijuana or from unexpectedly potent material.
Marijuana adulterated with other drugs can also produce a bad trip, although this occurs less frequently than is commonly believed.
In describing their fears and anxieties, marijuana smokers inevitably speak of "paranoia," using the term to describe a wide range of emotional states from mild discomfort to terror. One of the most common negative feelings experienced by smokers is the suspicion that they are not really liked by other people who are present, or that, aware of their state, nonusers are looking down on them.
Other smokers report that they sometimes feel vulnerable in busy places, such as restaurants or shopping centers. "People naturally look rushed and bitter and hostile in such places," observes Sarah, "and when I'm stoned, it's magnified many times." Most smokers who experience such feelings are careful to avoid situations where they might occur. But occasionally, as Jenny discovered, a bad trip cannot be anticipated:
We went to the Virgin Islands for our honeymoon. One night we got very stoned, and I couldn't stand up at dinner. I felt claustrophobic, as though I couldn't breathe. I wanted to get to a bright, open place. My fear was that I was going to die there, at the resort, and that nobody would know who I was because I was registered at the hotel under my new married name. How would they know I was really Jenny Smith from Queens? How would they know who I belonged to? I imagined annihilation. Of me. Destruction. The end.
Jenny's bad trip was clearly related to her anxiety about her new identity as a married woman. But not all such experiences are so easily explained. Sandy can recall having only one bad marijuana experience, but it was memorable:
I had been smoking on and off all day with friends, and a few of us were sitting around listening to records. All of a sudden I became convinced that my breathing was going to stop at any moment, and I panicked. A friend talked me down, telling me to relax, that it was just the grass that made me feel that way. When I felt a little better, she and I went outside and sat on the steps for a few hours. It was very peaceful there, and after a while I felt fine.
In recalling this experience, Sandy added that it had a positive result: if the same feelings were to recur, she knew that she would be able to talk herself down, having learned how from her friend. This talent was more often required during the 19605, when many novices experienced feelings of anxiety. Lenny recalls the procedure for talking somebody out of a bad trip:
The thing you wanted to do was to communicate directly and calmly with the person, to remind him as often as necessary that what he was going through was temporary, that it was a temporary bad reaction as a result of a drug. Sometimes it would help to move the person to another room, or even outdoors, and to focus his attention on some concrete and familiar object. The worst procedure was to take the person to a hospital or a doctor; in such cases, the anxiety would feed on itself, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
During their bad trips, both Jenny and Sandy believed they were going to die. In the following case, another smoker's fears of death were grounded in a feeling of paranoia with regard to strangers:
The only really bad pot experience I've had in twelve years of smoking was on a vacation in Jamaica, where I had some strong stuff in one of those huge joints called a spliff. I was with a group of people I didn't know very well. The insects and the rustling trees suddenly became unbearably loud; both they and the people I was with seemed to be scorning my worth as a person in both snickers and whispers. My whole body was agitated so as to be out of control. I thought I was going to die, and I wished I already had.
More often, feelings of paranoia are experienced less dramatically, since a user may be only routinely anxious about the presentation of himself to others. For some smokers, marijuana leads to a heightened sense of noticeability, a feeling of being conspicuous. A young receptionist elaborates:
Sometimes when I'm stoned, I get bad feelings when I go out with certain people. I get very self-conscious, which is unusual for me. In high school I was a real individual, and would even wear crazy clothes just to draw attention to myself. Now, if I even wear makeup I feel self-conscious. It makes me think that people are staring at me, or talking about me, and I get nervous and feel upset.
I think I probably create these feelings myself. Most of the time I find this out after I'm stoned, when the feelings have vanished. I've got a certain amount of normal paranoia, but when I'm stoned, it becomes intense. When I'm high, anything can make me paranoid. A Boston poet experiences another version of the same problem: Sometimes when I'm stoned, I have the feeling that other people are spotting me for a phony, a deceiver. I play a lot of games imagining that they don't know I'm stoned, and I have occasionally ventured into the scary experience of being stoned in the presence of people who I definitely don't want to know. That's a danger I sometimes even court. But more and more, I think people are spotting me as stoned when I'm not aware that they are, so it may be time to cut down on my smoking.
Another smoker explains why he smokes only with close friends or when he is alone. The source of his feelings of paranoia is external rather than personal. He lives in a small town and is aware that marijuana is not accepted by his colleagues and acquaintances:
I'm concerned that somebody I work with or know will see me stoned in public. They might think I was a "pothead" or "on drugs" and draw all sorts of conclusions. I know that when I see somebody who is stoned, it doesn't offend me at all. But if I'm the one who is stoned in public, I'm not so sure that other people will be so tolerant. I'm worried that they will label me, or judge me adversely.
