From Plastic Bongs to Harm Reduction
A personal story about learning the hard way, and what changed.
Written by Daniel Robinson Croft. Originally written 2025. Updated October 2026.
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I’m all about harm reduction these days, but it wasn’t always that way. I can still picture my friends and me smoking out of homemade Gatorade billies, with pipe hose for stems and tin foil for cone pieces.
This is the story of how I got from there to building Let’s Budvocate. It isn’t a story about quitting, and it isn’t a cautionary tale. It’s about what happens when young people consume cannabis without any real information, and what changed for me when I finally got some.
Working it out alone
The official messages I grew up with, from Healthy Harold to anti-drug websites, mostly told me cannabis would ruin my life. The online forums I found were more honest, but good advice sat right next to bad advice, and at that age I couldn’t always tell which was which. I’d come across harm reduction online too, but it all seemed to be about pill testing and festivals.
With cannabis being illegal, and all the stigma around it, it meant I kept my consumption hidden. Asking a parent or a teacher didn’t feel like an option. So my friends and I worked it out ourselves, and for all I knew, homemade bongs were just the most effective way to consume.
I don’t look back on that teenager as stupid. He was doing what made sense with what he had. The problem was what he didn’t have.
When it stopped working for me
After I left school in Year 12, most of my days looked the same: cones mixed with tobacco, lying in bed, watching whatever was on. Cannabis eased a lot of what I was going through with my mental health. My friends all consumed too, so if one of us was short, someone else chipped in. When I did run out, everything I’d been holding off came back hard.
A few years of that built up a tolerance I couldn’t afford, and I started asking whether the way I was consuming was still working for me. I was then referred to a youth alcohol and other drug service.
Getting support
I walked in expecting to be told to quit and pointed towards a 12-step program. Instead, my case worker asked what I wanted to get out of our sessions. Cannabis was genuinely helping with my mental health, so we built my support around me having control of my consumption, rather than my consumption having control of me.
During a stay in a residential detox, I learned practical harm reduction strategies for cannabis for the first time. When I started consuming again, I put them into practice, and both my mood and my relationship with cannabis improved.
Finding my way into the work
Those experiences made me want to do this work myself. I started studying mental health and volunteering with a youth AOD service, and a few years later began working in Victoria’s alcohol and other drug sector, supporting young people and bringing lived experience into the services they access.
In Australia, cannabis is the most common principal drug of concern for 10 to 19 year olds in AOD treatment, at 60% of clients in 2023-24. That tells me a lot of young people are still working it out on their own, the way I did, with forums, guesswork and homemade gear.
Why Buducation exists
That’s a big part of why I built Buducation. It’s the practical, non-judgemental cannabis information I wish I’d had as a teenager: how different consumption methods work, what can go wrong, and how to look after yourself, whatever you decide about your consumption.
If you or someone you know wants to understand cannabis better, or build a relationship with it that works for you, Buducation is free and a good place to start. If you’re thinking about cutting back, the Cutback Pack can help with that. If you’re not, that’s fine too.
