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A lot of my friends just recently started smoking weed on the odd occasion, usually with me. I've been smoking daily whenever I could afford to for coming up on two years now. So when they ask me what the dangers are, well, I tell them "there aren't any". Not from one joint. I mean, if I'm passing around a pipe, and someone's there who's never smoked, and he says "I'm not sure -- what dangers are there?" I'd say, "none; you might get cottonmouth and when you burn out in one to two hours you'll feel pretty ratty for a little while but it passes."
On the other hand, pot definitely has deleterious effects that build up with long-term use. I find that the times when I have the most weed around are when I feel the most creative and verbose, but I also get depressed more often, I have trouble sleeping if I don't smoke before bed, my short-term memory is slightly less efficacious, and of course my tolerance goes way up and I have to smoke more to get the same effects. When I've been smoking every day for a really long time, it stops working "the way it used to", and some of the effects I seek start to drop off while the ones I dislike pile up. But that goes away if I put the reefer aside for a week or two. (As a side note, I've read that taking melatonin supplements is supposed to arrest and even reverse these accretive negative effects, the memory problems, tolerance and all.)
People say using weed for a long time makes you "stupid". Well, it's never made me feel stupid per se. I look at stuff I've written while in a period of heavy use and it doesn't seem any better or worse than stuff I've written during periods when I didn't have any drugs at all. I don't believe I've suffered any long-term effects to my mentation since I started smoking. My experience with weed's negative effects is that they build up very slowly over a long time and go away when you back off. It's a forgiving plant but, you know, everything in moderation.
Weed has never made me say or do anything I regretted later by way of suppressing my inhibitions (like alcohol does). It's never made me pass out or fall over or put myself or anyone else in danger. Most people I know are comfortable and apparently safe when driving on cannabis but the common view is that you shouldn't drive while on anything that changes your perception at all, which pot certainly does. So there are a couple of schools of thought on weed and driving.
But essentially, to reiterate, if the newbie asked me if weed was dangerous I would say "no." Although for his sake on a more personal (slash psychedelic slash psychic) level I would take a little while to explain just what it's like to be high, what effects he can expect and so on. A few of my friends have got high with me for the first time in their lives and told me, wide-eyed, "it can't be this way for everyone. It can't. If this happened to everyone I would have heard about it by now. Wouldn't I? Wouldn't someone have told me about it? Wouldn't everyone do it?" I replied, "well, who told you it wasn't any fun to get high?" "No-one," he said. So they had told him. But as is always the case, you have to do it to get it.
Phoo. |
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