Also I was taking ambien for sleeping but it started giving me bad side effects.
Basically what turned me into a nightly smoker instead of just a weekend toker.
Have had insomnia basically since I was a teenager. And I don't mean the 'insomnia' that many people claim to have because they sit at their computer until 4am, I mean the real insomnia that has horribly negative effects on your life (which you obviously know about if you were on ambien).
Teens were fine cause it's not like I needed to be super aware for class and could skip to go crash in a friend's car when the crash came.
First couple years out of highschool were fine because I was working tech support and then construction and just drinking every night. Drinking makes me sleep fine, I didn't need full mental faculties at work, was young enough to be able to shrug off hangovers.
Then in my early 20s I went to university. My first year was in engineering (switched to physics after first year) and the first semester had 7 courses. I could no longer afford to drink - financially or mentally - every night. A month in I was struggling horribly because I'd be awake for 2-4 days and then NEED to crash. Did a lot of car-sleeping, but the sleep dep was definitely affecting my ability to learn and do homework. Missing class is also just not a feasible option for engineering. Decided to visit my GP (chose a school that I could commute to while moving back in with my folks to save money).
He prescribed me ambien.
At first I thought it was fan-fucking-tasking being able to actually sleep at normal times and get enough of it. Sure I felt fuzzy as fuck for the first part of the day, but it was better than being fuzzy all the time.
The problem: I already sleepwalk. I'm sure it's tied to my insomnia in some way. Usually it's just waking up or 'coming to' while standing in my room, sometimes outside my room. Ambien ramped that shit up like you wouldn't believe. I started waking up outside. Still wasn't a huge issue, my folks live in a rural area with a big yard. Would just wake up with wet feet.
The last straw: I fucking woke up in my underwear, standing in the middle of the road, staring into the headlights of a stopped car, with the driver asking me if I'm ok, what happened, etc. I was half a kilometre away from my house down a poorly-lit road at 3am. No more fucking ambien.
At this point I was already well aware of how well I slept after smoking weed, but I still had it in my head that people that do well in university don't smoke weed (I was horribly, HORRIBLY wrong as I'd go on to meet other students and profs that blaze regularly), but at this point I was desperate and decided to call up my dealer for the first time since I started university.
Started smoking every night and therefore started sleeping every night.
Pulled my shit together after bombing the midterms, scored high enough on the finals to get a B average for the first semester, went on to an A average in the second semester and the rest of my undergrad. I'm now in grad school doing theoretical nanotechnology research.
Thanks to weed.
All that said, I also just want to point something out so nobody uses this as a justification to smoke weed all day, erry day in college:
Despite being a smoker of over a decade and a nightly smoker of over 5 years, I'm still completely fucking useless as far as understanding new concepts, doing homework, or working on my research while stoned. There is no way in hell I would have been able to accomplish what I have if I had been smoking weed all day, every day. Just get your damn work done and then get high.