Punching Goats and Smoking Spice: Our Favorite DJs Share Their Most Horrifying Weed Experiences

Everyone's had at least one bad time on weed—whether it be endless spins via some terrifying mega-bong, passing out somewhere weird, or a shameful lecture from mom and dad. DJs, who travel the world playing rowdy, smoke-filled parties, and often sample random buds (with random people) in whatever city they find themselves in, are certainly no exception to the rule. So in honor of today's national holiday, we polled some of our favorite selectors like Seth Troxler, J-Cush, and Blondtron, and a few other THUMP friends on not their highest moments with Mary Jane, but the dark, the tragic, and kind of awful things that occasionally lurk beneath the green.

One time I was in Asia and someone gave me some synthetic weed. I had the biggest paranoia attack and thought the police and all the cameras were watching me—so much so that I went into McDonalds just to get a paper bag to put the weed in, and dispose of in an unmarked trash can outside the restaurant.

In January 2006, right before starting Trouble & Bass, Drop the Lime and I threw our first party together. It was a release party for a mix CD we had done called Shotgun Wedding Vol. 4 and our guests were Plastician and MCs Jammer and Skepta. They all stayed at my apartment in Brooklyn for about a week, and as I recall neither Jammer or Skepta had ever been to NYC before. At the time I was in a UK garage/breaks/bass DJ duo called Syrup Girls and we had to play some weird afterparty in midtown Manhattan so we took them all with us. Jammer is a big smoker and even though we would call the weed messenger on a pretty much daily basis, I guess he had smoked it all. About 40 minutes into our set, the dudes were coming up to us asking if we had seen Jammer. Apparently he had gone around the block to smoke weed with someone and never came back. When we came off the decks an hour later, he was still missing and we were all kind of freaking out because we had to go back to Brooklyn and were trapped at this party. After another hour, or hour and a half went by, and he wandered back in the party like nothing had ever happened.

Growing up I went to/worked at an overnight camp—think pretty much Wet Hot American Summer, but less 80s and more Jewish. One summer I was working on music with a friend of mine and we got the afternoon off to record some stuff for the camp. We decided to sneak off and smoke some tree in the woods behind his cabin. Legitimately two minutes after we got back from smoking, our boss pulled up on a golf cart. My heart stopped. Me and my friend stared at each other all like "we're fucked, we're getting fired". But somehow, in the seconds it took from him to get out of the cart and walk in the cabin, we mustered up the adrenaline and all the ol' cover up the smell tricks (AKA Purell and mint gum) to mask what we could. We got away with it but I'm still convinced to this day he knew we were high as fuck and should have fired us. Had that happened, I probably wouldn't have met yung GRiZ, who was also working at the camp at the time. That would have sucked. Shoutout to Camp Tamarack!

After a few false starts in high school, I officially became a marijuana smoker my freshman year of college. My early college experiences with the sweet leaf were fraught with poorly rolled joints, accidentally inhaled cherries, overly ambitious bong rips, and smoke sessions with a pipe emblazoned with the UNC Chapel Hill logo that I, in my infinite cleverness, called Tyler Hansbowl. More than anything, these misadventures were framed by my ambition to find new, innovative ways of getting high without getting caught. At first this involved finding a remote spot in the woods, smoking as quickly as humanly possible, then going back to my dorm room and giggling a lot. After a while, my friends and I discovered a landing on a nearby parking garage where we could look over the campus but nobody could see in. (I distinctly remember smoking up there with a friend who called his bowl Zarathustra—he'd hand it to you and say, "Thus smoke Zarathustra," and then giggle.)

But most of the time we smoked in our suite, exhaling into a poorly-made sploof to filter our weed smoke and keep our suite lemony fresh. If you are fortunate enough to have never used one, a sploof is basically a toilet paper tube stuffed with dryer sheets that's supposed to make your weed smoke smell like, uh, not-weed smoke. It worked…. fine, I guess? At least well enough that our RA, who lived directly above us, never gave us shit for turning our basement suite into what was essentially an opium den, but for weed. One night, though, the sploof was not enough—we'd been smoking and playing video games for something like 12 hours, carefully exhaling into our sploof.

