What About Weed?
What about Weed? Weed is not a big deal. Is Weed bad for you? Am I smoking too much Weed? If you’re banging any of this into a search engine, here are some thoughts based on a lot of professional observation minus jargon and stats you can find anywhere else.
Our culture is on a honeymoon with THC. I reckon it’ll last for 7-14 years. Academic research has been all but forbidden until recently, so it’s going to take some time for the picture to develop. In the meantime, we, as a culture, are going at it like it’s some kind of magical panacea. As in, weed couldn’t hurt you if it wanted to; it only does good. All I’m going to say is, there is no free lunch. Nothing’s that good. We wouldn’t believe that if they were talking floor polish.
Weed will be fine for a lot of people. Weed will not be good for some people. This will be many people. Weed will be bad news for a minority. I’ll place my bet that 15-20% of us as a whole will find Weed to be bad news. Of that 15-20%, there will be a lot of overlap with those for whom other substances are a problem. There is no special property about THC that makes it magically different from any other psychoactive substance, especially when there’s grief, loss, physical pain, existential pain, and trauma in the mix.
In the last decade, acute psychosis rates have climbed with the increasing potency and availability of legal weed. The weed they were smoking at Woodstock in 1969 doesn’t really happen anymore. That stuff was weak compared to now. Our culture super-sizes everything. Everything ends up on steroids. It’s what our culture does. Be constructively skeptical. And, for the record, I voted for weed to be legal.
Life is a lot. There’s a lot to feel, emotionally. Some of the feelings are about suffering and pain. We are meant to feel even the difficult parts. The good of life cannot be felt without some of the painful too. There’s a thousand ways to make that last sentence mean something I don’t, but feel the lows too, the worry, the loss, feel all of it. I’ve just seen way too many times before people not know how to manage the simplest of difficult emotions anymore without escaping and numbing-out. A lot is thrown at us that gives the impression that we’re meant to be living on some perpetual wave of Mountain Dew-commerical awesomeness. The pre-conscious belief in this fiction makes us sick and sad as a culture. We’ve got to have a forum to figure out what of life is inescapable Suffering, how to live into that, and what is resolvable suffering we can grow past and change. That’s a spiritual, existential, meaning-making discipline that therapy and psychology offers. Regardless, make meaning out of this life; don’t numb-out.
