Posted by 
Marijuana has been described as a ‘gateway drug,’ as if that is the essence of its danger. That is not the case. I submit that legal marijuana is far more dangerous than many of the illegal drugs to which people become addicted. I speak of this as an insider.
Since the legalization of access to the various forms of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in cannabis sativa and cannabis indica — you know, marijuana) it has become quite the obsession for many, especially among the young. It’s not only legal, it’s downright fashionable. The drug, in its smokable and increasingly popular edible formats, is said to be largely benign. This is not the case.
If you decide to become a heroin addict, you pretty much know what you’re getting yourself into. But reefer? Almost never does the user anticipate the consequences and that is where the danger lies. It is the insidious nature of the spirit of cannabis that makes it so incredibly treacherous.
I want to make a quick and clear distinction between the type of person who gets up in the morning and has a joint with their coffee or pops an ‘edible’ of some kind to start the day — and the person who has the odd toke on a weekend night. They are two different species. Just as a lush who wakes in the morning with the shakes and needs a drink is not to be compared to one who enjoys a drink before dinner.
The latter knows moderation, a blessed and hard-to-obtain mindset (also known as ‘maturity’) that allows us to sample almost all of the world’s offerings with pleasure and a minimum of recoil misery. The former lives to get high. The problem with this can be found in Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Thermodynamics which states that For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
I started smoking when I was 16. Many of the cool hip Catholic high schoolers indulged. I continued to smoke heavily and daily for many years, tapered off when I was about 30, and from 40 on I used only occasionally. When I was a lad (I’m 67 now) I believed that the height of social injustice was the fact that pot was illegal. A friend and I were busted in a parking lot with a small stash, but the ‘crime scene,’ replete with half a dozen squad cars and many angry and unpleasant policemen, gave the impression that we must have been the reefer kings of the Midwest. We were jailed for the day and paid fines up the wazoo by the time the court case cleared. Though my views on pot have changed, I still think that was quite an unnecessary overreaction.
I am a content provider. I have novels, short stories, a book on Classical Music, many recordings of my piano recitals, ambient electronic music, instrumental music and songs. I also publish several other authors at www.DreamStreetPress.com. Almost all of these works of mine were written and produced from my late-40s to the present. Before this, I was heavy, as I said, into the marijuana lifestyle, a true ‘Brother of the Weed.’ I got high and had cool ideas, man! I planned to do this and that awesome project. But the truth, which I never looked at hard in the face, was that I sat around on my ass and got buzzed with my other ‘brothers,’ and all the while the reefer assured us all that everything was cooooollll baby.
Killing the monkey on one’s back ain’t easy. Heavy users discover upon quitting the habit that all of their sense of joy was tied up in their addiction. The loss of joy, the drudgery of living without the buzz causes many to light up or pop the candy again. For joylessness is a true horror. And it takes a while for joy to return, sometimes months. (See Newton’s 3rd Law again.) The climb back into reality is terribly difficult, but the light at the end of the tunnel is not only the return of the possibility of joy, but a rejuvenation of the personality, the soul, that can open floodgates of creativity and achievement in any arena.
THC addicts — heavy users of pot and edibles — live in a literal dreamworld. They might notice how they rarely dream when they sleep. That’s because they dream while they are awake. One’s willpower gradually decays until even the desire for accomplishment fades away as the years pass with the soul and its development calcified in stasis.
And all while their willpower is being destroyed, the spirit of cannabis is whispering in their ear that everything is cool, man!
It’s legal in many states now, and that situation doesn’t thrill me as much as I had hoped it would when I was a young doper. Legalizing drugs, especially marijuana and the various THC extractions, is part of the moral decay we see around us. Why does the government allow it now? Do you think it’s because they are concerned with your civil liberties? That, I think, is naïve. The THC family of intoxicants keeps a person docile and easy to control. To bread and circuses add reefer and the internet, and you can tame millions of legal users into solitary, timid, antisocial zombies. It may take years before the lucky ones realize what’s happening to them.
I’m not a fan of the drug wars. I suppose legalization is the lesser of two evils, but we need, as a society, to not allow the stigma of drug use to be swept away by the progressive moral laxity that infects us. Drug use should always have a taint, a shame associated with it.
Parents, it’s natural for your kids to experiment. But make sure you advise them of the consequences. That drug sapped away years of my life as I wallowed in feel-good non-achievement. It was a trap that might have been avoided had I been properly counseled or at least called on my folly when I was in the grip of it.