The Soul

Does marijuana affect the values of the people who smoke it? For some users, at least, the answer is yes, although this group appears to be in the minority. It appears that these changed values go in two different directions, forming an interesting contradiction. On the one hand, many smokers have found marijuana the perfect companion to a greater pursuit of pleasure, sensuality, and physical comfort. At the same time, an equally large group, which includes some people from the first group, sees marijuana as the appropriate vehicle for an exploration of spirituality. Many considered marijuana the ideal drug for the 1970S because of these twin uses. The message of the 1960S was: choose either the good life or the meaningful life. For the most part, the smokers made the second choice. But the 1970S offered a very different message, which was difficult to resist: why not choose both? And with marijuana to help them, many smokers did.
    Lenny, who has tried to incorporate both the good and the meaningful in his life, explains how marijuana fits into this scheme:

Dope is about Epicureanism. When you're stoned, and you're eating a bowl of soup, you can taste it better. If you're listening to a record, you notice it sounds better. Well, after a certain amount of time, when you realize that you can really get off on a good bowl of soup, or a record, you begin to understand something. What's right in front of your nose can be a real treat. You can enjoy a Sunday afternoon just walking down the street, doing nothing in particular except enjoying the trees, and getting off on what you see.
    With all this going on, you wonder if you should be worrying so much about whether you become an associate professor or an executive vice-president by the time you're thirty-four. Hey, it's a beautiful day, let's watch the sunset! When it comes right down to it, either you're happy or you're not happy. Epicureanism says you can be happy with what's around you, that enjoying life is the most important thing. It also says that you can enjoy life even in a very small room—if you've got a large enough mind.

    Steve, the car salesman who has been smoking heavily for ten years, claims that marijuana has helped him to realize the relative unimportance of material values in his life. "I think that everybody who gets into drugs on a serious level is looking for a remaking of all values," he says, pointing to the fact that most of the smokers he knows have in some way shifted away from the pursuit of money and career advancement and toward human relationships and spiritual concerns.
    A man whose parents were survivors of the Nazi Holocaust sees marijuana as a symbol for a kind of thinking that could alert people to dangers they might not otherwise see, or want to see:

I hope that dope gives me the strength to resist straight-world thinking. During the early 1930s, when Hitler was newly in power, the Jews in Germany thought in straight-world terms: it made sense, after all, to try to save your business and your house. No logical person could have anticipated what was about to happen. It was absurd, and straight-world thinking doesn't usually take the absurd into account. People naturally assumed that things would get better. I hope that dope can help people in that way, by preventing them from relying too heavily on the external facts that their rational minds perceive, and by forcing them sometimes to think about the unthinkable.

    For other smokers, a change in values has more to do with their own personalities. One man reported that he had been voted the most changed person in his class at his tenth-year college reunion. He attributes at least part of the change to marijuana, which, as he sees it, helped him to understand that there was more to life than intellectual concerns and the worship of scholarship for its own sake:

The goal of my life used to be the acquisition of knowledge, because that would somehow give me greater worth as a person. But I found that the pursuit of that goal led only to an increasing feeling of unworthiness, as the more I came to know, the more I was aware of how much I didn't know. This resulted in a feeling of inadequacy, and in a lack of satisfaction from what I actually did know.