Some of the comments are assuming that all those who smoke pot are irresponsible or unable to do a job if they do smoke pot (this includes people who may only smoke at weekends/parties btw)
Decades of exposure to intentionally misleading propaganda is difficult to ignore. It becomes a part of the worldview, making it hard to even think outside that box.
True. Once things become 'cultural facts' they're hard to change. Another is explaining remote work to older generations, a lot of them just can't equate it to 'real work'
Age discrimination almost certainly goes one way in these cases. That's if you're above 40, and looking to join an early stage start-up, you'll find you're often not a culture fit.
True. But some part of that propaganda is from pot smokers themselves. Some enjoy the image of the laid-back happy carefree pothead. Their cult leaders (used to be) Cheech and Chong.
Maybe they've just bought in to someone elses' worldview. But I don't think so.
There are a lot more people that do or have smoked pot, than those who base their identity on it. The cults were always a minority.
It's like the difference between a commuter on bike here in the Netherlands (more than 30% of all trips) vs the handful of cyclists in spandex with some fragile unsafe bike wanking about how light their bike is.
One is a cult, where it becomes part of someone's identity, one is just person trying to get to work.
We should have the discipline to realize that the people carrying the flag of anything are the least likely to be true representatives of the thing.
I’m willing to bet that the annoyance meme of spandex cyclists is intentionally amplified, possibly even created, by marketing agencies working for oil and car companies.
I’m also willing to bet that Cheech & Chong et al. are manifestations of a similarly forced meme, with many industries funding the various ”lazy brainless stoners”.
The exact same pattern can be found from nicotine vapes (the entire ”vape nation” annoyance meme was definitely a graft), and probably a lot of other things.
The point seems to be to control people socially by associating their habits with annoying qualities and fictional negative outcomes, superficially supported by anecdotes represented as scientific truth.
I really like this: "we should [develop] the discipline to realize that the people carrying the flag of anything are the least likely to be the true representatives of the thing."
What other examples are there? Am I one of these people in ways I don't even realize?
I would love to be eating a meal with someone who says this, and then have a really fantastic conversation spring from it: Does this help me feel out my own blind-spots better? Is this always bad? Is this always true?
As someone with a very personal relationship with marijuana, I really despise the "pothead" culture. The idea that weed makes you permanently stupid or incapable of working normally whilst sober is simply wrong.
Like everything, being responsible goes a long way. There are responsible marijuana users and irresponsible ones. Blaming it on the weed is really the lazy part of "pothead" culture.
Cheech and Chong are a couple of goofy comedians from the '70s. They are not leaders, and they don't have followers. Maybe they have fans (and are C&C still alive?)
Well no, there are serious health risk associated with weed. Maybe alcohol have them too, yes both deserve legality, but this is not to say it is "safe", especially in young.
And the last I heard, oxygen was "combustible". Inhaling a combustible isn't a health risk; inhaling combustion products might be. But many pot smokers use a vape, set to well-below the combustion temperature for their chosen herb.
Vapes have issues too, which include exposure to heavy metals. By combustibles I mean anything you burn. Again, not a doctor and not a medical scientist so I may be using the wrong words but most people who use weed know these things. Most notably, anything that is smoked will incur a small but sharp rise in blood pressure. If you wear a heart monitor (or wrist watch with one) it's fairly trivial to detect.
Absolutely, i more made reference to how when somebody mention health impact of weed somebody else say "whatabout alcohol unhealthiness" as though it is relevant.
Of course it is relevant. Many of those 95,000 annual deaths would be preventable if a good variety of quality cannabis was more widely available and its use was more socially acceptable.
I also believe such a paradigm shift would largely eradicate domestic violence.
I think you have it upside-down. It's tobacco and alcohol that have special treatment, not pot.
My main guess for that special treatment is merely that tobacco and alcohol were global when we started taking care about global health issues, so we left them, but banned any newcomer
> My main guess for that special treatment is merely that tobacco and alcohol were global when we started taking care about global health issues, so we left them, but banned any newcomer
That narrative just doesn’t hold up.
Opium, heroin and cocaine were pretty much global when we started taking care about global health issues.
Not consumed by everyone all around the world, for sure, but readily available and consumed nearly everywhere.
Heck, heroin was considered a magical cough syrup safer than morphine at one point. It took nearly 30 years for it to be banned in the US [1][2]
Compared to tobacco and alcohol, it certainly is a young one, but cannabis and hallucinogenic mushrooms hardly qualify as newcomers.
There are plenty of psychoactive substances on the shelves of any major supermarket and most of the stuff is completely unregulated.
How is coffee different from tobacco? How is nutmeg or saffron different from drugs? How about artificial flavonoid—xanthine concoctions such as Red Bull?
