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This line has been reliably trotted out every few years since the 1990s at least: But experts say today’s high-THC cannabis products — vastly different than th

This line has been reliably trotted out every few years since the 1990s at least: But experts say today’s high-THC cannabis products — vastly different than the joints smoked decades ago — are poisoning some heavy users, including teenagers. The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly, just as with alcohol - drinking one liter of beer, everyone knows, is not the same as drinking one liter of vodka. Concentrated hash products were also widely available in past eras. Imagine a headline like "Concentrated alcohol products cause vomiting in teenagers! It's not your parent's booze!" Regardless, THC negatively impairs learning, as does alcohol, particular when it comes to memory and retention. People who choose to use such substances recreationally should really moderate their intake and not engage in daily use. This doesn't apply to people who use cannabis for legitimate medical uses, such as an adjunct to opiates to manage serious chronic pain without crossing the addictive threshold with opiates (i.e. avoiding opiate tolerance, which leads to opiate addiction).

raxxorraxor 4y ago
> The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly, just as with alcohol Eh, I don't believe that. Especially with weed there is not much to indicate dosage and the addiction is often to tobacco too which motivates people to smoke another joint. It is true that plants got more potent too. At least this is the case in Europe where weed is a bit different than in the US. But I guess the most immediate danger is that drugs are increasingly being laced with other stuff.
- undersuit 4y ago
  I track my cannabis consumption. Every time I buy I record the weight, price, date, and strain info. My daily consumption in grams per day averages out to 1.5g. Yet there are days when I'm consuming 3+ grams, and if you look at my spreadsheet you can see that more often then not those heavy days fall in a row. I'm not having days where I intake more THC, I'm having days where I consume more cannabis than normal from an inferior batch that has a property like low THC, poor growth, or incomplete curing.
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Great. Are you an outlier or a typical user?
    - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
      Good question. I'd also like to ask GP whether they think 1.5-3g a day is a low, moderate, or high quantity in a day, in their opinion.
      - civilitty 4y ago
        Not the GP but in my experience that is moderate for a habitual user (i.e. "occasional" users do not fall on this scale). Averaging an eighth of an ounce of flower or a gram of concentrate every day would be considered high usage and anything over a quarter ounce flower or two grams concentrate a day would be extreme (at that point you're getting more than a gram of the psychoactives a day, let alone all the other cannabinoids).
        DiggyJohnson 4y ago
        As a heavy stoner in the midst of a quit, I'm very surprised by the numbers you gave. I would characterize 1.5-3g as "heavy smoker", 1/8 oz/day as extremely heavy smoker, and 1/4 oz/day as unbelievable. To put it in monetary terms (error +/-50%) this is about $20/$40/$80 / day, respectfully. I don't intend to change your opinion on this, just sharing my perspective.
        civilitty 4y ago
        I think you're just out of your league ;) I'm also surprised you think 1/4 oz a day is unbelievable. A smoker with a 2 pack a day habit can easily smoke through a 1/4 oz by just replacing half a 0.5g cigarette with cannabis (40 cigs x 0.5 gram => 10g cannabis + 10g tobacco). When I was using concentrates heavily and pressing my own rosin, I was easily using up to an ounce of flower on my worst days (with 15-25% yields by mass). It's definitely a very fuzzy and subjective scale. Personal experience plays a big part and I suspect heavy smokers anchor around their most common daily average - I suspect you smoked 1.5-3g a day?
- delecti 4y ago
  Where does tobacco come into it? I don't have to go out of my way to avoid buying weed with tobacco in it, it's simply not even an option available to me. Also, I find it really obvious when I've gotten more high than usual, and I find it pretty easy to avoid doing that. I can't imagine that's that unusual.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  At least where I live in the US (WA) legal weed goods are sold indicating mg of THC and CBD.
oh_sigh 4y ago
> Imagine a headline like "Concentrated alcohol products cause vomiting in teenagers! It's not your parent's booze!" During the Gin Craze, sure: > It is with the deepest concern your committee observe the strong Inclination of the inferior Sort of People to these destructive Liquors, and how surprisingly this Infection has spread within these few Years ... it is scarce possible for Persons in low Life to go anywhere or to be anywhere, without being drawn in to taste, and, by Degrees, to like and approve of this pernicious Liquor.
allturtles 4y ago
