double ewe
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Mar 13, 2008
- Messages
- 2,143
squirrel_master said:nope. imma hafta disagree. since smoking pot, i have had far more emotional and personal growth. i'm not stuck on all this "high school crap" in the world. trying to get the biggest car, the best house, the stylish clothes or the job at the firm. life's about enjoying it with your friends and loved ones while you can.
See, that's the thing.
In High School, it seems really enlightened not to care about those things. It feels good to say "screw all those popular kids" and "fuck materialism" and all those other things that don't matter since you can't really buy a car or a house for yourself for 5 or 10 years anyway.
But come 24, when you still don't care about your job or your car or where you live or how you dress, the acceptance of mediocrity and a lack of ambition look a lot less like the result of "emotional and personal growth."
These people talking about pot causing problems for them aren't all head-case fuck-ups who would have de-railed anyways. A lot of them are very smart, very level-headed people who took for granted that pot was so harmless you could smoke it every day. You don't mug people to support a pot habit. You don't get track marks from smoking pot. You can quit whenever, and it just messes up your sleep a little.
But the insidiousness of it is that its negative affects build up so slowly you hardly notice. As long as you're not missing work or forgetting about exams, it's easy to convince yourself it's not causing any problems. I smoked daily for about 7 years, and even though it never caused panic attacks or crippling depression, even though I developed and maintained strong and fulfilling relationships, even though I went to a great university and did well, I still fucking kick myself for all the opportunities I missed because pot made me just a little bit less motivated, a little less sociable, and a little less intelligent than I could have been.
I'm not some anti-pot crusader. I love it dearly. But the assumption that it's harmless is, frankly, the most dangerous thing about it.