Some smokers are convinced that when they are high, they have

There is no such thing as a profound revelation when stoned! At the time of the thought, you may think that when you reveal it the universe will shake, but if you recall it later when you're straight, you'll laugh at its insignificance.[15]

    In general, even the most sympathetic experts agree that stoned insights represent just so much wishful thinking. For Norman Zinberg, such claims are not to be taken seriously and represent an example of users investing too much in the magical and mystical properties of the drug itself. According to Zinberg, the claim for insights is also a way of justifying marijuana and moralizing on its behalf. "In many cases," he notes, "the straight culture's moral opposition to marijuana is matched by the counterculture, with its moral insistence that it is engaged in a positive activity."
    In actual fact, most smokers do not claim that marijuana leads to particularly original insights. Carol holds a typical view:

I have never had an insight about a patient when I was stoned, and in fact I don't recall ever having a new insight of any kind that I wouldn't have had otherwise. My head rambles on whether or not I'm stoned, though, so it doesn't make that much of a difference.

    What also seems to be typical is the experience of the false insight, the ephemeral idea that seems remarkable at first, but soon disintegrates. A high school boy writes that he once had "a profound revelation" when he was stoned: in order to get into a car on the passenger's side, you have to use your right hand to push down on the handle, and when you want to get into the driver's side, you have to use your left hand. "Really profound," he says. "I was so proud of myself—until the next morning." And, in a similar occurrence, a high school girl recalls:

One night I was stoned and munching out and I knew the reason for people getting fat. I wrote it down: "When you get fat, it's because you eat so much that the material in the food you've eaten has so much importance that the bloodstream needs so much of the materials it ends up having to store everything because there's so much that gets to be stored material that you get fatter and fatter the more you eat."

    Nobody would dispute that most insights which occur on marijuana are, indeed, trivial—as trivial, certainly, as the insights people have when they are not stoned. But to claim that it's impossible to have an insight of any profundity with marijuana is summarily to ignore and dismiss the claims of many smokers. That pseudoinsights occur frequently on marijuana does not necessarily mean that real insights cannot. Jack Margolis, author of A Child's Garden of Grass, now concedes that he was wrong on this point:

What I meant to say was that those things which sound profound are usually shit. Some are good—maybe one in a hundred. But when you're straight, the odds are even lower, down to around one in a thousand.
    When I wrote the book, I said that you can't have profound revelations on grass. If I write a new foreword, I would say that up to that point I myself had never had a profound revelation on marijuana. But since then, they've been coming like eggs out of a chicken.

    Some marijuana insights are simply restatements, or new understandings, of previously accepted truths, as this Indiana secretary explains:

Introspection and insights are in the same category as sight, sound, and smell: you always knew something, but you never realized it. For a surface example, you always knew how old you were, or how long you've been married, but one day you stop to realize that fact, and it's astounding.