Reading

Few activities require as much combined use of memory and mental concentration as reading, and even those smokers who pride themselves on being able to do anything stoned will sometimes make an exception here. Reading while smoking tends to be for pleasure rather than for information, and those who are willing and able to make the effort usually find the experience to be rewarding.
    "Reading while high is a great experience," writes a man from Chicago. "It can be the National Lampoon or King Lear. You can feel the way the writer wants you to feel through his words." The notion that the stoned reader can somehow "feel through" what the writer has written is not uncommon among marijuana smokers, although, as French author Henri Michaux recounts, it can sometimes work against the author as well:

Treacherous hashish, hashish as hunting dog, instructive hashish. It sees quicker than we do, pointing to what we have not yet understood. One day when I was looking at a study in a review,... by an erudite young philosopher, I heard something that sounded like the murmur of crowds, gathered to listen to these words! Well, well! The sentence, even when later I read it, cold and philosophic though it appeared, was a model of the kind of false thinking that is trying for effect, a sentence that could never come from the pen of one who had not caressed the idea of multiple approbations and... of appearing on a platform.
    Thus, by virtue of a succession of short circuits, I heard the applause with which this writer had felt himself surrounded, having without the slightest doubt sought it. The rest of the article showed in several places that he was not a man to content himself solely with ideas.... Presently, though he was still soft-pedaling this ambition, it was clear that it was acclaim which would interest him in ten years, having an audience right up front and reacting immediately. Hashish opens up the inner space of sentences, and, as the concealed preoccupations come out, it pierces them at once. It is curious that this hashish, when I used it to test a few authors, never proved vain, or eccentric. Set at the quarry, it never faltered. It was diligent as a falcon. The author thus unmasked never altogether recovered his mantle or his former retreat.[9]

    A Child's Garden of Grass advises that reading is one of those activities better suited to a relatively mild intoxication. "If you get too high," the book cautions, "reading becomes impossible. You forget the beginning of the sentence by the time you get to the end. If you try to read while stoned, you'll find that you're reading the same paragraph over and over, trying to get it to make sense."[10]
    Users who have studied high report mixed results. "When I'm stoned," says a Philadelphia college student, "my thought processes are often confused and illogical, and I spin off on tangents. I never smoke when I have a test, or when I'm studying or doing school work or any serious reading." Most students who use marijuana will reduce their smoking while working on a paper or preparing for an exam.
    There are, however, many exceptions. A student at Columbia College writes:

When high, I read at almost double my speed. I like to smoke, find a good book and an undisturbed corner, and emerge two or three hours later with one less book on my reading list. I can zero in on the book with more complete concentration, fairly leaping from paragraph to paragraph.

    This student goes on to report that he sometimes studies when he is high, but whenever he does so, he also gets high for the exam; this, he believes, gives him special access to what he has studied.