I wanted to try out smoking; so, one day, while I was with my friends, I suggested that we should try out dry pawpaw leaves and we did. By the time I was in SS2, I began smoking weed. People hardly believed that I could smoke because I looked so slim and gentle. Weed (Indian hemp) was not hard to find there (in my school). Smoking weed helped me to not react in anger to those who provoked me – it pacified me; you could insult me and I would not worry about it.
I started taking codeine too. Even though I was always smoking, I was still a very intelligent student. In fact, I usually taught my classmates mathematics; it got to a point that my Mathematics teacher left most of his work for me to do.
Engaging in Weed Business
I finished secondary school in flying colours. I wanted to gain admission into my dream university, the University of Lagos, so I wrote JAMB and POST-UTME and passed them excellently. However, I was not given admission.
During the period I was at home waiting to re-write the JAMB examination, I started hanging out with armed robbers, street hustlers, cultists, drug dealers, ex-convicts and the likes. With time, I started buying weed in bulk for myself. Whenever the need for weed arose in my area, I would sell it out to those in need.
I had a number of friends who were about six to seven years older than I was and some of them were cultists.
One thing we had in common was that we all smoked. The boys I had around me talked fondly about the time they had spent in jail, and they would ask questions like, “You don do time?” (Have you ever been incarcerated?”). I looked innocent amongst them though, so it made me stand out in a quiet way.
During this period too, I was a church goer. Sometimes, I would come back from church feeling convicted about the kind of lifestyle I was living. Whenever I tried to tell my friends I wanted to stop doing those things, they would counter everything I said with Scriptures, applying them wrongly, of course. They usually liked quoting Genesis 1:29 that says that God has given all the grasses of the field to man for food. To them, weed was included. I was ignorant and did not know how to interpret scriptures so I believed it.
To Be Continued…
Miraculous Monday: 8th April 2024
Miraculous Monday 085
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