Me too — smoked it when I was young. And to this day, I wonder if has adversely affected me.
Odd things happen when you play around with the brain and its chemistry.
Interesting (at least for me): Initially, I had a tolerance for pot. It had little effect on me. Heard that this is pretty common. Then after several times smoking it, I began to feel the effects. As if my brain chemistry had to adjust to it. I stopped smoking for a couple of years and like you, at a party tried it — imediately got high. Whatever it did to my brain was permanent.
“I think the “partying” is often just a symptom of something else going on deep down inside of them.”
As I said in another thread, illegal drugs enable a person’s weakness. And they enable the enabling of someone weakness. We all have tough times in life. Just hope that “mother’s little helper” isn’t there when you are at your most vulnerable.
“Personally, I don’t think a whole lot more people would smoke marijuana if it was legal.”
Unfortunately, kids will be exposed to it more if it were legalized (IMO). When we were underage, whenever we needed or wanted some beer or hard liquor we knew where and who to get it from. It was pretty easy to get. Getting a “bag” was a lot more difficult. Mostly because it was illegal but it also had a stigma. My brother and friend drank lots of beers with me.
Maybe it wasn't very good. Maybe you didn’t inhale. If you smoked decent stuff and inhaled you probably would have felt it. It didn’t affect me the first time either, but none of us had ever smoked before and we just smoked some leaves from an immature plant that we dried in the oven. The next time was with someone who knew what he was doing and he had really good seedless buds. I felt it that time in a big way. That was back in the late seventies and back then at least while there was some really good stuff out there it was not uncommon to come across some really worthless weed if you didn’t know what you were doing.
“Whatever it did to my brain was permanent.”
I doubt anything horrible happened to your brain because you smoked pot a few times. If it did that about half of all adults under sixty or so would be in big trouble.
“As I said in another thread, illegal drugs enable a person’s weakness.”
I think maybe that's a little true. Marijuana can certainly enable one to procrastinate, but if anything is enabling, it's that legal drug, alcohol. I don't know that there is anything that can lower inhibitions more than alcohol. You won't convince me that marijuana is worse in that regard.
“And they enable the enabling of someone weakness.”
Not sure what to make of that.
“Just hope that ‘mother’s little helper’ isn’t there when you are at your most vulnerable.”
“Mother's little helper,” whatever the heck that means, is always there. I'm sure I could get it whenever I wanted it. I live in the town where I grew up and have a few old friends that still do it. It just doesn't appeal to me that much and it's the last thing I'd want to do in a “vulnerable state.” When I'd smoke that stuff while really down or stressed I'd just sit there and overthink about how miserable things were. No thanks. I'd rather get drunk and wake up with a pounding headache. I don’t do that either though because it doesn’t really help. There are always better ways to deal with stress. I’m a busy lawyer. I’m always dealing with stress. That’s just part of life.
“Unfortunately, kids will be exposed to it more if it were legalized (IMO).”
That's probably true to some extent, but in most places they are already exposed to it anyway at a fairly young age. I first smoked it when I was thirteen years old. It was everywhere in my town growing up. It was much easier to get than beer. Somebody had to be 21 or look old enough to get by using a fake ID. You didn't have to be 21 or have a fake ID to buy pot. All you needed was a little money. No one was going to check your ID.
In most places marijuana is already easily available. If legal I bet we'd still have places that were “dry,” like we have dry counties in may state where alcohol is not sold, but most places where it is already prevalent would have some sort of “pot stores.” Kids will end up getting it from these pot shops like they get booze from the store today, by having older siblings or friends buy it, or by using fake identification. We don't want kids to have pot, but it would be much better for them to get it that way than having them get it from drug dealers that also sell other far more dangerous drugs.
You talked about the stigma associated with marijuana. I think it will always have a certain amount of stigma. It's never going to be something everyone wants to do. Where in the world has pot ever been something the majority of the people use? Fewer than here smoke it even in a place like the Netherlands where they actually allow retail sales of marijuana. Everywhere in the in the world it seems to be viewed by most as the stoner/slacker drug, what the losers at the party sitting on the couch staring at the TV with the sound turned of are into. It's not a great social lubricant by any means. It’s not nearly as “good” as alcohol in that respect. Being high causes at least a little anxiety for most people in social settings. It's certainly not what you want to do before you go try to chat up the ladies. The smoke smells bad, as does your breath if you've been smoking it. It's smoking and smoking is viewed with more and more disdain in this country and elsewhere. Smoking marijuana is just not for everyone and it never will be.
