Maribel Motsinger
It was a friend who first told me. We were drinking wine at a bar, but hadn’t had nearly enough to explain the slight redness around her eyes. Hay fever, I asked? ‘No,’ she replied with a grin, ‘gummies.’
Not the type your kids might get in a party bag, clearly. These gummies, otherwise known as ‘edibles’, contain THC, a psychoactive compound that’s also found in cannabis.
‘It’s such a giggle,’ she told me. ‘You just have to be careful how much you take.
‘It takes a while to have an impact, so try a nibble, wait an hour and see how you feel.’
She handed me a see-through packet and inside was a large jelly in the shape of a teddy bear. It looked exactly like the kind of thing my seven-year-old might eat, so when I got home I hid it in the shed, in a vase, wrapped in foil and on the highest shelf.
These are not to be confused with CBD gummies, which are infused with the much tamer cannabidiol oil and are used to help combat stress. They can be found at any High Street pharmacy, whereas THC gummies are strictly illegal and sold on social media – and are generally aimed at daft teenagers.
But now they are also all the rage with west London mums looking for a ‘buzz’.
Their effect, I have since discovered, seems heavily dose-dependent, ranging from a general sense of relaxation to potent, dangerously altered sensory perception, to full body sedation and catastrophic paranoia. They are not class B drugs for nothing.
I am a chronic over-thinker (aren’t we all nowadays?) and often struggle with social anxiety. Back when my friend introduced me to the gummies, a giggle-inducing drug that looked like a sweetie sounded like a fun way to get through an evening.
I had a friend’s 50th birthday coming up at which I would no doubt encounter plenty of people I hadn’t seen in years.
Normally, I’d see it out on prosecco (the hedonistic fuel for most mums), but I’m not good at knowing when to stop, and my hangovers have become crippling in recent years.
For some reason I thought these gummies sounded easier to control and might deliver a more chilled-out effect.
This was before I’d heard the gummy nightmare stories, which came pouring out once I asked, in a whisper, other mum friends whether they had tried them. One told me she’d popped a gummy at a wedding, and then another to get through the interminable speeches, whereupon she lost control of her bowels.
Her hapless dash to the loo, red-eyed and stumbling, was witnessed by the entire wedding party.
Another friend told me she’d also once taken too much and got very paranoid, thinking everyone could see that she was high as a kite. So she hid in the garage at her own dinner party and didn’t come out for an hour.
These stories should have been enough to put me off, but I often believe Gen X are the most experimental when it comes to drugs, and I’d done my fair share back at university. I know it’s not right or clever.
On the day of the party, which was in a local pub, I was getting butterflies just thinking about taking the gummy. I was going to follow my friend’s advice and take a tiny bit first to see how I felt.
I went into the shed and broke off half a teddy bear, and then put it in my pocket, wrapped in a piece of kitchen paper. This was a sizeable chunk, and I hoped it would be enough to make me more relaxed. Perhaps I’d even have a dance: I used to love dancing but I rarely do it any more.
At the pub, I nibbled about half of my test gummy. Around me people were drinking and there was a DJ playing classic 1990s music. I didn’t feel anything. I got into a chat with an old friend about our kids and, after an hour, well, I still didn’t feel much – so I took the rest of it.
Half an hour later and I began to feel disorientated, as though I’d drunk a bottle of prosecco very rapidly. Except I wasn’t in the slightest bit chatty, as I am on the booze. Quite the reverse: I felt zoned out and aloof and withdrew to a seat at the side of the room.
I’d come on my own since my partner isn’t a fan of big bashes and didn’t know any of these old friends. Someone I’d known at uni now caught my eye, standing on the sidelines holding on to a ‘YOU’RE 50’ helium balloon and gently swaying. I was tempted to ask if she’d taken a gummy, too, and if we could be gummy-buddies, but someone called her a taxi and she disappeared.
I’d like to say that I had the most epic night, that all my inhibitions went out the window, that I flirted (playfully) with my friend’s husband, and had some really insightful conversations – but I ended up sitting in that corner just staring at people.
Several pals approached me over the course of the evening to ask how I was – but I could only nod mutely having apparently lost the capacity to talk.
Heaven knows what they made of it.
I wasn’t not enjoying the experience. I suppose I felt calm and quite happy, but the whole point of the evening was to socialise and I just… wasn’t.
As the night wore on, the woman who had given me the gummy at the wine bar came to talk to me. ‘Do you feel nice and chilled?’ she asked enthusiastically. She had a bit of a red tinge to her eyes. Oh help, I thought, did I have this, too?
‘I’m not sure it’s the buzz I was looking for,’ I said. ‘It’s just making me feel out of it.’
‘Maybe you need to take some more?’ she said. ‘It’s probably not working.’
Together, we went to the toilet and I had a nibble on one of her gummies. It felt absurd, with hindsight, as though we were 14.
Then she dragged me onto the dance floor and, for a while, I lost myself in the music, not caring that people were watching and undoubtedly behaving in a wilder fashion than I normally did.
Later, this would cause far more retrospective embarrassment than anything I’ve ever done on prosecco. I also flirted with the barman in a mild sort of way, but stopped when he asked me if I was ‘feeling OK’.
That’s when the paranoia began. Did I look weird? I went back to the toilets and examined my reflection. I looked sweaty. My hair was frizzy. My pupils were bigger than normal. I felt like an idiot, if I’m honest – and that constant inner critic began not just to nag but to scream in my ear. What a fool I was making of myself.
Half an hour later, I summoned an Uber (noticing that I couldn’t quite focus on the app, and found it hard to locate the car when I got outside).
Back home the kids were in bed and my partner was sound asleep. I hadn’t told him about the gummy as I knew he’d scold me – he often tells me I need to be less impulsive.
I went into the shed in the dead of night, took the vase from the shelf, got the rest of the gummy and threw it into the bottom of our household bin.
The next day I didn’t have a physical hangover, but that paranoia hung over me for a week, like the worst, most potent kind of hangxiety.
With hindsight, I disliked the THC gummy intensely, but I have noticed that they’re becoming more popular. A friend told me about a Home Counties dinner party she’d been to where the host provided gummies for all the guests. I can’t quite imagine what that was like – did they all stare slack-jawed at one another and then go home?
It isn’t especially cheap – I’m told the going rate is £45 per bag of ten gummies, but I imagine if you got the dose right, it might calm your nervous system.
But at what risk? Like all illegal drugs, you can’t know what you’re really taking and, as side-effects go, a bad time at a party – or heaven help us, a sudden loosening of the bowels – might, in fact, be the least of it.
I think I’ll stick to the CBD gummies I can get on the High Street. Or maybe just play it completely safe with my kids’ Haribo.
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