These are the kind of honest explanations for drugs that we need more of. Most people that do heroin don't become prostitutes to fund the habit. But once you've done it, no matter what happens in your life, it's not as good as that time you did heroin in your friends basement. And that's really sad.

edit: I'm being rightfully called out. I haven't done heroin and didn't mean to authoritatively say that there is only one realistic outcome. I only meant that painting the picture of drugs completely ruining your entire life isn't accurate, we all know very successful people that regularly do drugs.

I guess looking at movies and books, I could see where you'd get this idea, but it really isn't accurate.

There are different types of feeling good, and the purely chemical good isn't particularly rewarding. There are the moments in life where you are happy because you are living the life you want to live, and those are way better than just feeling good from drugs. Sometimes life goals and drugs come together, and that gets really interesting. It's reasonably common for people to do MDMA and have a glimpse of their life without anxiety and trauma, or LSD and looking at their own existence objectively.

For me, the best moments in my life are around building connections with people.

Lotta people talking about heroin in this thread, but lets be clear, unless you have tried heroin, or are otherwise intimately familiar with its affects, you are probably not qualified to talk about what it feels like.

Not trying to single out parent, just felt like it should be mentioned.

As someone who's done quite a bit of heroin...All of these comments are sort of correct in their own way. On its own turf, no, nothing will ever feel as good as heroin. Normal life experiences can't compete with that, not directly. But there is a one-dimensionality to its goodness that allows you to have experiences that, though i'm not sure they feel "better" than heroin, feel good in different ways that can be more satisfying, while also being sustainable.

It's sort of like the fact that nothing tastes better than cheesecake (or insert your favorite dessert here), but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy life or even other food without it.

As someone who's been through many different addictions, I'm starting to appreciate freedom from craving (a specific form of inner peace) more than the pleasure of indulging in a craving. (As well as the subtle benefits to mind and mood that come with it!)

Ya. It's sort of hard to explain to people who haven't experienced it, right? They like to ask "does not cheesecake ever taste as good as cheesecake?" and of course the answer is no: Cheesecake always tastes better than not-cheesecake. But there are other dimensions to experience that aren't captured by the immediacy of taste in that sense.

I am not misenjoying your non-shallow depth of double negatives (JK, love your observations)

I was trying to get to this with good versus rewarding, but it's one of those things that is so obvious when you feel it, but hard to communicate with people who haven't.

As far as drugs go though, there is a lot of personal preference involved too. For me, MDMA in unhealthy quantities is still the best that I've ever felt, and I know some other people prefer the meth high, but I don't think that's exactly what you are arguing against :)

The dimensionality is the key part. It's not just a metaphor, it's a physical quantity. Like cheesecake, the neurological response to heroin follows a specific profile of activation. However, (most) humans find fulfillment in far more dimensions than any single activity provides.

Life would be empty without cheesecake though.

Then I really don't recommend you experiment with heroin :)

I am a very very fat guy trying to eat properly and it’s excruciating, even after 5 weeks away from most of my daily life. Damned if I haven’t toyed briefly and desperately with the idea of some kind of pharmaceutical intervention. But my lifelong policy with drugs has always been if I can’t even handle Mountain Dew Throwback, I won’t have a chance with speed or coke or pot

Unsolicited tip. Something I find has helped me a lot with challenges like you are facing is to stop looking at them as difficult or choices and simply understanding it what you have to and are going to do. Remove the choice from the equation. I had some pretty destructive habits when I was younger and now people comment on my strong mental discipline. This approach has really helped. I recently had to cut all starch from my diet due to an auto-immune diagnosis and went through ketosis. The discipline has now become the habit. It never occurred to me to not follow through even in the deepest keto flu period. It's possible to achieve and once you've beaten one hurdle the next one becomes easier until you control fully your thoughts and not the other way around.

Definitely second this. Choices are hard, but decisions are easy. If you make hard rules for yourself and decide to follow them without exception, it is much easier to stick to, at least, that's what i've found for myself as well.

Much obliged. It’s a surprisingly alien concept for me with food, yet not elsewhere in my life. Odd, come to think of it.

Interesting. I will try to think that way. BTW I’m quite self-disciplined pretty much every other way and I never thought much about it, but I think that’s how I normally am. If it’s not food or caffeine...

Hah, I try to avoid it.

I'm writing from personal experience. Well, I've never done heavy opiates in a basement, so maybe going subterranean makes all the difference.

