Weed Makes You Scared — Tyler Perry crying meme captioned 'Wen u get so high u start getting scared'

Weed Makes You Scared

2014catchphraseclassic

Published November 4, 2026

Weed Makes You Scared, also known as When You Get So High You Start Getting Scared, is a catchphrase meme pairing photos of crying celebrities with Impact-font admissions that cannabis causes paranoia instead of relaxation. Facebook user Dj Sliink first captioned a crying Oprah guest with the line on March 30, 20141. By August 2021, the joke had shed the image macro entirely, with @bitchrespecter's plain-text tweet "the best part about smoking weed is getting scared" collecting roughly 116,000 likes5.

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Overview

Typical posts stack a top caption "When You Get So High" over a bottom caption "You Start Getting Scared" in white Impact font, overlaying faces mid-cry. Oprah guests1, LeBron James in tears after a loss2, Ellen DeGeneres3, and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris4 have all served as the weeping subject. The joke flips the party-drug stereotype, owning up to full-body paranoia and racing thoughts as the actual high.

Variants stretch the setup or ditch the picture entirely for tweet-form confessions, like @rrinconn's "I've got 99 problems and smoking weed and then getting scared is one of them"7. A separate strain skips the catchphrase and goes blunter about cannabis's downsides, as with Instagram page @da_jekyll's November 2020 edit of a skeleton smoking a bong captioned "Fuck Yeah I Love To Get / Paranoid And Waste My Money"8.

Origin & Background

Platform
Facebook (origin) / Twitter (viral spread)
Creator
Dj Sliink
Date
2014

Facebook user Dj Sliink posted the earliest known version on March 30, 2014, placing the caption "Wen U Get So High / U Start Getting Scared" in Impact font over a photo of a Black man crying on The Oprah Winfrey Show1. Dj Sliink's upload collected roughly 461,000 likes across the next seven years6. Pop culture had linked marijuana and anxiety for decades before this edit, but his wording gave the joke a fixed template later memes would reuse.

How It Spread

In 2015, Imgflip user FreakKingJuice reworked the format with a photo of LeBron James crying, labeling it "When You Smoke Weed For The First Time / And You Get So High You Start Getting Scared"2. That upload drew only about 33,100 views and three upvotes across six years, suggesting the catchphrase stayed niche through the mid-2010s.

Twitter brought the line back on August 5, 2020, when @HollieRotten tweeted an Ellen DeGeneres crying edit using the same two-line caption, earning roughly 41,000 likes and 5,756 retweets3. Instagram picked up the format that November when @heterogeneousgreens0 slapped the caption on a photo of Kamala Harris on November 204, and account @this.and.a.blunt reposted a version on December 28, 202010.

The joke went text-only in 2021. @rrinconn tweeted the "99 problems" variant on January 17, 20217, and @bitchrespecter's August 8 tweet "the best part about smoking weed is getting scared" collected around 116,000 likes and 11,200 retweets5. A September 28 plagiarized repost by @onmercnem brought in another 49,200 likes and 5,300 retweets regardless of its lifted wording9.

Timeline

2014-03-30

Facebook user Dj Sliink captions a crying Oprah guest with "Wen U Get So High / U Start Getting Scared," establishing the catchphrase.

2015

Imgflip user FreakKingJuice reworks the format with LeBron James crying and the expanded first-time-smoker caption.

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