But on that fateful night, we ended up smoking so much that the smoke ended up seeping up from our suite into our RA's room, who thought our suite was on fire. She quickly realized we were just stoned idiots, and proceeded to yell at us a bunch. Thankfully, I went to a state school, and I'm pretty sure writing someone up for smoking weed involved more paperwork than you'd find in a scene from Brazil, so she let us off with a warning. But, a word of advice to college stoners—sploofs don't actually work, get off your ass and find some parking garage to smoke in.

I've yet to have any negative experience with weed, and that is as a long-term daily smoker. Those situations when I've let myself smoke my whole stash without scheduling a re-up, well that always sucked. I learned from that mistake quickly. Life without weed is great and all but life with a fat sack of top shelf buds is no comparison.

I remember when I moved from New York to London. It was a deeper struggle in those times. In New York, there were flavors galore: excellent genetics, properly grown, delivered to your doorstep. In London back then, if you could score a few buds of some hippie's homegrown, it was equivalent to some holy sacrament. On a serious note, the weed droughts in UK back in the day sucked. You had to stock up if you found something proper as there was always an influx of mersh: commercially grown and thus rushed out to sale, uncured, unflushed, all around foul flowers with hard, black-ash. That lack of quality control was a bad experience. Probably, if I think about it, my worst experience with weed is not being able to buy it legally in a properly regulated marketplace. That or getting hassled for smoking by the cops. #BackStrapOrDontStrap

It was my first time playing Bass Coast and I was hella excited. At the time, Bass Coast was still on some private family farm campground and the gate of entry was near the barn. While I was waiting for my wristband and artist package I sat down on a stump near some farm animals and started petting a cute lil goat. This goat starts eating a piece of my hair. Sorry, this goat starts eating a piece of my expensive weave. I'm like 'oh hell no goat, bitch aint spend $200 on your goat food.'

I tried to loosen it from it's mouth. Jerk goat has got my 100% Remy virgin hair in there tight.

I tried to do that thing you do to dogs where you pinch either side of it's jaw. NOPE.

Now at this point he's got a pretty decent chunk in his mouth. I'm trying to not draw attention to myself. I am quietly pleading with the goat, staring into his weird goat eyes. Have you ever stared down a goat? They have creepy eyes on a good day. This goat however, was from the underworld. I was freaking out a little bit and didn't know what to do so I thought, 'What would a goat do?'

I punched the goat in the face.

(Before you call PETA, just think about goats, they butt heads and fall down mountains and shit)

It made a Taylor Swift goat noise and let go.

I then realized that a group of burnout festival kids had been watching the whole thing go down, embarrassed I blurted out 'He was eating my weave!'

They replied 'Dude, he ate our weed too! fuck that guy.' I don't know if punching a goat with munchies counts as a weed story but whatever.

I was seventeen and in my senior year of high school and had grown incredibly bored with going to class. I spent a lot of time bailing on school altogether to get high with the work-release kids, get high with the mentorship kids, or get high with my friends who had already graduated. One of these boring days my friend Jeremy asks me if I want to skip class and get high at his house, which was very exciting for me. Jeremy always had really, really good weed and he would always show up to class dumb high, so I was stoked to go get dumb high with him for once, since we'd never actually smoked together.

Jeremy drives us over to his house and he has this huge crazy bong—like if you watched a bad SNL skit about kids that smoke a lot of weed they'd probably have a bong that looked exactly like it for exaggerated comic affect. The joke would be that no one in the world would have a bong that huge and complicated, but Jeremy had that bong. So we get dumb high, and he is completely unfazed by it, but I am completely dying. We end up playing Halo together on his big-ass TV and spend like four games just jumping around the level and visibly shaking in real life because I can no longer differentiate between the video game & the real world. Whenever someone kills me I think I've died and gone to hell, but then I respawn and feel like Lazarus, but if he was really fucking stoned when Jesus brought him out of his cave. This whole time we're listening to Gucci Mane too and that's maybe the only thing that comforts me, since it's some kind of familiarity amidst this nightmare. To date I've never been as high as I was that afternoon at his house; no dabs, no edibles, nothing. It was honestly more disorienting than when I did mescaline by accident thinking it was ecstasy.