That makes it sound as if we should let people that only have a few days to live take all the heroin they want, actually. Maybe we should.

To a lesser extent, that's part of what hospice / palliative care is. Not to the extent that it's purely recreational, but often involve continued use of opiods for pain management.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palliative_care#Physical_pain

If I get to choose the way I die it will be with an unlimited morphine drip slamming on the button repetitively. I had morphine back as a kid for a ruptured appendix and damn that stuff was good. I'll never forget the day they came in and I was expecting to get my daily shot and they told me I was being switched over to Tylenol lest I become addicted. I was 8, and I still remember thinking of saying "Oh I'm not becoming addicted but can we do it for 1 more day" haha...

> I had morphine back as a kid for a ruptured appendix and damn that stuff was good.

I suppose this varies a lot from individual to individual. I had morphine a few months ago for a shoulder reduction, and I felt horrible enough that I almost wish I'd just done it without painkillers at all.

Sadly there's still some prohibition on giving the patient enough to comfortably OD and voluntarily end their suffering in a lot of places. I've heard nurses say that they're instructed to try and keep the patient optimistic, even when all that life means to them anymore is continued suffering. Gotta squeeze every last dollar out of them or something I suppose.

There is a less cynical explanation: if you make it too easy for people to kill themselves then you run the risk of old people being coerced into taking that option by, for example, greedy relatives eyeing their inheritance.

And it could be seen as a perverse incentive for governments to make it too easy for people who are an economic and budgetary burden to end their own lives.

I believe this approach is also present in the UK where the patient isn't paying for their treatment directly. So I doubt it is to do with making money.

The patient may not be paying, but is the question is if the hospital still gets paid for his continued use of their services.

Wouldn't that be the argument of legitimate medical use though? You're mitigating the pain of people who literally have less than a year to live.

There is extensive research and clinical practice on the topic of comfort-measure care at the end of life. Opioids are, indeed, often felt to be helpful at the very end.

Depending on the condition of the patient and the specifics of the palliative care prescribed, that's exactly what happens. Just using morphine minus the extra additves used to make heroin. Add pure oxygen to the mix and I'm not sure the patient notices much of a difference - they're high as a kite regardless.

This is already part of palliative care. Fentanyl is synthetic heroine and is orders of magnitude more potent.

Terminal patients are often given lethal doses of morphine near the end.

From what I heard it is a bit of a lawyerish distinction at that point - that euthanasia is never the intent but may be the end result. If they arecterminally ill or mortally injured with instructions to treat by giving enough that they don't have pain. If it is a level that they can just slumber peacefully 22 hours a day they are to go with that. If they are 95% third degree burnt and they need more than that and it eventually stops their breathing it is an unfortunate side effect of treating their pain but still the best option sadly and not malpractice - sometimes needed treatments can kill even when everything is done right.

The evasion and mental gymnastics does have some point at least - it isn't the doctor deciding to take the life of a patient because of a judgement and well any student of the 20th century knows how /that/ can end.

The mental gymnastics are due to the legal environment in the US and in particular on laws in many states that could send physicians who prescribe a drug for the purpose of ending a patient's life to jail.

But there are lots of drugs that have the possible side effect of death, and plenty of patients who decide that the risk-benefit of taking a drug is warranted even though it might kill them.

So therefore, everything has to be described in terms of "pain management" and "comfort" where the cessation of breathing is just a... potential side effect. If that, combined with the patient's standing orders not to intubate or perform any sort of resuscitative action in the event that they stop breathing, leads to death... well...

The euphemism that is frequently used is "palliative sedation" (or "terminal sedation", although that seems to be used mostly by people of the thou-must-maximally-suffer school of thought).

That pretty much already happens with painkillers in many cases.

I don't buy that. I'm not sure where that information came from, but it's not the case for all users. Heroin feels amazing, but there's a ton of things in life that past users can find even better--even more rewarding. Russell Brand has a good book about this, it's called "Recovery"

Throughout highschool and college I knew a decent amount of people who experimented with drugs. But only a few who injected heroin, and all of them expressed that they weren't sure they were ever going to be happy again without heroin. And now most(maybe all) of them are dead.

I'm sure that's not true of every user, but enough of them that I really think heroin(and strong opioids in general) is a different beast.

