I see many comments here about the health and social effects of smoking marijuana and there's of course a very valid point in each of those discussions - smoking (anything) is not good for your lungs and smoking around unsuspecting non-smokers is disrespectful (and gets them high, because weed smoke is active even in the air!).
But there's another angle that I'm curious about: the mentality shift that it will generate in society as more and more people start using the herb - for recreation, medication or as an industrial plant.
It's a very powerful plant, people have been using it for thousands of years, because it grows everywhere and has lots of industrial uses.
And of course we've all been indirectly influenced by it: by listening to the music, lyrics, books or movies created by artists who were high.
It's a great companion for both the consumption and production of all types of entertainment, from videos to video games, design and even coding !
So in a way it's even more useful today than it has ever been, which is why, sooner or later it will get legalised in a lot more places.
Like so many things, if abused, It's addictive and makes people lazy and demotivated, but the value it brings to its users ( and indirectly to the huge information and entertainment (and food!) industry) is quite high :)
I'm just curious how will society change after, say, 50 years of legal weed ? Will we still be trying to fight wars or will everyone just chill down, smoke the herb and play their sitars in peace ? :)
> smoking around unsuspecting non-smokers is disrespectful (and gets them high, because weed smoke is active even in the air!).
disrespectful, ok, I can agree with that. second-hand smoke (of any kind) is a type of highly local air pollution and it's bad manners to smoke (anything) in an inappropriate spot.
however, are you serious about second-hand high? I feel like this is a destructive myth and I'm really surprised to see it being promulgated on hacker news.
Absolutely it's a thing. At the more extreme end you have "hotboxing", i.e. trapping a lot of the smoke in a confined space, like a car. If you sat in the passenger seat of a car and didn't smoke, and I did, and we had all the windows rolled up, you would definitely get a bit of a high.
Outside in a well ventilated area it should be a non-issue, though again I'd recommend extreme care in not involuntarily exposing people.
Of course ! I've experienced it myself many times.
You won't get a 'real' stoned kind of high, but you're getting a healthy micro dose if you're sitting right next to someone who smokes a joint.
(Ok, for better results you have to hold the smoke in for a while).
You often end up with copious amounts of smoke that doesn't get inhaled when smoking with a joint or another device that is continuously burning the plant material, and your lungs are only so efficient at absorbing the vaporized THC in the smoke.
You can definitely get a bit of the effects by hanging out with smokers, and you can get high by being in a confined space with them.
The first change you're already seeing, and will see more of, is that people won't actually smoke it. Smoking joints especially, is the product of prohibition. It used to be that cannabis was mostly taken in extracts orally, at least in the developed world in modern times. Even when smoked, it was typically some form of hand-rolled hashish like 'Charas'.
Now you have various methods of extracting the desirable substances from the plant, and then either eat them, take them sublingually, volatilize ("vaporize") them. I don't really see much of a long-term future in smoking anything.
I can't guess as to the cultural impacts beyond that, although I suspect that it will be a boon for people struggling with various forms of pain and addiction. In the latter case especially, when you see someone kick pills and use cannabis to stay off them... it's an obvious "less harmful" choice.
I'd guess that Rx sleep aids will die off for most as well.
I'd love to know more about the history of the joint. I was always under the impression that it was closely linked to the rise of cigarettes in western cultures as the preferred method of taking tobacco. the joint is just a cannabis version of a cigarette.
was it the cigarette culture of the west that gave rise to the joint? were there other factors involved? what were the most prevalent methods of ingestion prior to joints?
In terms of smoking, pipes and hookahs have been the strong preference, but of course prohibition made having that kind of obvious paraphernalia difficult or impossible. By contrast, in a time when a lot of people were rolling their own cigarettes, a joint with half-pot half-tobacco was truly very stealthy. You could make it with a little grass so you didn't have to buy much or have much on you, and if you had to ditch it then it was no big loss. When you were done, nothing was left, but ashes and memories.
In terms of extracts, that's an even bigger case of "don't want to be caught with that on me!" as well as issues of knowledge being lost, and the fact that extracting any amount requires growing a large amount... so again the law is a factor. Joints really aren't ideal, except for stealth (in a time when most smoked), and certainly they're less efficient than a pipe, hookah, or bong. Efficiency doesn't matter as much as not going to jail though, and especially if you only had a bit of grass to mix with tobacco, it wasn't a concern.