More than half of all young Americans have tried marijuana though. Most of them do it once or a few times and decide it's not for them. Probably a few more of all ages would do it if it was legal, but I would really be surprised if we saw just a huge jump in the percentage who smoke. I am convinced that most people who really want to use it are already using it. Use numbers fluctuate some but on a per capita basis Americans are more likely to use marijuana than just about any other peoples in the world. Our marijuana laws are far more punitive than those in most Western nations yet in most years since the seventies when nations around the world really started collecting this data we've been “number one” in the per capita number of users department. And when we weren’t “number one,” we weren’t far from it. If the slight chance of getting caught and getting into a little trouble really deterred many who want to smoke pot, a much lower percentage of Americans would smoke it.
I think there must be a natural limit to the percentage of people who will want to smoke pot. If not, surely we'd have seen a jump to maybe seventy or eighty percent in one of these countries where they've made it practically legal. Instead they don't use it any more than we do and in many cases per capita use is lower where they don't really bother pot smokers. Are we just really weak? Is that why we can't handle the freedom? Why is it people think we are so much weaker than the Dutch or the Swiss or the people in any of these other countries where to varying degrees they've decriminalized marijuana use and made it at least practically legal? The Dutch sell it from highly visible storefronts where the main thing on the menu is cannabis in all the various preparations. Why aren't they just going crazy over there, all of them walking around with five burning joints hanging out of their mouths? The reality is that a lower percentage of Dutch smoke it than Americans. A smaller percentage of their children smoke it too, even though adults can just pick it up at the store whenever they want it there. The Dutch and others in countries where marijuana is basically allowed may have cultures a little different than ours, but I just cannot believe that we Americans are so weak that we cannot handle freedom with respect to marijuana at least almost as good as they can. Use would probably go up some at first at least until the novelty wore off, but I can’t see us just going crazy and having per capita use go up to several times that of any other nation in the world. I think what is more likely is that it would go up some at first and then it would fluctuate with popular culture, being high sometimes when it is in vogue and going down when it starts losing favor in popular culture, about like we’ve seen here in the past.
One thing about marijuana is that it really isn’t super addictive and it’s generally not super harmful either. It’s nothing like drugs like heroin or meth in those respects, and in some ways it’s probably a little better than alcohol in those respects. It would be a catastrophe to see use of drugs like meth tripling or quadrupling because so many would end up with lifelong addictions that would remain after people wised up and the fad subsided. I don’t think use could go up so much with marijuana because already so many have tried it compared to the percentage who have messed with the hard stuff and only a small percentage liked it enough to continue using it over the long haul. If marijuana use did go up considerably for a time most of the excess in users wouldn’t have any trouble stopping when the fad was over. Marijuana smoking was all the rage in the 70’s and by the end of that decade we had a lot more smoking it than today, but the fad waned in the 80’s and most who were smoking it in the 70’s grew out of that phase in their lives in time. Crack users of the 80’s weren’t so fortunate. A lot of them now in their 40’s and 50’s are still struggling with their addictions. People rarely just grow out of powerful addictions like that. I wouldn’t say marijuana has no potential for addiction, but most people don’t get addicted and whatever addiction people do experience is not nearly as powerful as it is for the hard stuff, and it’s probably not as powerful as that for alcohol or cigarettes. In my personal experience leaving cigarettes alone was infinitely more difficult than leaving marijuana alone. There will always be a few who just can’t quit, but of course there are plenty who can’t stay away from freerepublic.com when they have other things they need to be doing, or they can’t stop gambling or shopping or whatever. We can’t protect everyone from their weaknesses.
Marijuana doesn’t cause a lot of crime, except of course that which is related to the fact that it is an illegal black market drug. It generally causes little or no harm to people who use it. It’s not extremely addictive. It’s bad, but not bad enough to justify all the trouble we go through and all the harm we cause trying in vain to make it go away. We have to pick our battles, and this is one instance where the battle is not worth fighting. We don’t have to declare that it’s good for people and give up on trying to discourage kids and even adults from using it, but so many people do it despite our best efforts to make it go away, the market for it is just massive and unstoppable, and marijuana is just not so bad that it makes sense to continue trying to enforce the ban. I think we’d probably have more control over if we regulated it than we have now. Now we just have a multibillion dollar industry with no government controls whatsoever and the huge profits are in many cases going to bad people that do bad things, people that sell the hard stuff too who are more than happy to have minors buying their products. The marijuana industry is funding Mexican organized crime to the tune of billions of dollars a year. I don’t know about you, but since that money is going to be made by somebody anyway I’d rather see it go to law abiding tax paying Americans.
I think in that sometime in the not so distant future we’ll probably start regulating marijuana similar to the way we regulate alcohol. That will cause a lot of anxiety for a lot of people at first, but the sky isn’t going to fall in and eventually most people we be wondering why we didn’t just go ahead and legalize it a long time ago.
Getting a bag was difficult? You didn’t go to the school I went to, in both California and Colorado. Getting a bag of weed was ridiculously easy. Sometimes it was easier to get than booze, mostly because if the pot dealer was around he’d sell it to you without any ID. However, both were really easy to get.