That's a valid point, but it's worth pointing out that it can be applied to many more things than just marijuana (TV, video games, alcohol, social media, most articles people read, many apps, etc.). There's an enormous section of our economy that's devoted to wasting people's time when they could be "learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative" (I'd add taking care of your body, your mind, and your community to that list as well). For a lot of people, evenings have been the time to sit mindlessly in front of a screen for a few hours.

This ends up hurting our society on multiple fronts: people not being as productive as they could be because they're encouraged to waste time, an overall less happy society, a less healthy society because of the encouragement of sedentary behavior (and the economic burden that comes with that), a large part of the economy that could be devoted to improving people's lives but is instead wasted on encouraging negative behavior, etc. The problem is that we've grown so accustomed to this situation that we rarely think much about it, or what we can do to change it (whereas marijuana is getting at least some scrutiny, since legalization is new).

The problem with this quote is that it's too vague and can be applied to general entertainment and leisure time, no drugs needed.

You shouldn't be listening to music, you should be creating it. You shouldn't be playing video games, you should be designing them. You shouldn't be just eating food, you should be the one cooking it. You shouldn't be lazing around at the pool, you should be swimming laps.

It's disgustingly puritan. Really it's enough to tell people that you should spend part of your time being productive. How you spend your leisure time really doesn't matter. But I guess quoting south park is typically a prerequisite for constraining the discussion to the point of nothingness.

>If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything.

I understand the audience on this forum will not like this sentiment, but with the empirical evidence we have on hand, video games are a bigger problem for our youth than pot will most likely ever be.

http://www.who.int/features/qa/gaming-disorder/en/

Clearly sitting around on the couch playing video games all day can be just as destructive as sitting on the couch smoking pot all day. Also clearly, there are tons of skilled, industrious people who also smoke pot. I don't think anyone here is saying you should never entertain yourself, but maybe also don't make yourself a slack jawed victim of Infinite Jest.

Moderation is the thing, and for young people in particular that can be a lot to ask.

>can be just as destructive as sitting on the couch smoking pot all day

All evidence points to it being more destructive.

>Moderation is the thing

That's exactly what I just said.

>and for young people in particular that can be a lot to ask.

It can be. And quite frankly certain forms of media are doing more damage to our youth than marijuana ever could when taken in excessive amounts. Loss of sleep, sedentary lifestyles, in some cases toxic social environments.

I understand the quote to mean that pot makes people okay with being bored. Other recreational activities don't have that same effect. You might do them to stave off boredom, or you won't be bored when doing them, but it's not really the same thing.

Video gaming is an interesting one, a form of dopamine addiction. Pot isnt about dopamine I think?

The quote, while probably the best way to address juvenile cannabis use I have ever heard, is still from a satirical cartoon. Subjectively, cannabis does NOT make oneself numbly content with being bored. What I found is that it makes things seem profound or meaningful or funny, significantly lowering the boredom threshold. You can for sure still be bored when high and I find the boredom feelings are actually amplified (like sitting in a huge line at a store with no screen/headphones gets really old really fast).

>Other recreational activities don't have that same effect.

I'm sorry what do you think leisure activities are?

_alternatives_ to beeing bored

Where does marijuana suddenly not fall under the same characteristics as any other leisure activity?

It's blatantly obvious some of the comments are speaking out of unbridled ignorance.

Well, if your definition of smoking marijuana is going outside, walking around, thinking about stuff or talking with friends, then yeah, it is also an alternative to boredom.

But when you finished the joint, you will still have to do something. And after the active part of smoking is done, the "beeing high makes you more likely be okay with beeing bored" still applies.

And I can promise you that I am not ignorant when talking about marijuana, and neither am I opposed to people smoking it for their enjoyment.

I don't understand what line you're drawing here, because I don't understand how this is different to say, listening to music.

I wouldn't consider music an "alternative to boredom" as its foremost characteristic or as a last resort to boredom. It's just a fun activity. Just like smoking marijuana is. It's too much of a mischaracterization of music, or pot, or any other leisure activity.

Thanks for wanting to understand, here's another go.

The effect of smoking pot lasts longer than the action of smoking pot. The effect of listening to music often is limited to the action of listening to music.

Pot affects people over time. So you might smoke a joint then be quite content being in the world doing whatever. If you didn't smoke the joint and did the same whatever things you would feel bored.

You generally don't feel bored and are ok with it on pot, you feel ok doing the same activities you would feel bored doing if you were not high.

I hope that improves the understanding.

