Happy 4/20, San Francisco — the unofficial holiday of our fair city, where the smell of weed is basically municipal perfume and dispensaries outnumber Starbucks in certain zip codes.

So here's a confession: I used to be a stoner. A real one. Not a "hit a vape pen at a concert once" stoner, but the kind who could tell you the difference between a sativa and an indica by smell alone, who had a favorite rolling paper brand, and who genuinely believed that a 45-minute conversation about the nature of time was peak intellectual discourse.

And then I stopped.

Not because the government told me to — frankly, if the government told me to stop breathing, I'd want a second opinion. I stopped because I realized I was trading ambition for apathy, one session at a time. The couch got more comfortable. The goals got fuzzier. The weekends started bleeding into Mondays, and Mondays started feeling like something that happened to other people.

Look, I'm not here to moralize. This is San Francisco. Adults should be free to make their own choices about what they put in their bodies — that's a core liberty issue, and I'll defend legalization any day of the week. The War on Drugs was an expensive, authoritarian catastrophe that destroyed more lives than it saved, and California was right to end it.

But freedom includes the freedom to be honest. And honestly? The culture around weed — especially in this city — has zero room for the conversation about when recreational use quietly becomes a crutch. We celebrate it, brand it, tax it (oh boy, do we tax it), and sell it as self-care. What we don't do is talk about the version of yourself you might be shelving every time you light up.

I'm not anti-weed. I'm pro-you-at-your-sharpest. There's a difference.

So today, while half the city hotboxes Golden Gate Park, I'll be the guy with the black coffee and a clear head — not because I think I'm better, but because I finally realized I was borrowing happiness from tomorrow.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em. Just know what it's costing you.