It begins back in 2004. I was about 13 years old and just started my first year of high school, but the bad thing was that I had gone to primary school on the other side of town. I had to start from scratch, make new friends.

It was a Friday night, towards the end of summer, when I get a call from one of my friends asking if I wanted to go to a friend's birthday party. I asked my parents if i could go and they asked the usual 'concerned' questions, and i gave them innocent answers without knowing real details. They said yes, and shortly after I was getting picked up by my friend and his mother.

We arrive at the party and it's in a house. I've never been to a house party before. All of a sudden my friend is handing me cans of premixed bourbon. I had never drunk alcohol, never without my parents with me. I took a look around and saw that everyone had a drink in their hand. So i cracked it open and began to drink.

After a few hours and a fair few drinks, people are starting to get drunk. Drinks are being handed to me faster than I can drink them, so I stash a few for afterwards. I head inside to find somewhere to hide them until I walked past this room. Someone called out to me. I walk back and see that it's my friend with a whole bunch of other people sitting in a room listening to music, so I walk in and sit down.

After being introduced we start having a chat and then i look to my left and i see a bong! I didn't know what it was at the time---I mean i had seen them before but never really knew what they were. "What's that thing?" I ask. They begin to laugh and then hand it to me along with a bowl that had some brown-green stuff in it. They start to tell me that it was weed and what it does and all the rest of it, when I realise where I've seen it before. Dad's got one, and so does my aunty, and uncles. "Can't be that bad then!" I thought to myself. So I proceeded with filling the cone with weed, light it up and breathe in. I cough, hard!

We all know the rest of it but that's where it started. Though it didn't stop that night for me---the following year I was smoking. And the year after that, and the year after that and so on. I tried to quit many times throughout my teenage years, but now I am 20, soon to be 21. Four schools later and 3-4 years of consistent unemployment I am still smoking marijuana, after watching my parents smoke throughout my whole life and have no real consequence. Mind you, my mother has her masters in accounting, has raised 3 children and helped my father run a successful business. What my problem is, is how has marijuana affected their life for the worse? From where I'm standing it hasn't, but it has affected me, not so much mentally but socially and motivationally. I have dreams though. I believe weed is the broken-down bridge stopping me from fulfilling them. And here I am.