Lately, wandering around in my own world, my little bubble has been frequently permeated by a waft of cannabis. Prior to my current relationship (A band member, shall we say...green fingered?) I was blissfully ignorant to the common use of the drug.
Immediately, upon reading the word drug, I bet you've all grimaced and thought of some dirty junkie frantically looking for any available vein to get their latest fix. If a person smoking a spliff wandered down the street of an evening, I bet we'd all shake our heads and throw him a disapproving look for - gasp - exposing our children to substance misuse.
Now, lets remodel the scenario. Instead, change the joint to a bottle of wine, the person on their way to a friends house for a dinner party. Do we recoil in horror? No. Of course we don't. In fact, we may even allow ourselves to think them sophisticated.
Alcohol can be just as addictive as a drug. Anyone who has witnessed an alcohol related death knows it is often a slow and painful process for everyone involved, with lots of emotional ups and downs before the final culmination. For many, sufferers of alcoholism fall off the wagon many times, and eventually face death after conquering their demons, but not the lasting scars left on their bodies. A drug related death is similar. And yet, the stepping stones to these problems are treated so very differently in this country. People who entertain the prospect of weed are immediately ostracised from the bracket of "good moral conduct" because they have succumbed to the world of the 'illegal drug'.
As someone with little to no real experience of the drug before this year, I too was under the impression that anyone who smoked weed regularly should immediately be treated with caution. Their sense of right and wrong was clearly skewed and therefore, they were destined to be failures in life. Right?
And yet, the more time I spend in the company of the people who smoke cannabis, the more I find myself questioning this stereotype. As a scientific person, I am in no way using this piece of writing to claim cannabis has no adverse side effects. I'm well aware smoking anything that burns at such a high temperature is no good for you in the long run. As with everything, when taken excessively, the bad begins to outweigh the good. The human body is not meant to process tobacco smoke, but neither was it built to withstand 12 WKDs and 40 Big Macs. Or the chlamydia you catch following the WKD induced bad decision.
I'm not sanctifying weed by a long shot. I'm just curious as to what makes it so bad, essentially. As someone who doesn't smoke the drug myself, I would have to force myself to get high to evaluate the true meaning of "being stoned", in order to better understand the stigma attached. For now, I'll have to go on my observations. Have I ever seen anyone smoke a joint and get in a fight? No. Have I ever seen anyone high be verbally abusive/loud/generally antisocial? No. When I ask myself these questions about alcohol, I can't answer no to a single one of them.
The sad reality is, on any given night out in my area, I have seen many drunkards lay into wives/friends/other bystanders, and generally just make other people's lives difficult. I'm not saying these behavioral portraits can be applied to everyone. I'm just trying to get a picture of why my view - previously so anti-drugs - has changed so much. Some may say it is largely my boyfriend's influence - maybe even me trying to justify my romantic interest's choice of extra curricular activities. Again, I don't smoke it, and neither have I ever felt pressured to by him or his friends. Arguably, you could also say being around it so much in a casual context has taken away the shock factor. But then, wouldn't I have stopped thinking about it so much and just got stuck in myself?
I don't know what answer I'm looking to find, if any at all. All I do know is that for most things in life, in my opinion, there has always been a definitive sense of black or white. Yes or no. Right or wrong. Lately, regarding cannabis use, there have been many shades of grey. And the colour spectrum continues to expand the more I think about it.
Hmm...
