A cynical take on many governments embracing weed is Soma [1].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(Brave_New_World)

Brave New World is actually a utopian story told from the perspective of a weird shut-in who only reads Shakespeare and the Bible.

And in another drug-parable 'The Matrix', Cypher is actually the hero, advocating the acceptance of the blue-pill retreat into synthetic chemical fantasy as opposed to the harsh depressing truth of reality.

His failure ultimately leads to 'system failure' and the deaths of billions of adults unable to mentally deal with their expulsion from the dream-world.

The buddy-cop television series Limitless spin off series is superior to the Bradley Cooper movie of the same name.

The recent Matrix movie is certainly bad, but I strongly believe that a single change would have been cool: in the scenes where it's revealed to the viewer that Neo looks like a different man[1], he should look like Cypher. Someone famous, important, struggling to reintegrate, joylessly chewing on some steak, etc. ...

1. https://assets-prd.ignimgs.com/2021/09/08/46-1631115261242.p...

Isn't it great to live in a world where everybody is entitled to their own opinions, eccentric though they may be.

The (western) world today is incredibly divisive, and differing opinions are not only met with hate but lies are rampant and people in power use this propaganda to keep themselves there, sucking resources from everyone else and cause untold amounts of suffering to satiate their infinite greed.

I’m not advocating for a world where people can’t speak their mind, but it does feel like a stretch to call the current situation “great”.

aren't propagating proprietary agendas the foundational problem, constituting the lies and the fraud that both the hate and it's recipients reactive actions result from, not the other way around?

it looks like it's not even a cycle, though it might look like one because the coal is shoved top down into the boiling boiler room, to reward and insentivize, the business and marketing psychologists and the disseminatora of the algorithms that keep the information flows to the population as separate as necessary. all under the auspice of cultural friction and artifical obstacles to keep the convection rate as limited as is necessary to keep political and social leaders in fear so that they don't even have to come running for advice when (some)one sparks a civil micro conflict.

the older cousin of the "small wars theory" ... a knife attack here, a truck into a christmas market there ... and suddenly people don't need to vote Right, AND their conservative party doesn't have to ruin their image by taking the upRight stance ... the situation demands it, after all, the people need protection

I didn’t understand anything about your comment. Please use capital letters to differentiate sentences—they are useful to help readers parse your ideas, they’re not a stylistic choice. You (seemingly) wrote something full of metaphor and covert examples and made it look like a run-on sentence, which is hard to read.

No. I want hundreds of people down at the docks having drug fueled orgies in broad daylight on the deck of a battleship. (Been a few years since I read it but pretty sure that's how the book ends ..) None of that real danger shit for me thanks.

>Brave New World is actually a utopian story told from the perspective of a weird shut-in who only reads Shakespeare and the Bible.

Moral of the story being that every utopia is, by definition, someone else's dystopia.

Funny how when I read Brave New World it greatly got on my nerves, mainly due to how it's supposed to be a "dystopian" novel. To me it indeed depicted a dream world in so many ways.

>A cynical take on many governments embracing weed is Soma

The marijuana prohibition of the 20th century was a complete anomaly in practically all of human history, driven almost entirely by US policy. Before that humans had used the plant recreationally and commercially without hassle for thousands of years. We'll be just fine.

We will be just fine. Just like cigarette smoking, eventually weed will become unpopular to smoke.

Unfortunately, it does seem like there is a big uptake in users after legalization, which hopefully will subside.

I don’t think Cigarette smoking became unpopular without heavy regulation. In countries that don’t have such restrictions, smoking is still ubiquitous.

Cigarette smoking stopped looking cool to teenagers and young adults.

Bans and advertising and showing smoking in movies did that.

Absolutely.

The things that did the most to drive down use were raising the price of cigarettes (which fund the healthcare costs) and banning smoking indoors, where it affected even non-smoking workers [1]. When we stop subsidizing harmful behavior, we get a lot less of it.

