Carl Sagan: Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? ... I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent.
You're repeating something you've been indoctrinated to believe, that you haven't given any thought to, so yes it's going to be difficult to convince you and others like you otherwise.
Like anything you can overdo it. I regret smoking so much in my youth. I also regret drinking so much, and eating so much pizza and chocolate, and spending all day surfing (the web, sadly, not the waves). I was doing all those things before I became old enough to buy cannabis (although cannabis did exaggerate them somewhat).
It does seem like the cannabis had a negative effect on my memory and emotional stability (I was high basically the entire day for several years while my brain was still developing). And many of my worst paranoid delusions ever have been on uncomfortably high doses of cannabis. But so have some of the most beautiful and dare I say spiritual experiences of my life, and I wouldn't take those back.
I do wish I'd waited until I was older though, and in a better place emotionally (I was using it as a painkiller, if you will.)
All things considered though, I'm a much bigger fan of psilocybin and LSD. Rather than worsening my addictions they made me quit a lot of unhealthy things I was doing. I also found microdosing to be very beneficial.
For comparison, you can conduct a business meeting on a small dose of LSD and find that it actually helps you pay attention and think clearly, while even small doses of cannabis will interfere with something as trivial as a trip to the corner store.
Everyone knows it's a drug. It also has a handful of applications in medicine, but so do a lot of drugs. Doesn't mean it's for everyone. As a recreational drug, the societal and personal harm associated with consuming marijuana is rather low. And nobody with any integrity is acting as though smoking something isn't bad for your lungs.
Weed has already thoroughly permeated society, no use trying to turn back the clock there. We should just stop arresting people for it and stop making it so you have to take unnecessary risks to get it.
A headier pot certainly makes my mind sharper. Now, a pot with a heavy body load, that's more of the stereotypical "lazy stoner". But to say "nobody ever got smarter from smoking...weed" is kind of short-sighted.
I don't think that's it, either. I think it's that the word "ganja", in United States parlance, is sort of puerile and gets uttered ironically more than it does unironically. I think that most of us not caring about weed anymore is what makes the oblique reference to it kind of passe and eye-rolly.
On the one hand you're somewhat right: there are certainly many of those who fear marijuana with the only reason being that it is among "the drugs"; but is marijuana abuse not the greater issue of the two? Certainly you can agree that inhaling any smoke is bad for the lungs, for a start?