> The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly, just as with alcohol - drinking one liter of beer, everyone knows, is not the same as drinking one liter of vodka. It's easy to tell by looking at it that vodka is not beer. In fact you can often tell how alcoholic a beverage is just by sniffing it. Is the same true for different intensities of cannabis? In any case, hard liquor is certainly far more dangerous than beer (when you hear about college kids who died of alcohol poisoning, it's always from liquor - the physical limits of the stomach generally prevent you from getting worse than a night of vomiting and a hangover from beer). So I'm not sure that the analogy to alcohol is helpful to cannabis.
- bergenty 4y ago
  If you buy it from a store they have THC %s listed on the container. Knowing vodka was more potent is a learned behavior and there’s an entire culture that propagates that knowledge. The same can happen for weed.
  - allturtles 4y ago
    When I was a teen, most alcohol/cannabis I consumed was at some social gathering and was procured by someone else. Granted that was a long time ago, but I assume that hasn't changed.
    - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
      Many teens vape habitually these days.
- runarberg 4y ago
  idk. Beer can range from 0.0% up to 12%. 5% Sake is not uncommon but you can easily find 20% sake. And then Sake bottles are not that much different from Vodka. I think the difference is more in the consumption. It is hard to drink a lot of hard alcohol at once. You usually get more drunk over your consumption period. And—barring any behavior disorders—you can cease consumption. With weed it is easy to smoke a lot of really strong weed not realizing until too late that you’ve had more than you wanted.
blakebreeder 4y ago
hard to moderate consumption when you're doing dabs...
rr888 4y ago
> "Concentrated alcohol products cause vomiting in teenagers! It's not your parent's booze!" When non-American parents allow their teenagers to drink usually its beer/wine only.
bowsamic 4y ago
The problem is that it's almost impossible to find the "beer" of weed now. Almost all weed has been upgraded to be super powered. If I want a joint, I have to use tobacco or catnip to fill it out unless I want to be steaming. I also think that the weed culture is hostile against suggestions of problems. Almost every time I have spoken about possible dangers of weed, even when presenting peer reviewed articles or meta analysis, I have been angrily shouted down. Unfortunately weed users have been prosecuted for so long that they take a dogmatic view about its benefits.
- lolcat_cowsay 4y ago
  yeah very high percentage THC in nearly every variant of weed these days, for me having a joint with tiny sprinkles of weed completely fucks me up, I just choose to have hash with lower THC percentage, plus hash tastes nice. I think that the really strong stuff should be for medical patients, or people with really high tolerance, because for a teenager that doesn't know what it can do, it can really ruin them if they keep having it, especially since the strong stuff is more addictive aswell.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    In most countries we don’t have such freedom of choice, so we only get the high THc stuff
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > If I want a joint Just give up the idea of joints. You don't have to conform to weed culture or tradition (or marketing) to smoke weed. As an act, smoking isn't particularly pleasurable (although I have to admit that smoke is mildly entertaining.) How about taking 2-3 hits from a water pipe, vape, or just an old-school pipe, and spending the rest of the night drinking something you enjoy? Have some tea instead of smoking more pot. Popcorn is very good, and fairly low-calorie.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    Popcorn is actually really calorific But anyway I like joints and so do a lot of people, I don’t see this as a solution
jb1991 4y ago
> The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly That was definitely not true in my case. I used to consume pretty high-% THC hash throughout the day. At first it was strong and I did it once every day or two. But you get tolerant and can handle a lot more. Eventually I was smoking hash several times a day and I ended up with a lot of the symptoms described in this article (though I am in my 30s). I realized I needed to quit, and the off-ramp was terribly long and frightening; I was very hooked both physically and emotionally and I haven't touched any form of THC since, though it did take me close to a year to feel normal again. Interesting to me that sharing my experience with THC addiction has deserved downvotes. Sigh.
- lolcat_cowsay 4y ago
  why is this downvoted
ineptech 4y ago
Yeah, I'm calling BS. 1) That line has been trotted out continuously because weed potency has been going up continuously. In the late 90s, good weed was anything above 4-5% THC; the store near my house currently has nothing below 23%. For your beer/liquor analogy to work, you'd have to live somewhere where the bottle shop only sells triple IPAs and fortified wine, and Coors is in the soft drink section. 2) I don't believe there was anywhere in the US where hash products were "widely available" before legalization. And believe me, I was looking! Back then, using hash every day was an expensive and exotic thing to do, like owning an albino tiger. Today it's commonplace and costs less than a dollar a day. 3) You're ignoring the entire point of the article, which is people getting sick. I don't think cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome existed a generation ago. If you'd told me in 1999 that you knew a daily pot smoker who accidentally smoked too much and had to go to the ER, I would've said no way, physically not possible. Today, totally plausible. If everyone just "adjusted their consumption" this would not be true.
