About the Author:

The Man Behind the Myth - In His Own Words

The name's Matt. I live in a small town in the South East of England, called 'Sittingbourne'. I've lived here my whole life. I smoked my first joint at 15. You don't need to know much about my childhood, save that my parents were very religious. For the first 16 years of my life I had the Christian religion force-fed into my head. In 1998, my dad had an affair with my mum's best friend Debbie, and left home. Everything he'd taught me to believe throughout my childhood just came crashing down.

What was I supposed to believe in?

By 2000 I was real depressed. I had no identity. I smoked a lot of drugs at the start of this year. My use of cannabis resin was ever-increasing. I would buy it in 1 oz blocks, compared to 1/8 oz blocks when I started to smoke it. I was becoming more and more and more fucked up on drugs, almost to a quite worryingly insane level. All barriers were crashing down.

The more I smoked cannabis, the less and less attached I became to the real world, indulging in stoned fantasies. I started writing a ‘Forbidden Legacy’, kind of a bible for joint smokers. I became increasingly antisocial, and my confidence levels plummeted. I became a human wreck, a dope-addicted dosser with no interest in anything apart from getting stoned. Non-communicative and unemployed, I began taking Seroxat tablets, anti-depressants that help social anxiety and social phobia.

How did I finance my drug habit? Well, since I was signed up with a variety of employment agencies in town, I did do a number of temporary jobs, but none of them lasted more than two weeks. First, I did a bit of fruit packing with JB Workforce (at Mac and Macs). Then, for NAG, followed some Viagra-packing at Abbot Laboratories in Queenborough (I was sacked because I failed the drugs test; traces of cannabinoids were found in my urine sample), manual labour work with TAG Industrial, and Customer Service Consultancy with ANC East Kent. With each job I did I found it incredibly difficult to talk to people and deal with the situation in general, especially my job at ANC where I had to answer telephones in a busy office.

At the beginning of 2002, I moved into my dad's house in Auckland Drive. But, it wasn’t long before I became an extremely distant, disturbed boy who closed myself in my bedroom and avoided the rest of the family at all costs. I considered my dad and the rest of the family to be non-relatives, scum, really, and I had absolutely no wish whatsoever to talk to them. I would sit in my room, play on my PS2 or watch a DVD, with the door closed while I knew everyone else was enjoying ‘family’ time in the front room. In the mornings, I used to lay in bed, listening to them talking outside my room, slowly growing in my demented hatred of them. So paranoid and weird on cannabis, I wanted to avoid my family so much that I would take a piss out the back patio door, just to avoid walking through the kitchen and talking to them.

When I eventually moved into my own flat in the fall of 2002, things vastly improved. Living on my own helped me develop my own sense of independence and I became an Enlightened man. I am now greatly recovered and on the road to a normal life. But I still find it difficult sometimes. Hey, that's life...

Oh. You want to know if I still smoke cannabis? Well. Yeah.

I do. Just not as heavily  ;-)

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