And I don't know if companies do it but I know that monitoring Gamma GT levels of suspected alcoholics is a thing. It is a problem for those who have naturally elevated levels btw.
What is unfortunate is that we don't have a good test for cannabis-related impairment. It is quite reliable for alcohol BAC is easy to test and correlates with impairment, but for cannabis, you don't really know if a person is completely stoned or if he has sobered up.
But yeah, cannabis use is less tolerated than alcohol use, cultural reasons I guess. Plus, it is really difficult to control alcohol since pretty much anyone can turn staple food into alcohol at home.
Yeah, I tried to cover that with "past use". They care if you're drunk at work. Which is different from pot, where many workplaces care if you're high at home.
Alcohol is one of the most highly regulated substances on the planet.
Also, no puritanism here, just facts about how people can use pot and remain completely in control (again, worth pointing out that someone can fail a pot drug test if they smoked it weeks ago)
Meaning most people can drink alcohol without fear of being tested for past use in a work context. We don't regulate it in the workplace the way we regulate pot use.
Marijuana does stick around a long time, but they test for other stuff that doesn't, some benzos, heroin, etc. There's apparently something called an ETG test for alcohol consumption that can reach back a few days.
You don't get a DUI just for being drunk on the couch on the weekend, you have to also be operating a vehicle while drunk. Which is what the parent comment was talking about -- it's not regulated in the same way that pot usage is.
And also clearly have never been high enough to realize that they are more likely to be super paranoid and going 10 miles under the speed limit than driving through a fence or running over children. It’s not at all comparable to being drunk.
Driving high is still driving impaired. The failure modes may be different, but that doesn't mean someone who is high is safe to drive.
I'm not sure what the point of your comment is though, as I don't think anyone is suggesting that these drivers will actually be high while driving. Rather, they are people that use marijuana recreationally and would test positive for THC, disqualifying them from many jobs (despite the fact that urine THC levels do not corelate with how "high" someone is).
You're hyper vigilant, looking everywhere, your reactions are delayed a little such as that of an 60 year old person, and you're definitely listening to speed "limit" as the maximum, and not as the average.
As an avid marijuana user here, no, this is not the narrative that should be spread. As others have said, weed makes you incredibly impaired, just in other ways.
You are slower to process inputs, you are less likely to consider threats or obstacles as dangerous, to an extent your ability to judge distances is hindered, you are much more easily distracted (highway hypnosis, for example, becomes a huge problem - especially with blinking lights and whatnot), your ability to focus is oftentimes next to zero, causing you to be distracted often by music or other passengers in the car.
Plus, driving slowly in and of itself is a hazard - the "speed rule" exists for a reason. If everyone is going 30 mph over the speed limit on a busy highway, you are more likely to cause an accident by going the posted speed limit than if you were to go the same speed as the rest of the traffic - even though it's technically illegal.
So please, do not use marijuana and drive. Stay at home and watch Money Heist and postmates a McFlurry from McDonalds or something.
None of the states I've ever been, over the thousands of times I have partaken, with the maybe hundred different strains, with different percentages of indica/sativa, at different dosages, in different forms (flower vs. edible vs. whatever else), have ever been safe for me to operate a vehicle.
No, nobody is an exception. You are not superhuman.
Please stop normalizing this. This narrative makes it harder to change the minds of dissenters and legitimize legalization for those people that actually benefit from it.
It's easy to get distracted and then focus on that distraction while high. That's not conducive to safe driving. We don't want people mindlessly blowing through an intersection because they were fixating on how the wind was making the tarp on the truck in front of them flutter.
No, please. I've seen high driving first hand several times. Once after the guy literally told me "it doesn't affect me at all". Proceeded to drive over the kerb and get into the wrong lane.
It is very comparable to being drunk. Some people can in fact handle it, many cannot and severely overestimate their abilities.
tbf it's possible he was just a crap driver. Either way, while I would never recommend it, I think it is misleading to call it "very comparable". Anecdotally I would say that cannabis impairs quick decision making, and reaction time while driving, and possibly also makes the driver more prone to distraction but I am less sure about that one. Alcohol does both of the first two things, and to a much greater extent, while also obliterating fine motor control, as well as impacting judgement and perception of speed among other things.
So in my completely anecdotal opinion, weed bad, alcohol worse were driving is concerned.
That’s bullshit. Someone rolled their car into my front garden at 70+ mph in a 30 mph limit on it.
The only good thing was it was at 3AM so there was no one around on a normally busy street to get wiped out.
And your whole attitude of irrational justification of it says you’re probably not capable of making a rational judgement about whether or not you should drive.
