Pot has an effect that seems difficult to pinpoint, yet is evidenced in the ancient Cannabis cultures of the Middle East and that portion of the orient and in the modern awareness about the extraordinary uniformity of “potheads”, the use of pot so suddenly seems to create a somewhat new person, and not for the better.
The alcohol based West has always rejected Cannabis as an intoxicant, for thousands of years it has done so. From the Greeks to the Crusaders, and up until just the last 20 or 40 years, cannabis was seen as a threat to what Western man aspired to be.
The middle east ancient and now did not consume marijuana the way the west does. They beat the crap out of the plant to knock off the trichom’s and smoke the “hash”, a far more potent “manufactured” drug at that point. Smoking the flower itself without condensing it’s by-product is something different entirely and just smoking a plant.