Stopping

For some smokers, the most judicious use of marijuana is not to use it at all. Not surprisingly, this decision is not always made easily, because for most users there is a complex trade-off of positive and negative effects. There are several million former marijuana smokers, and they differ from former users of alcohol and cigarettes in that most of them do not condemn the drug they have discontinued using. Indeed, some ex-users even foresee an occasional return to smoking. As one man put it, "I don't like the effects of grass, and I'm glad I quit. But I do want to get high every now and then over the next few years, just to make sure that I'm not deceiving myself about anything."
    Smokers decide to quit for a variety of reasons. For some people, smoking simply loses its appeal and ceases to be fun or interesting. "It got to the point where marijuana was like being tickled when you didn't feel like it," notes a musician. And a film critic explains why he stopped smoking:

I think for me it may have been a surrogate for real challenge. It became so splendidly hard to think straight, such a brilliant struggle with spotlights and choruses underscoring the effort, that my curiosity and ambition were sated on a narrow diet of pop music and escape reading. I think there is in me and other people a real drive to achieve and make something of ourselves in the process. But marijuana catered to my fear of initiating things. It let me sit things out with a Marvel Comic Book, or an amazing pizza with all those weird things on it.

    Some smokers come to a point where they feel that they have outgrown marijuana, that it represents a stage of life from which they want to move away. "Smoking helped me grow in some ways," explains a photographer from Phoenix, "but to continue growing I had to leave it behind."
    For other smokers, quitting comes about spontaneously:

When I smoked my last joint, I didn't know that would be it. I didn't make a simple one-shot decision. It has been more a matter of deciding to resume smoking again at a different juncture in my life. Only recently did I realize I had quit. Of course, I can't guarantee that I'll never smoke again. It seems unlikely, but as my history teacher used to tell us, "Never say never."

    "In the periods when I don't smoke," a journalist told me, "I feel as though a mist has been lifted, and I can see things with much greater clarity." He has since quit, explaining:

Although I had developed a cough, it was something I didn't want to look at, so I just tuned it out. I also found that grass made me sluggish and dopey and sedated, which were effects I didn't notice while I was getting high. But when I stopped, I saw those things and didn't like them.

    An Ohio woman quit for very practical reasons:

I stopped smoking because I am striving for bigger and better things. I am trying to get into graduate school in clinical psychology, and for me, smoking and studying are simply incompatible.

    To be sure, some ex-smokers are less tolerant of their former use of marijuana. A Washington, D.C., woman who works as a congressional aide sees marijuana as representative of an entire lifestyle, "mellow" and conflict-free, which she rejects. "I'm drawn instead to conflict, tension, and hopefully resolution," she explains. "What marijuana does is to skip the conflicts and go right to the resolution, where things are resolved without really being explored."
    Today, marijuana is so widely accepted that many users have forgotten it is a drug; during the lg60s, this problem was less acute. "Back then," says one veteran smoker, "we knew that we shouldn't take our cues about drugs from the general culture. Today, when the culture is much more hospitable to drugs, we have to remember that lesson. If we're going to resist the propaganda of the antipot forces, we have to be careful to fight back without resorting to propaganda of our own. The answer to 'drugs are dangerous' is not that drugs are benign. The truth is more complicated than that and we owe it to ourselves to think long and hard about which drugs we decide to use, and how we are going to use them."