There's a difference between being productive and being entertained. Stan's father describes productive activities, but sometimes you just want to relax and be entertained. Everything in moderation.

"most likely isn't gonna fund terrorism"

This isn't true, unfortunately (at least in the US and I suspect much of the world) unless you are getting it legally or know the source. The US does grow quite a bit of illegal marijuana but there is also quite a bit imported by Mexican cartels and I have seen articles about how legalization is having a non-trivial financial impact on cartels, such as:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/03/legal...

For detailed reporting on cartels in Mexico see Borderland Beat: http://www.borderlandbeat.com/

Yes, you can say this is due to it being illegal and you would be right, but we shouldn't ignore what is actually being funded by US illegal drug consumption.

These are the kind of honest discussions we should have.

> South Park put it quite well: "Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn't gonna make you kill people, and it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorism, but… well, son,

> pot makes you feel fine with being bored. And it's when you're bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative.

>If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything".

All high school weed smokers are not equal. There are many occasional smokers. For the sake of simplicity, let me put a number here.

High schooler between 9th to 12 grade who smoke weed at least 10 times a week all four years will settle in LIFE below 50% of his potential (compared to how he would have done without weed)

I read this in Randy's voice and laughed out loud.

impressive quote from a cartoon, wow.

[Deleted]

I think you'd be surprised how many people smoke weed in high school. If I had to estimate I'd say that over half of my class smoked (including the class president and valedictorian) and probably close to 20% smoked on a daily basis. The parking lot literally reeked of weed every morning. Did everyone turn out ok? No but the vast majority of them did. Plenty of my aforementioned classmates are now doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc. By a number of metrics, they are successful and very useful humans.

I know people who were like that in high school who are just fine now. Actually, come to think of it I can't think of a single one of the 'stoners' that were in my grade at school who wasted their time being stoned constantly who didn't at least end up living a reasonable life to this point.

The few that didn't were the ones that either got into harder drugs or were already also stealing or hanging out with gangsters also.

The people that just sat around smoking weed though for the most part ended up alright.

I didn't smoke weed through high school but I still did poorly because I didn't really care. I was more concerned with my mom slowly dying of lung cancer at the time. I did enough to pass but was about it. High school was honestly one of the most pointless things i've had to do in my life. It didn't stop me from going to school after and doing useful things with my life though. I also smoked weed constantly throughout university and was consistently among the top in my class. I'd be stoned during midterms and get 100% or more on a couple occasions.

I've never found it slows me down or stops me from thinking. If anything it does the opposite. It lets my mind focus on one thing at a time without getting distracted and makes tasks i'd othwerwise find boring and probably procrastinate on fun and interesting and gives me more incentive to do those things.

No to dissuade or reject your points but you might have ADD/ADHD if that's how marijuana affects you.

Ya maybe...i've always wondered. Never bothered getting tested. I've mostly just learned to focus and pay attention when I need to. A while back a learned to meditate and practice mindfulness and i've found that's been more helpful than anything. When i start to feel my mind race i'll just close my eyes and focus on my breathing while I count for a little bit. It usually helps me get my thoughts back under control.

Honestly I think it's a little sad you (1) spend this much time thinking about people who smoked pot in high school and (2) have painted their futures this bleak.

I know plenty of people that spent high school and even a not insignificant amount of college in a pot-induced daze that are successful developers, scientists and even one doctor.

I have a similar attitude to MSG. It's probably not going to give you cancer, or cause any serious health problems, but it makes you ok with eating non-nutritious food that would otherwise be bland and tasteless.

Only because fearmongering has scared people away from MSG. You can use it to improve the flavor of nutritious food, too. It’s conceptually no different than salt; junk food contains it, but that doesn’t mean you should avoid it in your own cooking.

This was more or less my point about MSG.

People are quick to down vote here.

Nutrients don't give food taste though. Mostly acids and other non vital alkaloids and terpenes do..

Vitamin-C definitely has a taste.

Because it is an acid..namely ascorbic acid..

> pot makes you feel fine with being bored.

How do you define "boredom"?

According to Oxford Dictionary it means:

"Feeling weary and impatient because one is unoccupied or lacks interest in one's current activity." [1]

As far as my observations go this is particularly not fitting the perception experienced under the influence of weed.

Weed makes you feel - provided one responds positive to it - not weary, not impatient and one finds the present activity overly interesting.

> And it's when you're bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything.

