Why People Smoke

People use marijuana for a variety of reasons. The most famous, peer pressure, is indeed one of them, but it is actually far down on the list, and is much less prominent a reason than the public apparently believes. The most important reason that people try marijuana is out of curiosity; they stay with it if the experience is fun or enjoyable or stimulating.
    Our society finds it profoundly difficult to accept the notion that some people use marijuana and other nonmedical drugs primarily because they lead to experiences that are fun, or meaningful, or both. Built upon formidable Puritan roots, American culture retains the lingering legacy of, in Mencken's famous phrase, "the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy." That a rational and responsible person might deliberately perform an act that may not be socially useful or in any way related to the work ethic is a difficult notion—unless, of course, that person needs to use drugs. And so, in each decade of the twentieth century, society has invented various reasons to explain the increased use of alcohol, cannabis, and other drugs, including Prohibition, the end of Prohibition, economic depression, war, social tensions, political alienation, conformity, nonconformity, and most recently, the youthful rebellion and the "me decade." By now it should be clear that while such "reasons" come and go with the years, the use of drugs continues to escalate without regard to the explanations.[10]
    In the 1960s, social generalizations about drug use did make some sense. In that era, marijuana smoking was something more than a personal decision; it constituted an act of belonging to a specific subculture or community, with its own norms and values. These days, however, marijuana smokers belong to the same society as everybody else; one result of this change is that even those smokers who appear to use the drug casually have often given serious thought to their reasons for smoking. For some, this reflection may be due to their discomfort in performing an illegal act; for those who find themselves sharing most of society's values and norms, marijuana smoking constitutes an act of defiance they feel they must explain, if only to themselves.
    When marijuana users talk about what they find attractive in marijuana, they often mention its effect of allowing the mind to wander almost effortlessly, visiting new places and returning to familiar ones, and focusing in on issues and objects that often lie beyond the normal range of concerns. The focus may be on the secrets of the universe, or a sudden preoccupation with the colors or the pattern of the living room rug; marijuana generally does not respect the operative boundaries that separate the ridiculous from the sublime. When one's normal range of concerns becomes fixed on depressing, trivial or unproductive topics, marijuana may help the user get unstuck, as this research scientist explains:

I smoke pot because I enjoy the idea that one minute my mind and body are tired, confused and depressed, and the next minute it doesn't matter. The high has built up unknowingly while I've been smoking, and the doors of my mind have been opened. My problems and frustrations don't go floating away, but rather, they are no longer important for a while. I can still conjure them up if I want there are, after all, still bills to pay, doctors to visit, relatives to deal with. But where does such worrying get you?

    Often, marijuana allows its users to shift their minds away from their own problems and to focus instead on the world immediately around them. And that world, the smokers report, is suddenly more interesting, more alive, more rich with details and possibilities. A retired professor mentions that he smokes whenever he wants to enjoy what he is doing even more. "Life is beautiful," he says, "why not make it transcendent?" Many smokers find that when they are stoned, they appreciate ordinary things more deeply and become more intensely involved in routine experiences.
    This is in sharp contradiction to the popular view that smokers use marijuana to "escape" or to avoid coping with "reality." Indeed, both of these uses are possible and, particularly in the case of younger smokers, not uncommon. But most adult smokers find it difficult to use marijuana as an escape, because it simply doesn't work well in that capacity. As a law student put it, "If I smoke to forget some important problem, I'll usually end up thinking about it all the harder. Very often, in fact, I'll be able to solve it, or at least to understand why I have it."
    Some smokers argue, with respect to those who do use marijuana to escape, that it is unfair that such people are judged more harshly than their friends and colleagues who escape in other ways, through television, for example, or music, movies, friends, sleeping, work, or a dozen other routes. Every recreational activity has the potential of being used both well and poorly, and marijuana is no exception. As one smoker puts it, "If something you do for pleasure gets in the way of your life, then it's escape. Otherwise, it's play."
    Besides, argue some smokers, a certain amount of escape is both necessary and desirable. A Detroit family described the role played by marijuana in the recuperation of their daughter, a high school student who had been bedridden for months by back surgery. During this period, she used marijuana daily to cope with the pain and the boredom. She regards her own use as escape, but defends it as being essential to her mental health and happiness during an otherwise miserable winter.
    But for most smokers, escape is simply not a real issue. On the contrary; for many, marijuana leads to a greater sense of involvement that may, paradoxically, be experienced in terms of detachment or separation. In such cases, marijuana may help the user isolate a particular problem, task, or experience, acting as a kind of chemical coloring agent that shows component parts in relief from the whole that surrounds them. A man who works for an insurance company describes how this process works for him:

Smoking marijuana helps me see my life as a continuous whole. It allows me to step back from my daily concerns and see the direction in which I am headed. If I then feel I should make adjustments, marijuana helps me decide how to proceed. By removing myself temporarily from my daily concerns, I can see how certain little things—an argument I may have had, for example—are just not as important as I had once thought. Not only that, but it also makes me feel that the only way to get past such a problem is by constructive action, rather than mournful brooding.

    Claire, a radio announcer who studied philosophy in college, makes a similar point about the relationship between detachment and involvement:

Plato believed that the true philosopher had to step back from the everyday world—the Agora, the marketplace, he called it; there, men are too busy with the mundane details of life: buying and selling, eating and sleeping, taking care of business. To find truth and beauty, Plato said, a man has to remove himself from the business of the everyday world.
    For me, marijuana serves such a function. It is a way of stepping out of the routine, and gaining a fresh perspective. It allows me to take the time to simply enjoy and appreciate what is going on, to see beauty in everyday things that I would otherwise never notice.