This is an interesting subject. Most people would be pretty worried about a drunk 747 pilot, and want laws and policies to prevent that from happening. A high delivery driver -- better, but a lot of people still don't like that idea. But tired commuters on the road at 6:30am is acceptable.
Could be better informed by numbers here. But hard to say because there aren't reliable tests for "high right now", and maybe not for "tired" either.
Some of the smartest people I have worked with smoked pot daily and before work. one is a head of engineering at netflix, another a head of IT at a big firm...
some of the highest performers I have ever worked with, and pot was a daily for them.
And many top politicians, business executives, authors, producers, and musicians were alcoholics. Your claim of having met high performing pot smokers is meaningless.
i think for a small % pot will have a positive impact, but in general there is a reason it is considered a recreational drug. If you put 1000 linux kernel developers in a stadium, do they do better work sober, or if the stadium is hotboxed with some exotic kush. (maybe 5%, 10% see gains... but does the majority receive buffs to their concentration, analytical skills and memory?)
Maybe the question has a different outcome if you're measuring a stadium full of Designers with Adobe Illustrator open, trying to brainstorm how a logo looks?
A larger portion of them are from experience of hiring and being around people who smoke it. I would not employ someone who does because of those people. I have horror stories a mile long.
I know this is unpopular on internet news sites but I assure you that your social reputation isn’t that great if you smoke the stuff generally and that’s not going to change because of the propensity of people to be unreliable or dicks. The only thing that’s faulty is your perception of it.
Hmm. This is a tough one. Do you think those people come off unreliable because they use cannabis, or would it be more likely that they, for example, suffer from a(n undiagnosed) medical condition such as PTSD or ADHD, which tend to make them a bit unreliable at times, but which cannabis treats so that the person is in fact more reliable when constantly high?
I knew some of them before they started using it. It’s almost entirely the cannabis. Including the dude now in psychiatric care after it kicked his schizophrenia hard.
Everyone was promoted it as harmless. It’s not. I’m seeing lives wrecked.
And yes I know alcohol is bad. But I see less long term damage from that as most people seem to grow out of alcoholism I have know. Cannabis not so much - it becomes the primary thing they live for and around. All conversation ends up on it.
I think your viewpoint might be biased — do you know any people who haven’t had their lives wrecked because of cannabis?
Is cannabis legal where you live? Criminality causes stress and paranoia.
Are you living in a heavily Christian environment? Asking because in heavily religious environments, schizophrenia with religious illusions often occurs as a result of internal conflict between sin-programming and self-perception.
Is cannabis socially accepted or are people forced to choose between cannabis and other people? Social exclusion has in some studies been ranked more stressful than getting raped, so some sort of social PTSD can be expected to develop in these kind of environments to those who get excluded.
I am in my late 40s. Most of the proponents are a lot younger. They haven’t seen the impact it has on them until they get older. That’s not bias.
As for other points I’m an atheist with zero religious values at all. I have used it myself as well. And I’m in a country in a city where no one gives a crap. I’m about as unbiased as you can get.
As for sins, I’m a pretty big fan of them as whole.
The issue here is with the perception that it is harmless which it is definitely not.
I'm in my mid-sixties (and I'm not a proponent - I would never propound the recreational use of any drug). Maybe I'm not old enough to observe the effects you are referring to. But frankly I think this is arse-over-tit: I think it's young people, with little experience, that are most likely to be harmed by pot. Young people are more likely than older people to experience schizo for the first time; such people are less likely to be cautious in their use of pot. If you're over 40, and you've been using it since your teens, then I don't think you're likely to get many surprises from pot.
I did get a hypotension episode a few years ago, as a result of starting a new strain a bit over-enthusiastically. But even coffee can cause palpitations, if you drink too much just because you like drinking coffee.
My understanding is that certain high-THC strains are much more likely to give rise to psychological problems than other strains. I'm not aware that CBD as such can result in psychological problems.
Do something that alters your baseline consciousness long enough and it becomes your baseline. Doing anything over a long period of time with regularity will change you.
You have definitely met pot smokers who have, and do live perfectly normal lives because their baseline is better. You probably have no idea who they are.
Pot doesn't agree with schizophrenia. We've known that for a long time. It can certainly trigger an episode.
On the other hand, my experience is that many people with bipolar find it improves their mood.
If you have psychiatric difficulties, then it's not a good idea to mess with drugs that are in any way psychedelic. If you have problems with hypertension, it's not a good idea to mess with caffeine or cocaine.
Yes there are but they probably aren't very high, they're most likely toking as in slightly buzzed if we were comparing it alcohol. I guess you'd notice drunk people and you'd notice very high pot smokers. But would you mind a coworker having a glass of wine for lunch?
There are long term pot smokers whose intake is very large but whose tolerance has risen such that when they consume they're quite functional. They are usually easy to spot though...