A joint or a spliff?

First of all, if using everyday weed language makes you want to cringe a little, you’ve still got a long way to go. This is a stage that every pot smoker in the world has to go through at the beginning of their journey, though lasts a lot longer for some than others. If the sound of your own voice saying ‘Man I’d kill for a blunt’ really does make you want to crawl into a hole and die, pothead status you most certainly haven’t got. It’s not like you have to exclusively use every single cliché imaginable at all times, but if you still feel a little silly and contrived when talking about pot, there’s work to be done. Likewise, talking about pot just for the sake of it rather than it coming out in conversation naturally is also a sign of noob territory.

You Celebrate 420

420

Now, this is bound to stir up a great deal of controversy, given the fact that hundreds of thousands of stoners make a very big deal of 4/20. The thing is though, if you’re a genuine pothead of professional status, 4/20 will not actually have meant a great deal to you, and for two very good reasons. First of all, you wouldn’t have really given a damn about the law prior to 4/20 anyway, having quite easily managed to get hold of as much weed to smoke where you want, when you want and how you want. In addition, the fact that you’ll have been smoking weed every single day for as long as you can remember means that 4/20 really is just another average day. You’re happy it makes other people happy, but it just doesn’t have the same significance for you. If anything, the fact that it brings so many charlatans out of the woodwork for one day annoys you quite a bit.

You Plan To Smoke Way In Advance

Plan to smoke in advance

To be frank, actually planning to get stoned in advance automatically removes you form the professional pothead bracket. The reason being that if you are in a position where you are planning to get high, this clearly means you’re not high right now. Not only this, but planning ahead to get stoned is something seasoned potheads don’t do because they simple don’t have to. It would be a little like an everyday individual planning three days in advance that they were going to have a cup of tea…or maybe a sandwich. These things aren’t planned – they just ‘happen’ because they are a part of your life. And if weed isn’t a part of your life…as in your everyday life…you can’t call yourself a pothead.

You Wear Hippie-Chic to Music Festivals

 At the risk of stereotyping and causing a kerfuffle, those who go out of their way to look like hippie-hairy-fairy stoners when out in public are usually nothing of the sort. If you’re a seasoned stoner, the only thing that matters to you is doing what you do – not what it looks like in front of other people. In fact, it’s pretty likely that you’d actually prefer not to draw unnecessary attention to yourself, keeping what you’re doing nicely concealed in the background. Flower headbands, tie-dye, the full John Lennon-wannabe get up – any and all of these things qualify you more for charlatan territory than pro pothead. That being said, if it makes you happy, go for it!

You Get Wicked Munchies All the Time

Wicked Munchies

When you think about it, if a habitual pothead got the munchies like a regular stoner, they’d be eating themselves into oblivion all the damn time. Seriously – can you imagine having the wicked munchies on a near-24/7 basis and actually surviving? Of course not, which is why this is another tell-tale sign of a pothead that’s not actually a pro pothead just yet. Rookie smokers will in most instances have a pretty heavy smoking session and find themselves giving genuine thought to eating their own friends…as long as there’s BBQ sauce available. By contrast, seasoned potheads are somewhat immune to the munchies – largely because they have to be. They might occasionally go nuts after a super-heavy session, but this doesn’t happen very often.

Celebrity Cannabis Instagrams Have an Effect on You

Rhiannna smoking a spliff

If you’re the social media type, you’ll no doubt have come across thousands of images of celebrities and famous faces clearly flaunting the fact that they’re smoking pot. Which is fair enough…they can do whatever the hell they want. As far as pro potheads are concerned, this has about the same impact as flipping over to a photo of a yet another pug wearing a tie. They have no thoughts, no emotions and better things to do than even reaction to celebs smoking pot. As for rookies and up-and-comers, these guys are far more likely to react in some way. “Ooh, he’s smoking pot so it must be cool.” “I hate these fakers trying to look cool by smoking joints.” “Man, these guys are setting a good/bad example right now.” The simple fact of the matter is that if you give a s**t, you shouldn’t…so stop it!

You Don’t Have a List of Top Strains

You simply cannot call yourself a seasoned stoner until you have reached a point where you’ve compiled a list (to memory) of your very favourite strains. And not only this, but you can recognise them in an instant and can justify exactly what it is that’s awesome about them. As for amateurs, they’ll usually just tell you they prefer Indica or Sativa, or vice-versa. That, or they’ll reel off the strains even a non-cannabis-user will probably know by heart – Purple Haze, White Wide, Super Skunk etc. To be a pothead is to be a connoisseur of relentless passion and knowledge.

You Still Occasionally Weird-Out

A joint of serious proportions

It goes without saying that every pot smoker on Earth has at some time in their ‘career’ gone well and truly over the top and ended up in a world of weird. Some suddenly become strangely authoritative, others ride massive waves of paranoia and then there are those that seem to have their personalities extracted and replaced with…well, nothing really. It’s all part of the experience when getting used to weed and learning your own tolerance levels. But if you’ve been smoking weed for a while now and this still happens from time to time, you can’t call yourself a pro pothead. When you become a pro, this just doesn’t happen anymore a) because you’d need to get massively carried away and b) because you know how to make sure you don’t.

You Never Lose Your Equipment

Lost equipment

If you actually added up all the time the average pro pothead spends looking for lost lighters and other gear in the space of a year, you might well be looking at weeks. A staple for stoners at the highest level is habitually not being able to find jack, even if what you’re looking for it right there on the arm of the couch next to you…or in your pocket. The same also goes for breakages – pipes, ash trays, vape pens and so on – routinely broken and not worthy of a second thought. Which means that if you never seem to lose or break your equipment, chances are you’re not hitting it hard enough!

You Run Out of Weed

Run out of weed? Not with this bud you won’t.

Last but not least, running out of weed at any time and for any reason represents just about the single most telling characteristic of a non-seasoned stoner. For the pro pothead, it would be a little like facing the prospect of running out of air – something they are clearly not going to allow to happen. Running low is one thing, but if you ever find yourself literally 100% out of weed for even a few hours, you’re nowhere near pro pothead territory yet.