Especially in places that are super-cold.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2012/961724

The data [1] don't really show this. In particular as recently as 2001-2003 35% of young adults (in the US) said they smoked, versus an all-time historical high of 45% across all age groups for some context. By 2019 that figure was down to 10% for young adults. The first bans on advertising smoking went into effect in 1971!

So what happened in the ~2000 era window of time? The internet and social media started exploding in popularity. In fact you'll find that the graph of the decline in teen pregnancy [2] looks roughly similar to the decline in young adult smoking, and probably for the exact same reason.

[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/509720/cigarette-smoking-rate-s...

[2] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-th...

A much more obvious reason for the decline in smoking is the popularization of vapes. If you look at U.S. adults, you'll see that the decline in tobacco smoking is almost entirely made up for by the increase in vaping.

Technically, of course, vapes aren't cigarettes. But It's a bit misleading to say that smoking is unpopular, when it's just been replaced by a doppelganger. Especially since vapes are also deeply detrimental to health [1].

[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7348661/

Indoor smoking bans were passed during that period. This was a time period of major pushes to outright ban smoking. That’s when I saw it actually drop off.

“Throughout the early to mid-2000s, especially between 2004 and 2007, an increasing number of states enacted a statewide smoking ban of some kind.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un...

Weed might not directly ruin people’s cognitive ability in a dramatic way, but it can definitely contribute to stagnation, especially for people who are already on the edge of disengaging from life

I believe weed should be subsidized and sold so that you really must not be tricked onto buying it & cannot buy it when addicted solely for reason of getting more addicted without any other reason. Otherwise though, why restrict people from being dumb?

What's the opposite drug in the "South Park," senae? I would say methylphenidate+LSD makes one, not in simultaneous use, more acutely aware of need to do things.

LSD probably improves intelligence by increasing the fidelity of one's experience, which makes your subconscious dreams more capable of tying many dreams to a single place you have experienced, though childhood home is hard to beat. Made-up places and places one passed by but didn't feel with senses & are generic too much, DO NOT have as many edges in the directed causal graphs that are the associations through which our subconscious dreams switch from one to another, travelling on granular level one time every edge as we dream single time, "repetitive" dreams's loops actually also having subtle differences in betweenxt.

Re your correlation, if poor areas may have more accessible weed & lower education & more crime, and the exact causal mechanisms indeed require care.

[citations needed], though of course first you will need to define "intelligence". The studies[1] I've seen found increased visuospatial memory and verbal fluency in the immediate aftermath of use, but decreased cognitive flexibility. Given that cognitive flexibility has been founded to have a significant impact on programming tasks [2], that seems particularly bad for this crowd.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09249... [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9611030

> As South Park put it, weed lets you feel ok about doing nothing, and that's dangerous in aggregate.

I'd say, this is a huge feature, because in modern society we're losing the ability to just sit and do nothing. Look at old people, sometimes they spend hours just sitting and looking through the window, completely zoned out. I can't do that for five minutes no matter how stoned I am. My life revolves around having a thousand hobbies and activities.

Having said the above, for some reason weed stopped being fun for me. Instead of making me relaxed and giggly, it makes me tired. I don't smoke it, I make edibles. Any suggestions?

> I'd say, this is a huge feature, because in modern society we're losing the ability to just sit and do nothing. Look at old people, sometimes they spend hours just sitting and looking through the window, completely zoned out. I can't do that for five minutes no matter how stoned I am.

In moderation, I agree. Although given that numerous people have asked me why I don't where headphones at the gym, I might be an outlier in terms of my ability to zone out and ponder, sober or not, which I do try and practice.

> Having said the above, for some reason weed stopped being fun for me. Instead of making me relaxed and giggly, it makes me tired. I don't smoke it, I make edibles. Any suggestions?

Nah, I feel similarly, and it probably means it's been too regular of a habit. Even though at most I'd be consuming 0.5g joints or 10mg gummies a few times a week, it feels like it's time to dial it back cold turkey for at least a few months, or keep it to weekends.

I tried using it less, but it's not helping much :/

From my experience with meditation and weed I'd claim that sitting, "zoning out" and doing nothing requires significant effort.