Another common fear among smokers is that marijuana will lead to a loss of control. A New Jersey man is especially concerned about being alert in the event of a sudden emergency. Although he understands that when he is high he is still connected to his "normal" consciousness, he is anxious nonetheless about whether the "ladder" he used to get up will be available should he suddenly and unexpectedly need it to climb back down:
I feel incapable of dealing with a serious problem when I'm high, and I worry that I could make a wrong decision that could result in serious injury or death, and which would make me feel guilty for the rest of my life. I know that I would blame myself for being stoned, that I would feel that if I hadn't been stoned, I would have done the right thing. When I first started smoking, I didn't have these worries. They developed over time, as I became more mature and more responsible.
Some smokers fear other kinds of loss of control. For the receptionist, the fear that she would lose control of her emotions once took on a physical manifestation:
We were sitting around the kitchen table, me and some friends, sharing a few joints. I had been feeling bad to begin with, and smoking made me feel worse. Suddenly I became frightened that somebody was threatening my relationship with my boyfriend, and I felt that I couldn't control the jealousy and the fear inside of me.
I felt myself getting dizzy. My head was spinning, and I couldn't focus on anything. I was sweating, and my hands were shaking. I felt nauseous, and I couldn't think straight.
I began to feel more frightened than I already was, and I freaked out. When I tried to get up and walk around, my legs were like rubber. I felt my body was rising out of itself, and I couldn't control it or talk myself out of it. This lasted about five minutes. I don't think anybody in the room knew I was feeling these things, but I felt then as though they were all watching me.
In rare and extreme cases, a smoker may lose control of his own consciousness. A veteran user recalls an incident that took place when he was a freshman in college: 
Lying down on the bed, I started to believe that I was going to die. I remember thinking that my heart was beating too quickly. I felt myself traveling through rings and rings, faster and faster like the end of the film 2001. Finally, I stretched the center core of rings enough to have them enclosed behind me, at which point I passed out. Waking up, I thought about what had happened until it started all over again. This time, I remained conscious, although my body shook with convulsions. It was a very frightening experience.
Another veteran smoker recalls his worst marijuana experience, when his imagination took over from his other faculties:
There was the time I saw the Devil on the Trailways bus. No, seriously. I was with a close friend and we got stoned at dawn before an all-day bus trip. The first hour or two was on a rollercoaster mountain road in the Adirondacks, and both of us were bus sick, really ready to puke. It was horrible. In the seats next to us were two army guys who had just reenlisted; they were telling a third guy who was with them all about the neat things they did goofing around in the army. One of the neat things was torturing squirrels. We had to listen to this.
Eventually, I noticed up at the front of the bus something about the stainless steel luggage racks, the windows, and the red "watch your step" lights. They formed a surrealistic, robot-like shape. The windows in the bus roof were big, snazzy, sunglass eyes, and the luggage racks were ski feet. It was the Devil. Or rather, it was the personification of evil. He was a living character, not an abstraction. This, I realized, must be the kind of apparition that has caused all the world's belief in demons and evil spirits. I've always remembered it. I felt I had discovered one of the ways religion comes into being.
The man who saw the devil on the bus did not quite have a hallucination. He almost lost control of his rational powers in favor of his imagination, but he was able to retain some objectivity about what he thought he was seeing.
Real hallucinations are rare among American smokers, but they do occur.
Murray recalls a time in college when after a heavy session of smoking, he saw a friend's head turn for a flash into the head of a lion. Several users spoke of hallucinations involving light.
A woman from Minnesota recalls that she once saw an image of a multifaceted diamond for a split second, just before going to sleep; at that moment, she believed she was seeing a reflection of the structure of the universe. Another user saw a light on the ceiling turn momentarily into a giant eye in the sky.
Hallucinations are rare among American smokers for a variety of reasons. First, smoking marijuana is the mildest form of cannabis consumption. Smokers are able to self-titrate, to measure and estimate how much they need to smoke before they get high; overdoses (one cause of hallucinations) are uncommon.
When cannabis is eaten, however, its effects are not felt for about an hour, and are therefore much more difficult to control.
Second, the marijuana consumed by American smokers is only rarely fresh and/or potent enough to have psychedelic qualities.
Finally, marijuana is considerably less potent than hashish, which was the inspiration for the florid descriptions of such nineteenth-century cannabis users as Baudelaire, Gautier, and the American Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Marijuana scholar Michael Aldrich, director of the Ludlow Memorial Library in San Francisco, elaborates:
There is a myth that pot is a mild and minor drug. Usually in the context of American usage it is, but it doesn't have to be.
The hard part about expressing this, however, is that the anti-marijuana people who pose visions of disaster about "hashish" or about "legalizing this stronger form of cannabis" are also wrong.
In and of itself there's nothing wrong with cannabis being a potent hallucinogen; this has certainly accounted for its vast popularity through these many centuries. When one seeks a shaman's drug one generally wants something more powerful than a "mild hallucinogen."
Of course, knowing when and where to use cannabis at a dosage or strength suitable for real visions is also important. It's obviously not a good idea to try it in an unrefined social context, or when working in the fields or factory. This use of cannabis has traditionally been confined, by rational custom in ancient societies, to rituals which help define and control, measure and magnify, the raw experience.
http://www.psychedelic-library.org
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