The last thing, that ties all of this together is how difficult it became to grow cannabis in the US, and the associations with racial and social issues. Over time, marijuana (and heroin) were intentionally associated with hippies and black people- "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." (John Ehrlichman) -and as a result complex social dynamics evolved that we still see remnants of today.
I don't think smoking will go away completely, the effects are noticeably different than vaping and edibles. Agree that in the US, it seems everywhere it is legalized non-smoke options become more popular.
I agree, but I think that vaping of concentrates, edibles, and sub-lingual preparations are the biggest in the next decade or two. Now that people with degrees can work in this space without fear for their freedom, lives, and careers, interesting things are emerging. Cryogenic removal of trichome heads, then fractional distillation of the oils with steam and CO2. The result is that you can isolate individual terpene profiles from a given strain, separate from the THC bearing oil, and the CBD bearing crystals!
I think it might just end up as one of those things we all have in the medicine cabinet, in various forms.
With continuing automation and globalization further devaluing the work of the lower class, I don't have a problem with this. The social and physical effects of cannabis addiction are much lower than other addictions like cigarettes, alcohol, and opiates. If it leads to a higher quality of life for the poor while not negatively impacting our economy, who cares?
There's nothing inherently bad about a lack of mental anguish (how could there be), and being poor does not automatically mean you're laboring under some mental anguish. There is, in fact, nothing more wrong with smoking the occasional joint than there is with having a beer or a cup of coffee.
People do drugs. Some of them have substance abuse problems, but cannabis has inarguably fewer social consequences than alcohol. Cannabis is simply not a public health issue, mental or otherwise, and if you have moral misgivings about people being happy or making money then you may want to examine those, or at least elucidate them.
"if you have moral misgivings about people being happy or making money then you may want to examine those, or at least elucidate them."
I was following on my original half-joking comment that weed could be viewed as a way to pacify the masses instead of fixing the societal problems that induce malcontent.
I have no problem with people abating their personal pain with drugs. I do have a problem with this as a social policy - i.e. instead of focusing on building healthier communities people would be just given drugs. Which, actually, is kind of happening already if you look at the opiate and antidepressant use in the USA.
If society's rules are making people miserable the correct long term solution is not more drugs but a better society.
The hole in your logic is that you have the idea that drugs are taken because people feel badly, when in fact humans simply have a natural preference for altered mental states. Also, the vast majority of human cultures condone the use of some recreational drug, and no one is "just giving" anybody anything.
If you want to talk about social policy, it's quite clear that the actual 'opiate of the masses' is alcohol, and you may recall that Prohibition failed. If what you're talking about is not a return to Prohibition then it's fairly useless to try to imply that cannabis has anything like the social problems of alcohol. You're rationalizing your morality and trying to say "people should only do drugs I approve of". We've tried Puritanism. That it is a hopeless model for society is precisely why cannabis is being legalized now.
There is not a reasoned argument for cannabis prohibition, and thinking otherwise represents a flaw in reasoning.
>I presume it's a very convenient method to keep the dirty unemployed masses placid. Free weed and videogames. Yay.
It is better than free internet/facebook/mobile phones and spending time by watching cat videos and reading 'deep stuff' written by fellow plebs in Reddit and Hackernews...
But there's another angle that I'm curious about: the mentality shift that it will generate in society as more and more people start using the herb - for recreation, medication or as an industrial plant.
It's a very powerful plant, people have been using it for thousands of years, because it grows everywhere and has lots of industrial uses.
And of course we've all been indirectly influenced by it: by listening to the music, lyrics, books or movies created by artists who were high.
It's a great companion for both the consumption and production of all types of entertainment, from videos to video games, design and even coding !
So in a way it's even more useful today than it has ever been, which is why, sooner or later it will get legalised in a lot more places.
Like so many things, if abused, It's addictive and makes people lazy and demotivated, but the value it brings to its users ( and indirectly to the huge information and entertainment (and food!) industry) is quite high :)
I'm just curious how will society change after, say, 50 years of legal weed ? Will we still be trying to fight wars or will everyone just chill down, smoke the herb and play their sitars in peace ? :)