When I started College I voluntarily stopped smoking marijuana. It's really easy to quit.

I realized that it would be impossible to learn computer programming and get stoned at the same time. I decided that learning was more important. Parts of the schoolwork was incredibly difficult to understand. Especially Oracle's Structured Query Language. I had to take that class twice in order to pass it. Calculus was very difficult also. I managed to pass that class but never understood why anyone would want to use calculus ever. As it turned out, I never used calculus in any class or in real life. Someone said that without calculus the atom bomb and atomic energy would have been impossible to design. So maybe calculus is not just difficult but actually evil...

My experience with smoking tobacco shows the difference between drugs that are actually addictive and drugs that are not. Tobacco is addictive and it's really difficult to quit because I felt pain when I did not smoke. With marijuana, I just wished I was stoned... I have a great sympathy for the people that took the Doctor Drugs and got addicted to painkillers... I meet a lot of them at my NA meetings.

It was easy to avoid Marijuana as a student in Arcata, California because everyone I knew was a student in the computer science department. In general, nerds don't smoke dope. Arcata is in the geographic center of the illegal marijuana farms of the Emerald Triangle. Some say that 90% of the weed in the USA is grown in the North west corner of California. Humboldt, Mendocino, Shasta, Siskiou, Trinity and Del Norte counties are famous worldwide for Marijuana farming. Southwestern Oregon too. It's the same locations that Bigfoot is said to inhabit.

Now that marijuana is legal in California, the underground economy of Humboldt County is undergoing a crisis. It used to be that a vast amount of cash came into the county due to the illegal farms... Now, that business model has changed... The last few decades have been difficult for the economy there. First, logging stopped when all of the really profitable trees were cut down. Lumber mills closed in Fortuna, Carlotta and Arcata. MAXXAM went bankrupt. Then the fishing industry fell on hard times because many of the fish had already been caught in the ocean. No work for fishermen when the catch is small. Now, with legal marijuana it makes more economic sense to grow it in vast plantations in the central valley. More sunshine, black dirt... The only reason people grew weed in remote mountain farms was to avoid the police. I grew tomatoes in Chico and that central valley dirt yields bountiful harvests...

Read more of my autobiography at: http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/03/growing-up-in-los-gatos-california-in.html