Cannabis and Drugs
A common mis-perception is that cannabis is safe.
Puff for puff, cannabis smoke is more carcinogenic than tobacco smoke.
It creates chronic asthma in long term users, which can be severely debilitating in latter years.
Occasionally, a hard-core user will have the strength of character to admit that it is addictive. One, a member of UB40, who had to get stoned every night to get to sleep.
What happens when you smoke it? It doesn’t generally animate people. In a musically creative situation, a group is likely to start with the idea of writing and recording a brand new number, but after a couple of spliffs, nobody can be bothered to switch on the recorder. Stoned people rarely dance, and don’t generally say anything witty. Illusion.
And mental illness. Cannabis can cause paranoia and depression, even psychosis.
It also provides a living for some nasty people.
It’s often used as an escape from an unattractive reality. Same as alcohol, or many other things for that matter. For a while, on a drug, even prescription anti depressants, we can gain an impression of happiness. The alternative is to put effort into one’s reality to make that a pleasant place to be, and then the desire to escape evaporates. It takes effort, but for some short term work, the long term gains are higher than the stick-it-with-sellotape remedy of taking drugs.
Maybe some people react violently to the notion that cannabis is dangerous, because they don’t want to appear weak by saying they were wrong? Maybe the truth dents the egos of those who have expounded the virtues of hash for so long previously. When you’ve gone down a certain path for a long time, it hurts one’s pride to admit for years that you were wrong, so in our subconscious we might know we’re only hurting ourselves – but we’d rather continue hurting ourselves than to admit publicly that we were wrong. If we admit we were wrong then we risk falling a few steps down the Social Esteem ladder – to appear weak to others. But the reality is that by not changing, we are actually being weak. We cause our own demise in order to protect our egos. After all, if we try to understand and learn, we can become stronger. If we incorporate a truth which is new to us, we are better armed with correct knowledge.
The drug dealing culture gains money from addicts, and so it is they who want to fool us that drugs are cool, or ok? Those people want to alter our Truth Jigsaw, so that they can take from us. The illusion generates their profits. Maybe we’ve been had – we’re being controlled by people who are using us for their own gains.
And cannabis is likely to get you hooked on tobacco too.