- ineptech 4y ago
  edit to add: for all that, if we're asking what's changed in the last twenty years, I don't think the change in potency is as important as the change in cost and convenience. Sure, there were people who stayed high all day in the 90s, but it was a difficult, expensive, and inconvenient thing to do. It just isn't anymore, so it's no surprise that more people do it.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  All my life the only people I've heard going to the ER for weed are the people who got too high (usually via edibles) and just freaked out and called 911. I wonder if there are any physical indications of this illness, or if it's a name they've given to something they can't quite figure out.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  1) Concentrated hash was widely available in California in the 1980s, and the strength of locally grown strains then was little different than it is today. Perhaps this was not true in East Coast or other regions of the USA. There was an active import market from Asia at the time as well, not just from Mexico. 2) If people want low-concentration cannabis (though why anyone would want to fill their lungs with soot and ash is beyond my comprehension), it's easy enough to grow your own and cure the leaf material for the purpose instead of the flower material - the cannabis shops simply don't find this profitable, nor do the growers. 3) Back in the 1980s and 1990s, there were definitely cases of people getting sick and having to go to the ER, although then it was from eating too many pot brownies. It was definitely a fairly common occurence, just the source was not gummies or resin from cannabis shops. Personally I don't think alcohol or cannabis have many positives, and I like having a nice clear memory and a fog-free thinking process so I avoid them more and more as I get older, but these kind of articles are just so reminiscent of Nancy Reagan's 'think of the children' pearl-clutching nonsense. If people's kids are so pressured that they turn to drugs and alcohol for relief as teenagers, that's more of a symptom of bad parenting (typically too much high-pressure expectation nonsense, if not actual abuse) than anything else.
kromem 4y ago
You are wrong. CBD is a very effective antipsychotic that occurs naturally alongside the THC: https://academic.oup.com/schizbullopen/article/3/1/sgab053/6445173 https://academic.oup.com/schizbullopen/article/3/1/sgab053/6... What percent of products sold for recreational use in dispensaries have a 1:1 or greater ratio of CBD? So no, there actually is a confirmable mechanism by which the legal product being sold today is significantly less safe in terms of psychosis related side effects than the illegal products from years ago. And everyone is still so sensitive to regulatory overreach from those years ago that they are stubbornly turning a blind eye to the underlying pharmacological evidence for that danger. 10mg of THC alone and 10mg of THC with 10-20mg of CBD will have very similar euphoric effects. But the latter will be much less likely to result in delusional side effects, for which constant daily use can build up into a full-blown psychotic episode as in the case mentioned in the article.
bryans 4y ago
Your argument ignores nearly all of the factors involved with dosage -- most notably tolerance. Tolerance reduces perceived effectiveness, requiring increased dosage to achieve the desired psychological results. People regulate their consumption to that psychological effect, but the negative physical effects do not share the same curve. Not to mention the vast difference between what it says on the label and what you may actually be consuming -- the testing and labeling processes are rather notorious for being inaccurate. Even for an avid smoker, it's virtually impossible to consume the exact appropriate dosage, if there even were such a thing. There's also social pressures which encourage people to consume larger amounts. The list goes on and on. So, what you're suggesting as being the obvious negator of the expert opinions of medical professionals, simply has no foundation in reality.
pessimizer 4y ago
> Regardless, THC negatively impairs learning,[...] particular when it comes to memory and retention. This is true, and I believed it without caveat until I was in my 30s, and met a very productive programmer who smoked when they studied. Learning under the influence of cannabis is just something that has to be practiced, and since people rarely study stoned, they rarely get to that point. After you've realized this, cannabis just allows you to study longer and more imaginatively. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't had the example, and the practice that I used was playing the game minesweeper under the influence. I do feel that I might have ruined some of the joy in being stoned, I never feel as out of control or confused as I could feel before, but I'm now of the belief that this was weird cultural baggage. When you're intoxicated, society gives you permission to be out of control, so you feel that. I've always known people who drank for the impunity. The kind of people who start saying and doing unforgivable shit and slurring their speech after the first can of O'Doul's.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