Somehow we end up back at school after this all and I'm just so completely panicked-out-stoned-unable-to-function that one of my friends volunteers to guide me through the rest of the day and get me back to my house after. I don't remember anything about that evening besides lying down for a long, long time. I didn't really feel completely normal again until around 5pm the next day, which doesn't even make sense. I was just completely beaten down after it all, like my body & spirit had both been completely exhausted. It was a very humbling experience. I felt like that picture of Cam Newton getting sacked by Von Miller from the last Super Bowl. It haunts me.

Growing up in New Jersey, finding good weed or "headies" was like leprechaun gold. So when my brother went to college in California, I took the opportunity to visit him as soon as i could. He somehow convinced his school that me and my friend Bart should get flown out to DJ his spring fling party. When we arrived, the weedlife was out of control. We learned about many new things, including weed soda, weed candy, cookies, and any other food you can imagine. The weed food seemed like such a good idea at the time, that in our minds we would save a bunch of money by stocking up on weed food and drinks, that after we smoked we could eat snacks and get more high instead of getting the buzzkill that comes with gorging on regular food when we got the munchies. So for one whole day the only thing we ingested was weed food and weed drinks, while also smoking the entire time.

Things got weird. I don't remember most of what happened that day but I do remember some sort of confusing numbers puzzle and a blurry squinted vision of my brother's face laughing. I woke up that night and my head felt like a cinderblock. I managed to get up and puke in the toilet. It felt horrible. I was in full on diarrhea/puke mode through the next day, in the airport, on the flight home, and on the ride to NYC where I would be DJing a party that night. You know that feeling when you puke from shrimp, then when you smell shrimps you feel like you want to puke. Thats how I felt when I smelled weed for about a week. I get to this show I'm supposed to play, sweating puking and shitting. I somehow managed to play the show, only throwing up two or three times in a trash can I stashed under the table. I'm no doctor but I'm pretty sure it was something like food poisoning. The lesson I learned is that weed food is not real food. I still smoke and eat weed all the time, but now I try to eat some pizza and stuff.

My first really bad experience with weed, actually doesn't involve weed, but more the idea of weed (smoking, sneaking around your parents, masking the smell of smoke). One of my best friends growing up had very chill parents, so his house was usually our main zone for getting into all sorts of mischief—usually during sleepovers, which my parents would soon ban all together in attempts to hinder my ability to partake in things like weed smoking. Before I took my first actual puff on ganj, which of course would be in said friend's basement, I decided to test my lungs' ability to smoke a rolled object by smoking a fat joint of mint. Like actual mint leaves, that my friend's mom grew in her garden. Before this, if I can remember correctly, we had also tried smoking cat nip. (Take my advice: don't ever smoke catnip.)

Anyways, we rolled up the mint-joint, smoked it, and it actually wasn't half bad! Fast forward about 15 minutes and my mom picked me up outside my friend's house to take me home. I could sense that she knew I was hiding something, and seemed interested in the denim jacket I was wearing, probably because it had trapped some of the heady mint odors. Eventually we got home, and after placing the jacket on the rack downstairs, I went down into the basement to watch TV. Eventually I heard the fateful call from upstairs—DAAAAAVIIIID—I would soon learn meant bad news. My mom asked why my jacket reeked of smoke, and what I was doing at my friend's house. A slew of emotions and possible excuses went through my brain. My buddy had an older sister, who smoked, so I thought it was best to just say that I had left my jacket around her room which caused it to possibly smell. Mom was not buying that.

Finally after more interrogation I fessed up: We were smoking mint. My mom's eyes lit up, and it was clear she thought "mint" was some new, terrible experimental drug that would soon ruin my life and lead me into a world of rehab. After some frantic back and forth, I explained what had happened. We then went over to the computer in our kitchen and my mom looked up to see if there was indeed some new drug called mint, but eventually believed my story…which embarrassingly was true. I would soon smoke actual weed for the first time at my friend's place, and didn't get caught for blazing until my dad found my small bong stashed in an AC vent in our ceiling.

Send David your weed horror stories on Twitter