Pandemic created a crop of ‘smokers’
ZIMBABWEANS who rarely, if ever, smoked marijuana before the Covid-19 pandemic now say they’re turning to weed to help them cope.
Three years ago, Ricardo Mthunzi (32), didn’t know how much a gram of marijuana cost. Now, after two years of lockdowns and an extended period of overwhelming anxiety, he has become something of a weed connoisseur.
Mthunzi was never a stoner; sure, he dabbled in high school, but beer and cigarettes were always his “weapons of choice”. It wasn’t until the middle of 2020, in the pits of Covid-19 despair, that he found himself reformed as a proud, regular “toker” (someone who smokes marijuana/weed). In fact, Mthunzi found himself actually proselytising about the splendour of cannabis to his friends during their weekly PlayStation games.
“I was starting to become an advocate. I didn’t have to interact with that many people,” said Mthunzi, who recently became engaged to his girlfriend of five years and moved from Bulawayo to Harare to facilitate a career pivot.
“I was cooking and doing dishes, I was sitting and waiting for time to pass. Weed is enjoyable when you’re doing those activities. We didn’t see my parents or my friends,” he adds, “but we did see our dealer quite often.”
The Covid-19 nightmare sparked a number of shake-ups to the social order — a burgeoning anti-work movement, a sharp economic swoon, and tiresome new polarities in the culture war. But as lockdown orders marched on, many weed agnostics dived into the community with gusto, forming a new cohort of pandemicera stoners.
There are multiple factors at play here: cannabis is increasingly accessible. The trend also coincides with a gradual de-stigmatisation of the drug across the world that is reaching the general populace here in Zimbabwe.
But clearly, something about the Covid-19 experience sparked a cannabis renaissance in previously weed-neutral households. Overnight, in quarantined dwellings across the that many people up.
“Covid-19 suspended people’s social habits. There were these surveys that college and varsity students were smoking more and drinking less. Since we don’t have sanctioned places built for public consumption of marijuana, it’s something that people often do in their houses,” says a reliable source who is advocating for a drug policy in the country.
She notes that there are a lot of different ways to consume marijuana in 2022. The stoner’s toolbox — bongs, pipes, rolling papers Harris speculates that edibles may have served as an easy entry point for the fresh pandemic stoners, which is certainly true for a 35-year-old in the city named “Andrews”. He tells me that he had spent maybe $10 total on weed in his life before Covid-19, but now says a minor dosage has become a near-daily sacrament.
The legalisation efforts in most of the world sanded away any apprehensions Thabo had about having a bad experience; he always knew he was getting whatever was printed on the labels, which offered far more chemical transparency than a mysterious tray of homemade weed brownies. We all spent lockdown willing to try anything — anything — to feel better. What’s a better time to experiment?
Thabo says he drinks much less than he did before the pandemic, which he believes is both a symptom of extended isolation and the acute afternoondestroying hangovers that heavy drinkers are forced to contend with in their 30s and beyond.
Thabo’s observation bears truth in the data; an increasing number of people are abstaining from alcohol, which Sarah*, a 28-year-old office administrator and mother of three in Bulawayo, believes is a rebound effect from early-pandemic debauchery. Sarah also became a daily smoker after Covid-19 struck the country.
However, there are concerted efforts by Government and other stakeholders to stop drug and alcohol abuse, which is detrimental to health and the society at large. - @RealSimbaJemwa land, it seemed
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