> The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly, just as with alcohol Eh, I don't believe that. Especially with weed there is not much to indicate dosage and the addiction is often to tobacco too which motivates people to smoke another joint. It is true that plants got more potent too. At least this is the case in Europe where weed is a bit different than in the US. But I guess the most immediate danger is that drugs are increasingly being laced with other stuff.

undersuit 4y ago
I track my cannabis consumption. Every time I buy I record the weight, price, date, and strain info. My daily consumption in grams per day averages out to 1.5g. Yet there are days when I'm consuming 3+ grams, and if you look at my spreadsheet you can see that more often then not those heavy days fall in a row. I'm not having days where I intake more THC, I'm having days where I consume more cannabis than normal from an inferior batch that has a property like low THC, poor growth, or incomplete curing.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Great. Are you an outlier or a typical user?
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Good question. I'd also like to ask GP whether they think 1.5-3g a day is a low, moderate, or high quantity in a day, in their opinion.
    - civilitty 4y ago
      Not the GP but in my experience that is moderate for a habitual user (i.e. "occasional" users do not fall on this scale). Averaging an eighth of an ounce of flower or a gram of concentrate every day would be considered high usage and anything over a quarter ounce flower or two grams concentrate a day would be extreme (at that point you're getting more than a gram of the psychoactives a day, let alone all the other cannabinoids).
      - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
        As a heavy stoner in the midst of a quit, I'm very surprised by the numbers you gave. I would characterize 1.5-3g as "heavy smoker", 1/8 oz/day as extremely heavy smoker, and 1/4 oz/day as unbelievable. To put it in monetary terms (error +/-50%) this is about $20/$40/$80 / day, respectfully. I don't intend to change your opinion on this, just sharing my perspective.
        civilitty 4y ago
        I think you're just out of your league ;) I'm also surprised you think 1/4 oz a day is unbelievable. A smoker with a 2 pack a day habit can easily smoke through a 1/4 oz by just replacing half a 0.5g cigarette with cannabis (40 cigs x 0.5 gram => 10g cannabis + 10g tobacco). When I was using concentrates heavily and pressing my own rosin, I was easily using up to an ounce of flower on my worst days (with 15-25% yields by mass). It's definitely a very fuzzy and subjective scale. Personal experience plays a big part and I suspect heavy smokers anchor around their most common daily average - I suspect you smoked 1.5-3g a day?
delecti 4y ago
Where does tobacco come into it? I don't have to go out of my way to avoid buying weed with tobacco in it, it's simply not even an option available to me. Also, I find it really obvious when I've gotten more high than usual, and I find it pretty easy to avoid doing that. I can't imagine that's that unusual.
bobthepanda 4y ago
At least where I live in the US (WA) legal weed goods are sold indicating mg of THC and CBD.

oh_sigh 4y ago

> Imagine a headline like "Concentrated alcohol products cause vomiting in teenagers! It's not your parent's booze!" During the Gin Craze, sure: > It is with the deepest concern your committee observe the strong Inclination of the inferior Sort of People to these destructive Liquors, and how surprisingly this Infection has spread within these few Years ... it is scarce possible for Persons in low Life to go anywhere or to be anywhere, without being drawn in to taste, and, by Degrees, to like and approve of this pernicious Liquor.

allturtles 4y ago

> The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly, just as with alcohol - drinking one liter of beer, everyone knows, is not the same as drinking one liter of vodka. It's easy to tell by looking at it that vodka is not beer. In fact you can often tell how alcoholic a beverage is just by sniffing it. Is the same true for different intensities of cannabis? In any case, hard liquor is certainly far more dangerous than beer (when you hear about college kids who died of alcohol poisoning, it's always from liquor - the physical limits of the stomach generally prevent you from getting worse than a night of vomiting and a hangover from beer). So I'm not sure that the analogy to alcohol is helpful to cannabis.

