Bullshit. There are numerous counter-examples to this, from artists and musicians to game developers, engineers and scientists.
I suspect that the perceived correlation between smoking cannabis and being a loser is that successful cannabis smokers have a strong incentive against disclosing this habit -- they could lose their jobs, or be excluded from further opportunities. They also have more resources and possibly life experience and wisdom to protect themselves from law enforcement and the social status quo (i.e people like you who might judge them unfairly).
Of course I am not advocating cannabis use. I am advocating seeing what works for you and making up your own mind. Some people love coffee, some people don't. None of our business.
One problem I suspect that the status quo has with cannabis is that it is a type of drug that makes you more relaxed about status games. Some people describe the experience like this: it's not that you don't want to do things anymore, it's that you don't care so much about what other people think you should be doing.
But mostly, cannabis is illegal because of racism (it was associated with black people and the jazz scene when it became popular in the west) while alcohol -- a much more dangerous drug that is indeed heavily used to mask boredom -- is ok because white people were used to it, it was part of their culture.
I'm not saying the GP is correct (I'd rather see a study than "something a cartoon said"), but there are "numerous counter-examples" to everything. Pack-a-day smokers who lived to 110, high-functional alcoholics, people who lived long lives around lead, mercury and asbestos. That doesn't mean you don't want to encourage people to not try to beat the odds.
Tobacco smoking, alcohol abuse and exposure to lead, mercury and asbestos have been shown to have strong negative health effects by extensive studies with a lot of statistical power and grounded in theory.
This is not the case for cannabis use. The public perception of cannabis as having horrible negative health consequences comes from state propaganda, not science. Look it up yourself. But look for scientific articles, not newspaper articles.
So before you use that classical argument, you have to actually have some data that provides evidence for the substance under question being generally harmful.
Carl Sagan (one of the counter-examples) used to confront his scientist friends with this, and they were surprised to find that there is indeed very little scientific support for this view. For a while, the strongest result was that cannabis could help trigger early schizophrenia, but even this research is on shaky grounds (turns out that the population under study was highly biased).
> There is a high barrier to research about pot and other drugs such as LSD, for obvious reason. This means that while you have a gigantic corpus of data about alcohol usage, for instance, you have next to nothing to work with on pot.
Prohibition prevents scientific research, but it is not true that there isn't a lot of indirect data. One of them is cause of death at emergency rooms. While alcohol produces a large number of deaths daily, cannabis produced zero so far (in the history of modern medicine).
> Just because you don't have studies showing pot is harmful it doesn't mean pot isn't harmful. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Sure, but this applies to everything. Maybe having brown curtains in your living room increases your chances of suffering from depression. Let's make brown curtains illegal until we know more?
Pot has produced cancer deaths just like other forms of smoke inhalation. Incense is also harmful for similar reasons.
THC is fairly safe, inhaling smoke is stupid.
PS: As far as I know eating it is ok, but many things become harmful when you do them for 30+ years. Ex: Runniners often have knee problems over the long term.
There is a high barrier to research about pot and other drugs such as LSD, for obvious reason. This means that while you have a gigantic corpus of data about alcohol usage, for instance, you have next to nothing to work with on pot.
Just because you don't have studies showing pot is harmful it doesn't mean pot isn't harmful. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I suspect that the perceived correlation between smoking cannabis and being a loser is that successful cannabis smokers have a strong incentive against disclosing this habit -- they could lose their jobs, or be excluded from further opportunities. They also have more resources and possibly life experience and wisdom to protect themselves from law enforcement and the social status quo (i.e people like you who might judge them unfairly).
Of course I am not advocating cannabis use. I am advocating seeing what works for you and making up your own mind. Some people love coffee, some people don't. None of our business.
One problem I suspect that the status quo has with cannabis is that it is a type of drug that makes you more relaxed about status games. Some people describe the experience like this: it's not that you don't want to do things anymore, it's that you don't care so much about what other people think you should be doing.
But mostly, cannabis is illegal because of racism (it was associated with black people and the jazz scene when it became popular in the west) while alcohol -- a much more dangerous drug that is indeed heavily used to mask boredom -- is ok because white people were used to it, it was part of their culture.