Was it the drugs or was it stigma?

Thursday, 1 May, 2025.

Photo credit: Reunite Dias

My name is Eli, I’m 25 and I’m a big fan of responsible drug use. Whether it be in a medical or recreational setting, I believe drugs should be treated with appropriate respect for their potential harms and celebrated for their potential benefits.

I haven’t always had the best relationship with drug use. I was expelled from school as a result of it. I severed close family relationships as a result of it. I have seen many friends go to dark places as a result of it.

However, I’ve also experienced and heard of so many amazing experiences where drugs helped people form into the person they truly want to be.

My story, like many others, started with excessive cannabis consumption, fuelled by a sense of social isolation. I would smoke to fit in and smoke when I was left out. It was a drug that consumed my waking life. I was living sesh by sesh.

Quitting was the hardest thing for me. The withdrawals were bad but the worst part was how I was treated by the people close to me – my family and friends.

I grew up in a Catholic household with traditional values. Drugs were never something I was exposed to, or thought much about, but I’ve always been a curious person by nature. When I was 16 years old, I started riding a skateboard and would hang at the skatepark quite frequently. All my homies smoked weed, and I wanted to see what it was all about.

Instantly, I was in love with the feeling.

I didn’t have to worry about schoolwork, and my constantly overactive brain was just enamoured by the world around me. I truly believe cannabis is what made me the easily intrigued and open-minded person I am today.

When I was stoned, my parents and I had a good relationship, we would rarely fight, and life was easy.

But my memory was getting bad, and my parents started to smell it on me, so I decided I should stop.

Yet, whenever I quit, withdrawal kicked in. I was labelled a “junkie,” and suddenly, I turned from the loving young Eli to a stereotypical drug addict.

My parents would hide their valuables, thinking I would hock their wedding rings to get $20 of bud. In fact, when I was smoking, I would offer to wash their cars three times a week and pick up extra work around the house to get money (which they loved, I might add).

The true stigma showed up when I needed them the most, when I was an absolute mental mess, all alone, crying in bed for days because I couldn’t feel anything else but loss for my “unconditionally” loving parents.

They started treating me like an unwelcome stranger in their house because that’s the only way they knew how to help. This happened many times over two or so years. My mother couldn’t even look at me. My stomach sank when I attended family gatherings. I’d watch everyone’s concerned eyes hit me as I entered the room. I felt so much judgment and shame from people I loved dearly.

With this all said, I don’t blame them. They were truly trying their best, doing what they thought was right for me. But their stigma and lack of understanding about drugs is so deeply ingrained, that doing what they thought was right meant acting with a lack of compassion. No one should have stigma standing between them and the support they need.

I eventually did it. I had a year without weed. Yet, during that time, I noticed that my ability to remember, talk fluently and be social was very poor. I started googling ways to recover these abilities. My motto was, “If there’s a drug to fry my brain, there’s gotta be a drug to unfry it. Yin and Yang or whatever.”

So, I started looking into nootropic supplements, herbs, and substances that might rewire areas of the brain affected by cannabis. Maybe it was placebo, but they helped immensely. I was able to study and speak more confidently, while even impressing my friends and colleagues by explaining complex neurotransmitter systems and drug interactions in a way that was not only accurate but genuinely entertaining.

This spurred on intense research into many other legal, illegal, and grey area drugs. I’d go to parties and start talking about everything I’d learned. I then decided to go to university and get a degree, so that I’d be taken seriously.

Now, at 25, I’ve learned a lot. I hold a degree in medical science. I’ve taken many substances with a backbone of appropriate harm reduction education and I’ve been volunteering for peer support services since 2021.

The pharmacological side of things is something I can conceptualise, yet my lived experience with stigma is something that I’ve found far more complex to tackle. I’ve contributed to many national and community-based harm reduction groups, working in everything from party outreach to policy advocacy. Through it all, I’ve come to understand something important: stigma is an issue I can’t fix on my own, and that’s why you’re reading this today.

If you relate to this story, I want you to know you are not the problem. You shouldn’t feel regret. Stigma has almost certainly shaped your story more than your actions ever could have.

If you want to help change things, it starts with how we speak. People need support, not punishment. We need to be able to talk openly, without shame or fear.