It is brought up with other things. Perhaps you are extra sensitive about the weed topic for your own personal reasons. "Video games" is a particularly bad counter example, there's a lot of chatter around video game addictiveness and what it can do to vulnerable minds. There's always been some low-key discussion of it but the increasing prevalence of "loot boxes" and their corresponding mechanics have not just increased the volume of the hand-wringing but actually risen up to the level of being banned in certain countries. It's early days on that and I expect to see more regulation of video games over time. As a parent, I can and do directly control my children's access to video games. (My children for various reasons I'm not sharing on the internet are extra sensitive to the issues.)

For example: "The Immoral Design of Diablo Immortal" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17lBUZgjTs

That's a gambling addiction you're mentioning here, something I feel is a LOT more insidious than smoking a joint on occasion

You are debating a different aspect of video games. The complaint against loot boxes is not that they prevent video game players from reaching their true productive potential. They don't do that. The problem with loot boxes is that they are exploitative.

Before loot boxes existed you had Diablo 2, which instead of your money you were trading your time to get the best items. I wasted thousands of hours of my prime years trying to gamble my way to the “perfect build”. World of Warcraft was the same way, only writ large and perfected with raids. I’ve spent literal years of my life playing Blizzard games and hate myself for wasting so much time.

I'm not "debating" anything. I'm pointing out that people have been complaining about video games for a while, and that the loot boxes in particular have amped that debate up. But they did not create it. Video games have been accused of rotting brains (the favored rhetorical formulation of this accusation for whatever reason) for my entire life. I'm pointing to the existing debates as evidence of this.

"Weed is bad" is not what I am arguing against and therefore a generic "video games are bad" complaint is not equivalent. The question is whether we should care that weed makes you a less productive member of society. Loot boxes have no impact on a gamers level of production so it is an irrelevant argument.

Also isn't the "video games rotting people's brain" complaint always laughed at in circles like HN? Is that really the parallel you want to make? Plus people generally only say that in relation to kids. I'm not advocating for kids (or anyone) to use pot. I am saying the personal productivity angle is a weak line of argument and is usually masking some other objection to pot since the same argument is not used in other discussions in which it is equally applicable.

Parents have been complaining for literally decades that videogames make kids lazy or that "tv rots your brain". And I have seen videogame overuse fuck up people's academics and careers.

Weed bros get real touchy when anybody suggests something bad about it. Inb4 "alcohol is worse". I'm still for legalization but people need to stop getting so defensive.

Touchiness is a hangover from the unjust war on drugs. Also, why alcohol is worse is so frequently cited. It will probably go away as stigma rapidly fades

All people want is for weed to be legal. These arguments about wasted lives are used to justify keeping it illegal.

I'm 100% pro-legalisation, not because I believe cannabis is harmless (I got psychologically hooked the exact way lacker describes), but because:

1. Putting people in prison for using it causes more harm than the actual usage of it does.

2. The threat of state force being used to strip people of their freedoms is not an effective deterrent. The war on drugs is an objective failure.

3. The war on drugs was nonsensical to begin with. You are legally free to drink bleach. You can legally drink yourself to death on alcohol. You can legally consume enough caffeine to give yourself a heart attack and die on the spot. You can legally smoke 100 packs of highly addictive and harmful cigarettes a day. But you can't legally consume cannabis, which remains a schedule 1 drug?

Legalisation is of utmost importance not because cannabis is good and we ought to encourage consumption, but because the alternative (criminalisation) is irrational, morally reprehensible, and a costly waste of taxpayer resources.

There is no good that comes from criminalisation, only more harm, more waste, and more people being stripped of basic human rights for no justifiable reason.

There are gradations between putting people in prison and full legalization. Speeding in a school zone is illegal but it generally won’t land me in prison. I don’t favor imprisoning drug users but that doesn’t mean we need a free-for-all with weed stores.

Criminalising the sale just turns what could otherwise be taxed and regulated product (tested for mycotoxins, pesticides, solvents, heavy metals, etc; ++tax revenue) into an unregulated (and thus less safe) and untaxed product sold exclusively in illicit markets.

Again, it's not about wanting to encourage the sale of it, it's that the alternative (criminalisation) causes more harm than good.

To your point, I'm all for having a surgeon general's warning on cannabis products, restricting the sale to age 25+ (when the prefrontal cortex is much closer to finishing development), and other measures that may reduce harm, rather than increasing it.

Users of weed do more to keep it illegal by their off-putting rhetoric than any Refer Madness propaganda does. I've been in favor of legalization for decades but really dislike discussing it with users because of their often lack of self-awareness and tendency to be just as dishonest as those against it.

"Pot smokers are aggravating" is, frankly, a very stupid reason for anybody to support criminalization.

What? Like, films such as Reefer Madness were created at the height of the anti-marijuana propaganda drive fueled by strongly racist rhetoric to stamp out minorities. That drive and rhetoric dictated US policy for over 50 years, resulted in increasing penalties against marijuana users and leads up to the current day where it's still classified as Schedule I drug.

Your framing of the situation is just remarkably wrong considering the entire legal history of marijuana in the US.

Your comment kinda demonstrates his point though. He made a comparison, and you pointed out that what he compared weed consumption to is crazy. And you said absolutely nothing about weed consumption itself which is required to understand the validity of the comparison. And not providing that part is exactly demonstrating the lack of self-awareness.

His comparison was between your average smoker arguing for legality vs an entire institution that was setup to criminalize and demonize them for decades, then calling them equally a problem. What exactly here would change the validity of the comparison?

