[Kon5ole]

American media has really been shockingly pro weed/cannabis for the past 20 or so years. Really astounding to witness considering the well known downsides to human health and cognitive function. Main characters smoke weed as a cool disobedience, in sitcoms even.

Wonder what is behind it, from my perspective it's quite remarkable.

[cj]

I think it became socially acceptable because there’s not a huge reason to hate on it.

The risks to cognition and health exist, but they’re no where near as bad as alcohol or cigarettes (and the negative effects basically don’t exist at low, even moderate doses)

The biggest negative effect of using weed regularly is it seems to slowly kill people’s motivation to do stuff over time. It will turn just about anyone into a couch potato. That’s more dangerous than any other effect IMO.

[Kon5ole]

>I think it became socially acceptable because there’s not a huge reason to hate on it.

That may be but I see no reason to encourage it either, which is what I feel is happening.

[quietsegfault]

Where are you seeing it be encouraged any more than other harmful things? My US state despite legalizing has a lot of programs to tell people not to use it.

[anon84873628]

Because the Schedule 1 prohibition was ridiculous. This is the cultural pendulum swing to normalize it and push legalization.

[t-writescode]

The DARE program just had to tell the truth, but they didn’t and it made everyone question how bad everything really was, if pot wasn’t a problem.

Full agree here. Unfortunately, history is what clarifies why pot is SO HUGE now rather than being something indifferent about, like it should be.

[ecshafer]

Since the 1960s and the emergence of the New Left, and the introduction of the Frankfurt School and 60s post modernism into academia, there has been a widespread belief amongst a large segment of the population that everything traditional is wrong. A social stigma is merely ignorance, that which is seen as bad is actually good, traditions are wrong. All of these things need to be overturned for the enlightenment. Since society deemed marijuana bad, it is therefore good. As those people who were went through that indoctrination in the 60s as students got older, they got into power. They took power in universities. By the 90s they were pushing all of the ideas as the status quo. Students in the 90s then took those ideas, and when they got into power in Media, they pushed those ideas into all movies and tv.

[Loughla]

Alternate theory: there's a shit load of money to be made with legal marijuana so it will be mainstream just to ensure those paychecks keep coming. And for media, it's a low hanging trope that if you want your character to seen edgy but not dangerous, you have them do safe drugs like marijuana. It's easier than the weeks of story it would take to let the audience know they're just slightly anti establishment.

I'm not sure I buy your theory even a little, to be honest. The children of the 60's have, by and large, gotten FAR more conservative as they've gotten older.

[jdejean]

What an intellectually bankrupt take; Extremely convincing until you realize less than 50% of people in the 60s even finished high school, and less than 8% of them even attempted post secondary education. Rejection of traditional values post 95 is attributable to any number of side effects of humans participating in the internet. We realized the scale of antiquated regulation. Something the “traditional media” would’ve never bothered to cover. This post is about weed not some soap box for your silent generation tears.

[thrance]

No sources, pure bullshit. This is a common right-wing conspiracy theory: just throwing words like "Frankfurt school" or "post-modernism" without understanding them, accusing "the Left" (with a capital L, as if it was a secret cabal) of orchestrating a decades-spanning Grand Plan to indoctrinate children, etc. Insanity.

Also makes me laugh whenever I see right wingers accuse the left of post-modernism, when Trump is the most post-modernist guy I know. The man literally never says the truth: according to him, we destroyed 100% of Iran's armament [1], Iran were the ones to strike their own girls school and oil prices are as low as ever.

[1] https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1162279041433...

[AreShoesFeet000]

This assumes that culture and academia work hand in hand, which is just in line with many right-wing conspiracies and plain wrong.

[mjmsmith]

Students in the 90s had also lived their entire lives under the counter-productive and utterly racist War on Drugs. That might have colored their attitude more than the leftist indoctrination bogeyman.

[XorNot]

The college indoctrination boogieman exists because it is coincidentally the first time in their lives a lot of people live away from their parents fulltime.

How much your opinions change once you're not in that environment can be amazing to both yourself and to the people who think they understand you because you were financially dependent on them.

New ideas or diversity or whatever: living by yourself 24/7 is a huge liberator of thought.

[themafia]

People were smoking weed even when it was socially unacceptable and illegal. Then they were going to jail for a decade or more because of it. This simply did not make any sense. I believe most of this is a backlash effect.

Weed was the worst thing ever. Weed is the best thing ever. Eventually weed will be in the same category as coffee.

[XorNot]

I'd be real happy if we landed on "edibles" and not smoking though.

Just about all drugs would benefit from people doing the unobtrusively.

[GorbachevyChase]

I think there’s probably some adjacency to other things which make people feel good, but are ultimately bad for them. Gambling, alcohol, porn, infinite scroll social media. There are a few people making a ton of money on this stuff and the social costs aren’t something they care about.

[blackqueeriroh]

Lol pornography is not fundamentally bad for people. This remains the weirdest widespread take on HN

[rozhok]

It is: https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/

[GorbachevyChase]

Frying the reward centers in your brain on anything can create unhealthy dependencies. That some people may see it as a good for social engineering purposes is orthogonal to its effect on consumers.

[tombert]

I am not sure I'd say I'm "against" it since broadly speaking I don't think it should be illegal, but I am against it in the sense that I really think that absolutely no one should be smoking weed. It's kind of an unearned opinion; I don't know anything about medicine or health or anything like that, but I hated what it would seemingly do to my friends in high school.

I'd have friends that would be more or less down to earth, start smoking weed, then start finding and watching videos of Alan Watts and Carl Sagan and convince themselves that they knew everything in the world about physics and philosophy, and they became utterly insufferable in the process, and whenever anything negative about weed was ever said, they would provide me a lecture about how weed is a cure to pretty much everything and how no one has ever had a negative effect from it ever in history.

I think there's been a huge over correction; there was so much bullshit about the dangers of weed that people started acting like it's some miraculous cure-all and ignoring actual issues.

This was such a visceral turn-off for me that I to this day have never used weed, and the idea of using it still kind of makes me viscerally annoyed. It's entirely possible that my friends were insufferable teenagers purely because teenagers can be insufferable, and that's not even unlikely, but the way I remember it is the weed making them annoying it. Not saying it's rational, just that memory and human brains are weird.

[dfedbeef]

Probably because almost everyone has done it and it's fun.

[AngryData]

Maybe because like 65% of the nation is in favor of legalization and a huge chunk of the nation has been smoking weed for 70+ years without crisis?

[zug_zug]

> American media has really been shockingly pro weed/cannabis for the past 20 or so years

Really? I think the opposite is true.

Given 1/6 adults admit to using it, I think it's totally underrepresented in media -- in theory 1/6 characters would be using it.

It's only very recently that I see characters who just casually say something like "I take a gummy for a long flight" or whatever, rather than be a stereotypical comedic stoner character.

I feel like really it's alcohol that's glamorized in the media, and before that it was smoking.

[Kon5ole]

>Given 1/6 adults admit to using it

That seems high to me. (sorry) ;-)

Seriously though, by the time I was 15 several of my classmates were drunk most weekends and smoked cigarettes regularly, but even decades later I have still never seen or heard of anyone I know smoking weed. That's why it sticks out so much to me.

If 1/6 is true it would be interesting to see how it has changed over the past say 20 years or so.

I think cigarettes and alcohol were established vices when media became a thing so media can be semi-excused from those. It would be interesting to know if the same is true for weed. Has it just gotten so common that media has to show it to be realistic, or did it get more common after media started to show it?

Cigarette smoking is an interesting counterexample, it has been extremely de-glamorized since the heydays and sales of cigarettes have halved since 2000.