Illness kept changing the rules of my life. Tea, whisky, and eventually cannabis became ways of finding something worth chasing anyway.
It’s 7:38 a.m., and it’s time for my medication. I grab my pill strip off my desk and pop the lid open. Gotta check that it’s all there; otherwise I’m screwed. The pills for my C-PTSD, anxiety, and depression are already in there, but there are always more. Something for breakthrough pain. Two more tablets for anxiety and depression. Something for allergies. A probiotic. Another antibiotic, this one a powder I have to mix with water.
I look down at the pill strip. The pills have piled into a neat little haystack of medicine. I dump them into my hand, throw them into my mouth, and wash them down with the antibiotic. That’s the first of three batches of meds done for the day. Time to get on with my life.
Learning to Taste
Some moments stick around longer than others. Looking back, mine tend to cluster around the same things: illness, flavor, and whatever my body would still let me have.
I am two years old, and I haven’t eaten solid food yet. Medical malformations in my body make it difficult to digest. According to my parents, I live on disgusting pre-digested formula mixed with water and fed to me from a bottle. I have almost no frame of reference for what food is supposed to taste like. By six, I know enough to hate hospital food. During one two-week stay, I live for the nights when a nurse brings me popsicles and ice cream from the freezer for the “very sick kids.” At the time, I think she’s sneaking them to me. It doesn’t dawn on me that I am one of the very sick kids.
I am eight years old when flavor becomes something more than a pleasant distraction. I’ve written my first sheet of tasting notes about teas I like. I visit the tea shop in town constantly, and when it closes, I am devastated. The tap water at home is disgusting, but brewing Iron Goddess of Mercy makes it palatable. I’m fascinated that the leaves have been hand-curled and fired in a wok. I’ve grown up with things arriving pre-packaged in sterile containers, so anything handmade feels like a small wonder. The tea keeps me sane.
Chasing Flavor
At 15, I started an energy drink review website. Companies send me samples, and suddenly I’m awash in flavors I have never tried before. I want to catalog them all. Maybe it’s the caffeine, maybe it’s the novelty, who knows. For once, I am happy. Then I am 19, standing on the fraternity quad at college when a guy runs out of a fraternity and hands me a Milwaukee’s Best Ice. “Welcome to the frat quad.” I crack open the ice-cold can and take a sip. It’s my first drink.
A whole category of taste, closed to me for 19 years, rushes in. I’m fascinated. I hide the beer in my sleeve as security rolls by on a golf cart, smile and nod, and watch them wave back. Something changes.
Alcohol doesn’t fascinate me because I like getting drunk. It fascinates me because of its flavor. By 22, I have an alcohol review website and samples showing up at my door. I write about tequila with all the bravado and braggadocio a 22-year-old can muster. My engineering degree is going adequately, but I care much more about what is in the glass. I chase flavor from one bottle to the next until I realize my engineering degree could get me into a master’s program in Brewing and Distilling Science.
At 23, I’m in Scotland doing exactly that. It was a close call getting medical clearance to go, but I made it. My health problems are there, always, but I’m stable enough to believe I’ve outrun them for a while. At Whisky Club, I pour Maker’s 46 from a bottle I managed to get into the UK before its release there. We toast to my success and to the joviality of life. Things are good.
When My Body Changed the Rules
At 26, I am openly weeping in a doctor’s office. I had landed a job at a distillery, but I had to leave when my six-month trial ended because I needed surgery. For two years, every time I got close to another job in the industry, I wound up back in the hospital. Every time I make headway, they cut my legs out from under me.
Now the doctor is talking about fentanyl for the pain. It comes with a long list of warnings, including one that hits especially hard: If I start taking it, I can’t drink anymore. What I had turned into a passion, an education, and the start of a career is suddenly off the table.
By 34, the years have taken their toll. My medical problems have piled on top of one another, and I’ve been awarded disability. I am taking fentanyl for pain, dealing with an infection that won’t go away, and trying not to increase the medication even as the pain breaks through it.
To celebrate the disability decision, I smoke a little cannabis with my mom. Partly, I want to see what it does for the pain. For me, it takes the edge off. But then I notice something else: It tastes like nothing I have ever tried.
Finding Another World of Flavor
At 35, I went to my first cannabis event. I’d been using cannabis more often, quietly, but now I want to understand what is happening around it. I talk with growers and processors, try samples, and immerse myself in the culture. What surprises me most is how familiar it feels.
There is the same obsession with craft, flavor, process, raw material, and the tiny decisions that separate something forgettable from something extraordinary. Growers talk about plants in ways that remind me of distillers talking about grain, barrels, fermentation, and cuts. They care about what went into the finished product and why it tastes the way it does. That part I understand immediately.
The more I explore cannabis, the more I realize I am chasing the same thing I had always chased. It isn’t the intoxication that hooks me. It’s the possibility that the next thing I try might taste completely different from the last one. I had spent years learning how to pull apart the flavors in whisky and other spirits, building a vocabulary around what was in the glass. Cannabis gives me a new vocabulary to learn.
And, importantly, it gives me somewhere to put that curiosity after alcohol is no longer an option. I had thought that part of my life was finished when my health and pain management made drinking impossible. I had gone to school for it. I had tried to build a career around it. Losing alcohol meant losing more than a beverage. It meant losing an entire world I had trained myself to understand.
Cannabis doesn’t recreate that world. It gives me another one.
By 38, I’ve been running a cannabis website for a year and exploring the plant seriously for several. I’m smoking a review spliff on my front deck, made with flower from a home grower who’s spent years refining their craft and genetics. The flavor blows my mind. I can taste the work that went into it, the same way I once went looking for the decisions behind a bottle.
I had thought illness had closed the door on the thing I loved chasing. Instead, I had stumbled into an entirely different vocabulary of taste. Once again, I am enamored. I’ve found place, presence, and purpose.
What I Got to Keep
Another morning, I open the pill strip and grimace. I forgot to fill it the night before, so it’s empty. Dutifully, I reach over my samples of cannabis to grab the bottles I need to restock it. I have reviews to do today and writing to finish. All of it is cannabis-related now.
I think about the non-alcoholic beer waiting in the fridge and get a little giddy. A spliff and a non-alcoholic beer is a good combo. While reaching for an antibiotic, I accidentally knock an eighth onto the floor. I bend down and pick it up.
It stares back at me, daring me to smoke it. I smile and continue filling the pill strip.
Contributing Author Disclaimer: This essay reflects the author’s firsthand experience with chronic illness, prescription medications, alcohol, and cannabis. It is a personal account, not medical advice, and should not be taken as guidance on treating pain, mental health conditions, or any other medical condition. Cannabis affects people differently, and readers should consult a qualified healthcare professional about their own health, medications, and cannabis use. The author is an external, unpaid contributor, and the views and experiences expressed here are his own.