Weed works in opposition to that. It more likely makes the mind wander more, not less. That's not always a negative thing, but I think it's almost the opposite of meditation.

I definitely think it's the opposite of meditation. Imo meditative states come from deliberate effort and shouldn't be encumbered by much else but your mind as it is.

Personal observation and common sense logic are often disregarded as 'unscientific', yet they are more powerful tools for learning about the world around us than sifting through hundreds of papers we are not trained to on scholar.google

Weed make you dumb short term? Probably make you dumb long term.

Friends who smoke weed end up dumb and underachieving? Correlation established.

Life is not a college science test. Sometimed you have to just put 2 plus 2 together.

We learned nothing from your casual observation. You took 2 parts and combined them together to form a conclusion based on hearsay. So not better than what you're arguing against.

No of course you don't learn from my observation, and it's hearsay to you.

The idea is that each of us learns from our observation. And of course the observation and judgment of those we trust.

I'm not expecting or caring if you are influenced by my particular observations.

Who is "we"?

The HN audience, you and I.

> A stoned couch surfer was already a lazy couch surfer.

This is the only part of your comment that I think there's some nuance to disagree with. I don't think it's an untrue statement, but I do think it's partly a matter of whether weed or any of those maladies come into the picture before you learn to do anything remotely ambitious or self-directed. If you're already the type of person who's taking on projects, looking forward to an interesting future, challenge-seeking, etc.. then that's fine it's no problem, that's a state you're going to come back to, but it's also not something you really earned at the outset either, you're more likely to just be pre-disposed to those things early on for some reason or another.

I was and am this type of person, but I didn't really realize it in a tangible way until my early-mid twenties, and if I'd be chronically indulging in weed or drinking or gaming, it seems pretty plausible I'd never have been able to get out of the place and rut I was in, but if I wasn't in a rut, I don't think it would necessarily put me in one. I was in a terribly unambitious state in my late teens, floundering and depressed, it's not a productive personal thing to enable more methods of just dealing with it, much like being a lazy couch potato doesn't encourage a person to start a lifelong fitness journey, and having kids early should reduce your inclination to take unnecessary risks.

Anyway, I just think that while it's not to blame for a person becoming a loser, it's plausible that it doesn't help a person become not a loser if they find the crutch at the wrong time.

>Funny. I have smoked regularly for two decades, yet also have two STEM degrees, a full time EE job, occasional side work, and I’m fixing up a 100 year old house.

Congrats and I don't mean to be demeaming, but you sell it as if that were a peak achievement and it's actually quite mid. The hardest part of those achievements would be studying and testing for calculus and algebra, for which I assume you had to drop the weed to retain some cognitive function.

Here's some predictive power I go on a limb with, you said EE and I bet you mean Electronic Engineering and not Electrical.

Along with physician or lawyer, those would be quite surprising and incompatible with weed because you would be responsible for significant real world risks and responsibilities. Again no offense but you are probably working on something with not much real world responsibility which is why it's compatible with smoking weed.

That's ok, not everyone needs to be a top performing human being responsible for their actions, and if they were you would be working in an industry with drug testing instead of a workplace that values creativity and approves of drugs. And your head would roll if there's an incident you are responsible for and it comes out that you are smoking regularly (god forbid while you make the malpractice)

Was I close?

Cheers

This is demeaning, uncivil, and largely baseless.

Drugs are a sensitive subject

Drugs or not, your comment was rude and condescending. And trying to brush it off as people being 'sensitive' doesn't change it being rude and condescending

This post says far, far more about you than anything the other fellow has said does about him.

Same experience here. Weed doesn’t make you dumb or lazy — choosing to sit on the couch watching reruns of The Simpsons is what makes you dumb and lazy, weed or no weed.

Some of the smartest and most accomplished people I've met in my life spent their 20s experimenting heavily with weed and psychedelics. But that was not *all* they did and the goal behind this experimentation was not 'get fucked up and have fun' but fuel for their creativity and curiosity.

So it does seem that easy negative generalizations based on superficial correlations are poor models of what is actually a much more complicated reality.