In my personal opinion I think that's alright. Not everybody has to be "good" at something. Whatever that even means.

[1]: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/bored

EDIT: I would like to mention that weed only makes me sleepy and helps relax. Also I don't think that one should respond to boredom (how I understand it) with weed - not at all. Drugs are never necessary to grow personally and often detrimental due to overuse.

> As far as my observations go this is particularly not fitting the perception experienced under the influence of weed.

And that is the point of what they're saying. Being bored can be uncomfortable. One route out of that is to do something more interesting and productive, another is to alter your perception so that you are ok with it.

People are usually bored doing math hw, but most people would still consider it "productive and interesting" once they are doing it. If you smoke weed and become more actively engaged with the boring activity of math hw, you become more interested and productive.

If people got to choose what they were doing it seems unlikely they would be bored in the first place though...

I think it depends on your definition of boredom. What does feeling bored mean to you?

Most people say that weed helps them be more creative, which is the opposite of the South Park quote. Having creative thoughts and dreams but not acting on them can lead to depression. "Being in the moment" is doing what you are thinking, and not letting worry or doubt stop you. Hence the creative energy people often get when high.

Good point - personally, I am skeptical whether weed increases creativity. I never experienced that. I just don't like the weed-bashing from the angle of the you-have-to-be-productive-dogma.

When I was younger (in my early/mid 20s mostly) I enjoyed it and in some ways I think it can stimulate creativity. The way it always felt to me was that it made me think "tangentially".

The stereotype of an absent-minded stoner is one way to look at it, but I often found that it caused my mind to wander and occasionally follow trains of thought that would normally be cut off earlier by "normal" thought processes.

That said, letting your mind wander can spur creativity and cannabis is something that enables this state. At the same time, if all you do is come up with random ideas (some of which might have value to yourself or others), it's only the start of the process. Brainstorming is great but if it never goes past the daydream phase, it may be irrelevant.

Either way, as I got older I stopped reacting positively to cannabis and I find it makes me more anxious than anything these days (yeah, yeah, I tried "that one strain I just had to try"). For whatever reason my brain just doesn't like being in that state anymore. But I'd never tell someone else how to relax or when it's valid to indulge in a bit of daydreaming if it agrees with them.

Maybe weed only helps them feel more creative.

Looks more creative: https://www.google.com/search?q=weed+art&num=50&tbm=isch&tbo...

I don't see a problem with the definition you posted.

I do - for me feeling bored means facing some kind of a vacuum. A lack of motivation and inspiration. When you deeply look into this it is for me often the only moment that makes me feel inspired. Of course it can cause weariness and if one responds to this boredom with avoidance - be it playing computer games or smoking weed. That's usually not benefiting personal growth.

"Weed makes you feel - provided one responds positive to it - not weary, not impatient and one finds the present activity overly interesting." - Exactly. It makes you ok with being bored rather than feeling weary and impatient and prone to go and do something instead of finding whatever banal activity you're doing overly interesting.

If cannabis makes you ok with being bored, just admit you're a boring person. It's there inside of you and you're using the cannabis as an excuse to continue it. You're not even considering what the implications are for add and adhd users, that is, they can concentrate on a task for much longer without feeling the same banality and lack of connection for example.

What's wrong with "banal" activities?

You're right, it's a matter of values.

Banal: Overeating/overdrinking/overconsuming, sitting around, reading reddit/HN for hours, playing video games or twitch.

Not banal: Challenging yourself to new activities or hobbies that require skill. Seeing the world, interacting with other people IRL. Learning (new topics, reading, etc). Building things. Getting out of your comfort zone.

Essentially, being passive/not learning/not engaging vs. learning/challenging oneself and trying to be more than you are.

While I can say I have the experience of not 'growing' at times (now), I would never say that's the weed's fault. Mostly because I've felt the exact same thing before ever smoking weed (I didn't smoke until my 30s). It's depression for me, and it's pervasive.

That said I can say that having depression (and a bit of PTSD) is way more of a hell without the weed to take my mind off it. And even if it's just playing a video game for 6 hours (rimworld is my current 2nd drug) that's far more active and engaging than my typical super depressed not leaving my bed state.

I also think bettering yourself and being a success isn't a one-size-fits-all package. I have a friend who smoked so much damn weed it's a wonder they have any brains left. They learned to play league of legends 10+ hours a day sometimes while high as a kite. They're now making multiple times the money streaming on twitch than they ever would've with any job they would be qualified for. They're the happiest they've ever been, met their SO through twitch, and are living the good life all by ignoring the advice being given here.