At least claiming that your average smoker arguing for legality would provide more substantiated arguments, than the institution in question.

> And I have seen videogame overuse fuck up people's academics and careers.

Circa 2005, a non-trivial percent of students sat in the back of lecture halls playing WoW during classes.

Games have gotten terrifyingly more addictive since then, though you don't hear so much about games ruining lives anymore in the news. Maybe it just isn't newsworthy anymore?

I think while productivity shouldn't be the exclusive way we measure someone's life (and its implicit frame that someone's worth is measured by that person's material contribution to society), those dialogues hide a more interesting question -- how purposeful someone's life is, and whether regular, recreational use of marijuana supports or discourages living purposefully and meaningfully.

My experiences of marijuna is that it can loosen the societal conditioning on "productivity", and reveal the lack of purpose and meaning in one's life. It's liberating to realize the a lot of the conditioning don't matter as much as it seems.

It's at this point, that it's tempting to continue and just have fun. Here though, is the space in which one can discover one's purpose from within, with societal and external expectations muted. It's paradoxically that here, connecting with that purpose, brings life and joy outside of the mental states that marijuana can bring. When one makes conscious contact with that inner, unconditioned purpose, marijuna is something that is fun that one can occasionally enjoy, but not as a substitute for purposefully living.

It gets brought up in posts about weed because the posts, like this one, are about weed. Similar things are stated about other things in posts about those other things. Do you believe discussion of the relative pros and cons of weed use should be forbidden?

No one said it should be illegal. It's just dangerous.

> Should we make video games illegal

Didn't China do almost exactly that?

Not exactly. They restricted online gaming. "China Limits Online Videogames to Three Hours a Week for Young People - New regulation will ban minors from playing videogames entirely between Monday and Thursday" https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-sets-new-rules-for-youth-...

Online video games are kind of their own thing. I wish normal/local multiplayer games didn't get lumped in.

I don't see much support for criminalization of drugs around here.

But yeah, we should educate people so they notice if this happen due to view games, or Facebook too.

The conversation about whether or not we should make something illegal is a whole other category. We know that alcohol is bad for the brain and has a myriad of health effects and destroys lives, but was prohibition the best solution to end addiction - the jury is definitely out on that one! And don't get me started on the opioid crisis. However, I do think information is power. People often see marijuana is the harmless, kind drug that gets over-criticized. It's important to realize that the impact of the drug is not harmless and that it's also changing as it's become legalized and people are able to make it more potent with higher levels of THC, the impact on human health - and also the environment. It's also not being sustainably farmed the way it was before.

In their never ending goal to control kids' lives, a certain segment of parents know they've lost the war against D&D, comic books, rock n roll, TV, rap music, video games, etc. This is just the topic du jour.

Video games are a similar threat to living a fulfilling life, absolutely.

Definitely not the exact same kind of threat, since video games don't make you dumber like pot, but there is a real risk that a person substitutes accomplishing things in real life in favor of accomplishing things in a video game.

Your comment is kind of whataboutism. You're not really refuting what he's saying, just bringing up a separate topic

I wasn't trying to refute the idea. The idea is true. The question is whether we should worry about it.

Using weed is a recreation activity. Most recreation activities will have a negative impact on your life if they are not done in moderation. I don't think that is necessarily a problem and the fact that this generally isn't discussed in other contexts might indicate that people are subconsciously using this an excuse when their true objections to weed originate somewhere else.

I can't speak for other people, but for me, it's not recreational. Not anymore. I need cannabis to simply feel normal. I feel high only when I'm sober, because sobriety is the atypical state. I can't sleep without it. I can't leave the house in the morning without it. After about 24 hours abstinence, I get debilitating headaches and start to vomit, presumably from the withdrawal. It's not fun. There's not much fun left in it at all, really. It's just an addiction.

Weed may be unique in allowing such a constant level of intoxication with relatively mild side-effects. I think that's how it gets people. Such addiction is not that uncommon and I've watched legalization in Canada with a mix of appreciation (I still do believe it should be legally available) and apprehension (I think we're about to see a small but significant % of an entire generation end up in the same place I've been for the last ~10 years.)

I don't know what your usage is like, but that is an outlier response that most likely originates from non-moderate use. Video game addiction is also something that causes severe negative impacts. The existence of these outlier responses does not mean either video games or weed are dangerous in moderation.

> After about 24 hours abstinence, I get debilitating headaches and start to vomit, presumably from the withdrawal.

Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome

it's just the body missing something it thinks it needs, I get the same thing with coffee

I don't think video games fuck up your lungs and kill you in the long term, at least in capita.

Video games don’t make you lethargic, less productive, and significantly less intelligent for days after playing them.

I disagree. I was fully addicted to Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) back in the day. A perfect set of circumstances led to me have bit of time to start playing, and it quickly turned into 8+ hours/day. Anytime I wasn't playing, I was thinking or reading about playing. It ruined some important relationships, and definitely stunted my career (I stayed at an easy job far too long), and impacted me physically (stopped working out, ate like crap, etc...).

For days? Neither does weed.

Yes, it does.

Weed has non-acute negative effects on cognition for 7 hours to 3 weeks after use, dropping off most significantly after 72 hours of abstinence.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...

You're really making that study do a lot of work it wasn't intended to. Their main conclusion is that the effect size on cognitive function was very small, and basically disappears after 72 hours.

In a round-about-way they do - video games are so fun you can end up playing them for days until you get bored.

What the hell did you smoke?