thoughts on how marijuana does it's thing
We're all well acquainted with the knowlege that marijuana disrupts your short term memory. That much is true, and the effect can linger a day or two if you've been smoking heavily. However, it's not permanent. Take a break from the pot and your memory restores.
Much of the effects of marijuana in popular awareness are pure BS or teenager hijinks. You've been young and used some form of inebriation to excuse silliness or rule breaking, if not worse, right? Now it's true that alcohol can create absolute chaos in one's moral fiber, but marijuana does not. If anything, it strengthens that fiber. Stoners are pretty sociable folks. They share, they care, they listen, they hug, they feed each other and offer a bed for the night. I never met a stoned person who wasn't nicer than a straight. Oh, those are ancient hippy terms for those who take recreational drugs vs those who don't. Straights are sober people with a stick up their ass and that's what keeps them straight. The rest of us have different lables, but not one that is in opposition to straight except 'I'm not straight, man." I mean, I think it should be bent, but well. Get bent, LOL.
What marijuana does, chiefly, is to disrupt the short term memory awareness. I cuts you off from the last three seconds, but the information is still entered into long term memory the same as ever! I can wait a few extra beats and I'll remember. Or choose not to, and not remember except very vaguely.
What this does, is break our sense of time. We become fixed in the moment. We can still think our way back into time awareness. We can still get ourselves worked up. But it is by choice, then, not so much by triggers. Now for psych things, this allows us to let go more quickly and relax again, thus resulting in a more laid back emotional state. We slow down. We take it easy. We can still put ourselves into a job and work hard, but we don't get worked up over it and we don't get lost in the size of it either. It's much easier to set into it and focus on the task at hand. Because we keep forgetting everything else.
This includes pain. You feel pain on marijuana, unlike opium. You feel it and forget it, over and over, and when the pain is in a lull state, because pain is never constant, it throbs or pulses, waves or moves in tides, but it does take breaks, more or less. Marijuana helps you bridge over the tougher spots, because you immediately forget how much it hurt as soon as it stops. It's remembering between hits that really undoes a person, they don't get the relief because their mind screams in terror. Take out the terror, and by god it's astonishing how much you can stand.
This then also applies for mental pain. CPTSD type stuff. You just jump from second to second, focusing instead on what's happening in the moment. Now, granted, this can effect your executive functioning. It's hard in that state to organize your time or make plans for something else, or stop doing this and start doing that. You put off things that aren't self motivating, like cleaning. This can be overcome by force of will, if the issue matters to the person.
I think it's always better if a person can avoid use of medicines of all kinds. Whether psychoactive or for other systems in the body. Better to exercise and eat right than get put on heart meds, for instance. Better to raise a child without abuse than to create another customer for the pot store. To refuse medicine that makes your life happier, gentler, healthier or more peaceful, or otherwise relieves your distress is a bit drastic. Maybe you don't trust the stuff or it's side effects, and that's fair, but judge someone who is willing to endure them because they need the relief? That's rather like judging a person for using glasses, isn't it?
the trouble with marijuana is a lack of unbiased science. It's all either for or against before the first notebook is opened. Neither side trusts the data and frankly, we shouldn't. Now that canada allows marijuana, we will at least begin to collect data from the wild. Car accidents blamed on weed alone, for instance (not many so far) or medical records and reports. We'll also get less afraid of it as time passes and the apocalypse is not triggered by stoners. More and more weed smokers who are successful in life will be unafraid to admit their use of it and that will help with the stigma. Weed crosses all walks of life. I've known abstainers who weren't being moral, but really didn't feel the need to do it. Whether or not they'd tried it, that is fair. but I've also met people who use it as some kind of badge of fitness and virtue. they scold and judge others.
Well ok. So I think the chief effect of weed is the disconnect of a couple of seconds in one's memory. It creates funny situations, but also a better grounding and sense of the now.