>Not banal: Challenging yourself to new activities or hobbies that require skill. Seeing the world, interacting with other people IRL. Learning (new topics, reading, etc). Building things. Getting out of your comfort zone.

All those things feel AMAZING while high, even if the banal things feel way better than sober. Cannabis doesn't just somehow discriminate to make only unproductive activities feel better.

I personally reached the conclusion to start seriously self-learning coding while stoned out of my mind and would furiously code in my room while stoned out of my mind. Now, about seven years later, I have a good career as a developer and still get stoned silly every night.

There's nothing in cannabis that stops you from engaging in these activities, and for some the consumption of cannabis can enhance these activities that are otherwise difficult to enter for them to enter on their own. You seem to be unaware of just how many great pieces of pop culture were developed or punched up while high. There's nothing preclusive about getting high, it's time to stop blaming the drug that has widely different effects in people and start looking at the people themselves and the environment they're apart of. I'm willing to concede the clinic trials that show cannabis has a negative effect on word list memorization and digital symbol substitution tests, but it's not forcing you to do anything you were incapable of doing before, and if it you let it can open so many windows.

We really need to look at society and ask why people are looking for a way out instead of a way in, but I guess it's easier to blame weed.

Banal is a pretty negative connotation for activities that I think are pretty core to human happiness

Some of the unhappiest people I know obsess over optimizing every second to be productive

Sometimes, often, in fact, we need banality to reset ourselves, to rest and recuperate.

We're not all Elon Musk, working 90 hours a week and always starting up a new start up. Banality will ensure we don't burn out before we're 40.

@jimmaswell: "Relevant note here is that Elon actually smokes it himself"

Also Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Feynman etc. (of course that doesn't prove anything - but it helps keeping things in proportion)

Relevant note here is that Elon actually smokes it himself

Or a matter of definition? For me banal means reading a novel or playing a game. Maybe that's because the term "banal" in German means just almost the same as in English. The German "banal" just means "nothing special", "ordinary", "not ingenious".

Is sleep a banal activity?

Sleep, dreams, and mental recuperation are underrated. How many coders wake up with the solution to a bug or problem they couldn't resolve.

That's the point, one person's "banal activity" is another person's necessary re-charge.

There is nothing wrong. It's just that they don't contribute to success. Now you might ask, what's wrong with not striving for success? Nothing, I suppose. It's nice however to be able to reach one's fullest potential.

While I agree that spending your free time sitting around, smoking weed and watching Netflix is a poor use of your time, I'd be wary of defining for yourself what the 'fullest potential' of another person is.

That's such a proud and confident thing to say. No need for a throwaway account.

I would argue that striving for success is often the best way to actually not reach one's fullest potential.

You misunderstand me. I'm not making value judgements. Success and non-success means the same thing in the end. But while we're here, might as well experience a drive for success? Or smoke up and be lazy, that's fine too. I've done both and don't necessarily prefer one over another. I really don't think pride or confidence comes into play here.

but its better chances than trying to reach averageness.

> Weed makes you feel - provided one responds positive to it - not weary, not impatient and one finds the present activity overly interesting.

That's basically what he said. You're doing something that you'd ordinarily find boring, but now you don't feel bored.

Feeling bored is your mind telling you that you should be doing something else.

And how is that bad?

Okay - so you normally would feel unpleasant. Now you don't because of weed. Of course you can argue weed is unhealthy - totally possible. But regarding the perceived state change. How is that causing harm? Because s/he's not going to become wealthy or "successful"?

It’s not causing harm, it’s preventing growth.

I think sometimes, not a big deal.

The problem is if you do it to excess. When you would rather stay in and get high, than meet up with friends, drop out of school etc. When you are not living up to what you consider successful for yourself. Then you have a problem.

Being able to not rely on government assistance for ANYTHING, including health care, would be a start.

Please do not post political flamebait, or any flamebait, to Hacker News.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Good luck finding a single person on a developed country who fits this description. If anything, people with incredible drive lean on government assistance the most (e.g. Elon Musk and his two heavily-subsidized companies), because they know how to find leverage to accomplish their goals.

As a young, successful stoner living in Western Europe, I salute your ignorance

Please be civil on Hacker News.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html