bergenty 4y ago
If you buy it from a store they have THC %s listed on the container. Knowing vodka was more potent is a learned behavior and there’s an entire culture that propagates that knowledge. The same can happen for weed.
- allturtles 4y ago
  When I was a teen, most alcohol/cannabis I consumed was at some social gathering and was procured by someone else. Granted that was a long time ago, but I assume that hasn't changed.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    Many teens vape habitually these days.
runarberg 4y ago
idk. Beer can range from 0.0% up to 12%. 5% Sake is not uncommon but you can easily find 20% sake. And then Sake bottles are not that much different from Vodka. I think the difference is more in the consumption. It is hard to drink a lot of hard alcohol at once. You usually get more drunk over your consumption period. And—barring any behavior disorders—you can cease consumption. With weed it is easy to smoke a lot of really strong weed not realizing until too late that you’ve had more than you wanted.

blakebreeder 4y ago

hard to moderate consumption when you're doing dabs...

rr888 4y ago

> "Concentrated alcohol products cause vomiting in teenagers! It's not your parent's booze!" When non-American parents allow their teenagers to drink usually its beer/wine only.

bowsamic 4y ago

The problem is that it's almost impossible to find the "beer" of weed now. Almost all weed has been upgraded to be super powered. If I want a joint, I have to use tobacco or catnip to fill it out unless I want to be steaming. I also think that the weed culture is hostile against suggestions of problems. Almost every time I have spoken about possible dangers of weed, even when presenting peer reviewed articles or meta analysis, I have been angrily shouted down. Unfortunately weed users have been prosecuted for so long that they take a dogmatic view about its benefits.

lolcat_cowsay 4y ago
yeah very high percentage THC in nearly every variant of weed these days, for me having a joint with tiny sprinkles of weed completely fucks me up, I just choose to have hash with lower THC percentage, plus hash tastes nice. I think that the really strong stuff should be for medical patients, or people with really high tolerance, because for a teenager that doesn't know what it can do, it can really ruin them if they keep having it, especially since the strong stuff is more addictive aswell.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  In most countries we don’t have such freedom of choice, so we only get the high THc stuff
pessimizer 4y ago
> If I want a joint Just give up the idea of joints. You don't have to conform to weed culture or tradition (or marketing) to smoke weed. As an act, smoking isn't particularly pleasurable (although I have to admit that smoke is mildly entertaining.) How about taking 2-3 hits from a water pipe, vape, or just an old-school pipe, and spending the rest of the night drinking something you enjoy? Have some tea instead of smoking more pot. Popcorn is very good, and fairly low-calorie.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  Popcorn is actually really calorific But anyway I like joints and so do a lot of people, I don’t see this as a solution

jb1991 4y ago

> The issue is that people adjust their consumption accordingly That was definitely not true in my case. I used to consume pretty high-% THC hash throughout the day. At first it was strong and I did it once every day or two. But you get tolerant and can handle a lot more. Eventually I was smoking hash several times a day and I ended up with a lot of the symptoms described in this article (though I am in my 30s). I realized I needed to quit, and the off-ramp was terribly long and frightening; I was very hooked both physically and emotionally and I haven't touched any form of THC since, though it did take me close to a year to feel normal again. Interesting to me that sharing my experience with THC addiction has deserved downvotes. Sigh.

lolcat_cowsay 4y ago
why is this downvoted

ineptech 4y ago

Yeah, I'm calling BS. 1) That line has been trotted out continuously because weed potency has been going up continuously. In the late 90s, good weed was anything above 4-5% THC; the store near my house currently has nothing below 23%. For your beer/liquor analogy to work, you'd have to live somewhere where the bottle shop only sells triple IPAs and fortified wine, and Coors is in the soft drink section. 2) I don't believe there was anywhere in the US where hash products were "widely available" before legalization. And believe me, I was looking! Back then, using hash every day was an expensive and exotic thing to do, like owning an albino tiger. Today it's commonplace and costs less than a dollar a day. 3) You're ignoring the entire point of the article, which is people getting sick. I don't think cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome existed a generation ago. If you'd told me in 1999 that you knew a daily pot smoker who accidentally smoked too much and had to go to the ER, I would've said no way, physically not possible. Today, totally plausible. If everyone just "adjusted their consumption" this would not be true.

