Mike Cannon’s Field Guide to Doing Drugs
Mike Cannon’s first album I Think It Just Kicked In releases on iTunes this Friday, September 8th. It was recorded live at New York Comedy Club, which is the first place Cannon ever saw a comedy show when he was a teenager. The album was recently featured as a pre-release on SiriusXM Comedy.
Cannon is thrilled with the album, “It is so rare in comedy to be able to put something out that I had a hundred percent creative control over, it just makes me feel good and accomplished.” You may be familiar with Cannon from numerous appearances on Red Eye, his popular Irish Goodbye Podcast with fellow comedian Mike Feeney or his former cult favorite conspiracy theory podcast DeepInside The Rabbit Hole. You may also know Mike from his long running web series The Weed News or from being the judge at Roast Battle NYC who is always high. Really, really high. So he seemed like the perfect expert to weigh in on which drugs to do and how to do them.
Weed (smoking). It’s tough in NYC, because we do live in this internment camp where everything is illegal, so it’s almost like blindly reaching into a drawer and just picking a pill. You gotta find somebody you trust to sell it to you, so they are accurately giving you a kind you would like. And really, the first thing is finding what kind of pot you like. I remember in the beginning, just smoking whatever I could get my hands on and it would send me into warp speed panic. I basically built myself up into being a good pothead. I fought my way through two years of having a terrible time. I figured eventually I would have to see the benefits of this. Then I remember the first time I smoked something I actually liked, it was like “Oh, this is how it should feel!” My heart wasn’t racing, I wasn’t sleepy, I was thinking weird shit that was fun, it helped me write and I was productive. I way look at it, if weed can bottleneck all the traffic in my head down to one lane, then that’s working for me. So, find a strain that suits you. And don’t do what I did, don’t wait two years. If it’s not for you, it’s not for you! One of my least favorite things is evangelical potheads, people who are soooo caught up in how it works for them, they can’t believe it doesn’t work for you. Pot is not a deity, it should just be something you do because it helps you out or you like it.
Weed (edibles). I have no idea what goes into those, I just eat as many as possible and hold on to the Earth for dear life! I’m really not a roller coaster guy at all, because I get scared of the physical risk, but I do like riding an emotional and mental roller coaster. So I tend to overdose and just be like Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, “Is that all you got!!???” I think other people should follow the standard advice and just start with a nibble and see how it affects you. I am a person who likes to make myself very uncomfortable. You need to understand it’s totally different from smoking. Joe Rogan had a brilliant bit on how differently your body processes it when you eat it versus smoke it, it’s like 5 times more potent for your body and it’s actually psychoactive, so you are experiencing a little bit of hallucination. You gotta be ready for a ride. I actually like being on stage on an edible if you can just surrender yourself to it. Brendan Sagalow had one of the funniest experiences on edibles I’ve ever seen. He went onstage and he was fighting it tooth and nail, he wanted to appear as sober as humanly possible and you could see his effort against the drug, just walking through quicksand and folding into himself. But if you just trust fall into the weed, you’ll have a great time.
Shrooms. Mushrooms are different because they can really change your life. They did for me. I was a really cynical former Irish Catholic that watched his parents get a divorce, watched a bunch of my friends die, watched my grandpa die and my dog die, so I had a very slanted view about the world. It was almost like, “Fuck this place! You’re gonna hurt me? I’m not gonna have any wonder about any of this. There’s no heaven, there’s no god.” Then I did mushrooms and it was like, “Oh, it’s just not the God I grew up on.” It really opened me up to connecting more with my friends, connecting with my parents and understanding their faults, it made me a better version of myself. That’s not necessarily gonna happen with everybody, but I would dive right in with mushrooms. And there are going to be some uncomfortable moments, but those have been some of the most rewarding for me. People always worry what are you gonna do on a bad trip, but it’s like with edibles, you just trust fall into it. Those are things you’ve been pushing down for so long and it’s finally peeking its head out and you just need to acknowledge it. Like at my bachelor party, the overwhelming message was “Shut the fuck up” (and I did) and just listen to your friends, they have valuable things to say, you don’t always have to be funny and the superstar. And it’s been tough, because I do just always talk my ass off, but it helped me become aware of that. So, jump straight in, take the full dose, do it with someone who’s done it before and there probably should be one sober person on the premises as kind of a lifeguard.
Steroids. Happiest drug of them all! I’ve never had a bigger smile on my face than just being 205 lbs and just a solid meat piston of a human. I never have been better at sex. I’m not sure if it was enjoyable for the other person, but I was going to Pound Town. I would recommend them.. and not, because they almost killed me. I remember after doing three cycles and going to the doctor to get a physical, they said to me, “Have you drank every single day of your life since you were five years old? Your liver is red alert level bad.” I stopped and three weeks later most of my liver had grown back and it was fine. But yeah, steroids are awesome.
Cocaine. I had my bouts with coke, but it was never more than just a kind of fun thing to do when I would do it. When I was in college, when we’d drink, I’d be like “let’s do blow” and up there it was cut with baby laxative, so I’d just do a line and then shit all night. What a wild time. But now they are literally cutting it with a drug [fentanyl] that is so powerful a cop went to brush it off his uniform and he almost died [from skin absorption]. And they are doing it just to prove their stuff is the shit. So they’re selling it to junkies and killing them just to become the hottest stuff on the block. I’m glad I’m out of that game. If I died of that, I’d be so pissed off.
Adderall. I think that’s actually the pure devil. Nothing has ever affected me as negatively as Adderall did. I would take the 20 mg every day and by the end of the week I would be in such a tailspin depression from spiking so high and them coming off of it, that it got real dark. Even if it’s meant for you, it’s so crazy. Most of my friends who have had drug problems, they started with that.
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