[saiya-jin]

That's simply not true. I've dealt with hard stuff in my life (ie very long term relationship went into tough sudden breakup) with weed. It gave me a good perspective on it that holds to this day, it made me close the whole topic completely very quickly (1-2 weeks at max) in a rather pleasant way.

I've set my life priorities with help of weed. They still hold to this day. I've done some of the best decisions on direction of my life with weed. Looking back +-10 years ago, damn those were some fine decisions. Weed gives me, when alone, often semi-constant stream of very creative ideas just popping out of sub-consciousness. I've come up with ideas for startups at least 50x, often to find later somebody is already well into executing it (often in areas I normally don't touch, ie self-belaying machines for climbing, or self-shaping moving wall for climbing - I never ever saw/heard about any of those, but it seems they are quite popular in US).

The rate, amount and depth of those ideas just isn't there when sober. The rate is so high that I sometimes don't manage to record them all.

All this was done alone, just me and my emotions. YMMV, but for my introvertish personality type, it works wonders. There are drawbacks of course, like with everything else. But postponing dealing with issues is more of an alcohol style effect.

[sshine]

Okay, so I won't try to rob you of that experience. I've felt creativity and perspective when doing psychoactive drugs, too.

The rate of good ideas (or rather, the feeling of that, as it is) was called "interpretation madness" by one podcaster.

When you relate alcohol with postponing one's emotions, perhaps this is because you've seen that happen. So have I.

But I've also seen dozens of friends get stuck in their emotional (and educational) development for years because of weed.

Don't forget the hashishins - the drug is literally named after a bunch of assassins who smoked to forget.

[saiya-jin]

Yeah, that's why I mentioned YMMV. I've seen people turn aggressive on weed, but then again they were broken personalities to start with, and alcohol wasn't faring much better. I've witnessed one lady mentioning seeing blood run down the walls during whole trip. Tons of people just giggle with little additional insight. Don't know, maybe mindset thing.

It's a mind altering drug, can be quite powerful, can create (easy to shed) psychical dependence. As we say back home about fire - good servant, bad master.

[jmcqk6]

>But I've also seen dozens of friends get stuck in their emotional (and educational) development for years because of weed.

Weed has different effects on different people. Assuming that weed will have the same effect on everyone is obviously a bad assumption.

There are tons of stories about many different things (gluten, msg, sugar, caffiene, coffee, tea, ice cream, tylenol, etc. etc.) having different effects on different people. Sometimes those differences are completely perceptional, and sometimes they are physical, but the outcomes are definitively different.

It's a deep cognitive bias to ignore this fact.