ineptech 4y ago
edit to add: for all that, if we're asking what's changed in the last twenty years, I don't think the change in potency is as important as the change in cost and convenience. Sure, there were people who stayed high all day in the 90s, but it was a difficult, expensive, and inconvenient thing to do. It just isn't anymore, so it's no surprise that more people do it.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
All my life the only people I've heard going to the ER for weed are the people who got too high (usually via edibles) and just freaked out and called 911. I wonder if there are any physical indications of this illness, or if it's a name they've given to something they can't quite figure out.
photochemsyn 4y ago
1) Concentrated hash was widely available in California in the 1980s, and the strength of locally grown strains then was little different than it is today. Perhaps this was not true in East Coast or other regions of the USA. There was an active import market from Asia at the time as well, not just from Mexico. 2) If people want low-concentration cannabis (though why anyone would want to fill their lungs with soot and ash is beyond my comprehension), it's easy enough to grow your own and cure the leaf material for the purpose instead of the flower material - the cannabis shops simply don't find this profitable, nor do the growers. 3) Back in the 1980s and 1990s, there were definitely cases of people getting sick and having to go to the ER, although then it was from eating too many pot brownies. It was definitely a fairly common occurence, just the source was not gummies or resin from cannabis shops. Personally I don't think alcohol or cannabis have many positives, and I like having a nice clear memory and a fog-free thinking process so I avoid them more and more as I get older, but these kind of articles are just so reminiscent of Nancy Reagan's 'think of the children' pearl-clutching nonsense. If people's kids are so pressured that they turn to drugs and alcohol for relief as teenagers, that's more of a symptom of bad parenting (typically too much high-pressure expectation nonsense, if not actual abuse) than anything else.

kromem 4y ago

You are wrong. CBD is a very effective antipsychotic that occurs naturally alongside the THC: https://academic.oup.com/schizbullopen/article/3/1/sgab053/6445173 https://academic.oup.com/schizbullopen/article/3/1/sgab053/6... What percent of products sold for recreational use in dispensaries have a 1:1 or greater ratio of CBD? So no, there actually is a confirmable mechanism by which the legal product being sold today is significantly less safe in terms of psychosis related side effects than the illegal products from years ago. And everyone is still so sensitive to regulatory overreach from those years ago that they are stubbornly turning a blind eye to the underlying pharmacological evidence for that danger. 10mg of THC alone and 10mg of THC with 10-20mg of CBD will have very similar euphoric effects. But the latter will be much less likely to result in delusional side effects, for which constant daily use can build up into a full-blown psychotic episode as in the case mentioned in the article.

bryans 4y ago

Your argument ignores nearly all of the factors involved with dosage -- most notably tolerance. Tolerance reduces perceived effectiveness, requiring increased dosage to achieve the desired psychological results. People regulate their consumption to that psychological effect, but the negative physical effects do not share the same curve. Not to mention the vast difference between what it says on the label and what you may actually be consuming -- the testing and labeling processes are rather notorious for being inaccurate. Even for an avid smoker, it's virtually impossible to consume the exact appropriate dosage, if there even were such a thing. There's also social pressures which encourage people to consume larger amounts. The list goes on and on. So, what you're suggesting as being the obvious negator of the expert opinions of medical professionals, simply has no foundation in reality.

pessimizer 4y ago

> Regardless, THC negatively impairs learning,[...] particular when it comes to memory and retention. This is true, and I believed it without caveat until I was in my 30s, and met a very productive programmer who smoked when they studied. Learning under the influence of cannabis is just something that has to be practiced, and since people rarely study stoned, they rarely get to that point. After you've realized this, cannabis just allows you to study longer and more imaginatively. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't had the example, and the practice that I used was playing the game minesweeper under the influence. I do feel that I might have ruined some of the joy in being stoned, I never feel as out of control or confused as I could feel before, but I'm now of the belief that this was weird cultural baggage. When you're intoxicated, society gives you permission to be out of control, so you feel that. I've always known people who drank for the impunity. The kind of people who start saying and doing unforgivable shit and slurring their speech after the first can of O'Doul's.