I used to smoke weed a lot. Throughout my four years of college, I probably smoked weed once a day on average (this average includes, for example, two-week stints of zero smoking as well as month-long binges of heavy consumption, when I’d smoke two to four times a day). My third year of school, I did an exchange program in Holland. The point is, I have been, at times, a total stoner. So, I mean: I get weed. I get it. But I quit smoking awhile ago, and now I think it sucks. Here’s why.

REASON WEED SUCKS #1: IT’S A WASTE OF MONEY (NOT APPLICABLE TO MEDICAL MARIJUANA)

Smoking weed all the time is a huge drain on your finances. An eighth of weed here in Seattle costs $50, and a regular smoker could go through an eighth in a week, easy. And what do you do when you smoke weed? You sit on the couch, watch a movie or play a video game, and spend more money on a bunch of gross food that you later feel gross about. What did you get out of it? Drymouth? Impaired motor abilities? Short-term memory loss? Relaxation? I guess. I dunno. It seems expedient to find cheaper, less tar-consumptive ways to relax, because with weed, you’re relaxing for like $10 an hour, a smelly apartment, food binges, and tar on your lungs.

REASON WEED SUCKS #2: IT MAKES YOU DUMB

Yeah, it does. When you’re high, you’re stupid. And if you’re high all the time (or from the time you get home from work until the time you pass out on the couch with your bong on your lap), well then – you’re stupid all the time. Because when you get high, it’s difficult to think straight. When you get high, it’s difficult to think in a normal capacity (key word is normal). When you get high, you aren’t supposed to drive because you’re impaired.

When you get high, you’re on drugs. And when you’re on drugs – you’re dumb. It’s ok – being dumb on drugs can be fun. We all get dumb on drugs sometimes. But don’t try to tell me that you’re actually smarter on weed, because you aren’t. What actually happens when you’re high is your eyes get red, glaze over and close halfway; you laugh a lot, you misunderstand people and can’t follow what they’re saying, and non-high people dismiss you because you’re “just high.”

REASON WEED SUCKS #3: IT MAKES YOU PARANOID AS SHIT

Weed sucks because it makes you paranoid. Not like, paranoid about the cops raiding your house and finding your bong (well, maybe that, too), but paranoid about just being around other people. When people ask me if I want to smoke weed with them and I tell them thank you, but no, and they try to pressure me further into smoking, I tell them “You don’t want me to smoke weed with you. My facial expression will become very afraid and then I’ll just leave the room without saying anything. I’ll kill the vibe. Believe me – you don’t want to smoke weed with me.” This has actually happened. The problem with weed is that it gets into your head and starts making you ultra self-aware to the point where your sensitivity to social cues is literally tormenting. It also makes you so aware (as David portays so well in the video) of yourself that you begin mentally berating yourself for all the “wrong” things you’ve done in the recent past. And so once you smoke weed, you’re done. Time to go home.

REASON WEED SUCKS #4: WEED IS THE ANTI-PRODUCTIVITY DRUG

When you smoke weed, you’re more likely to get into a YouTube conspiracy video tunnel than you are to finish editing the first three chapters of your thesis. Weed steals your time and turns it into a pile of warm mush that smells like Taco Bell. Yes – maybe you got high that one time and beat the latest Gears of War or whatever – but, sorry, that doesn’t count as productivity. The truth is that weed just makes you want to sit and stare at a wall, or at a flashing TV screen, or at a video game. But like, do you really think that, when you’re older, you’ll remember all those times you took bong hits and watched Good Movies to Get High To like Inception and Pink Floyd’s The Wall? “Man, that was the most exciting and stimulating time in my life! When I got high every day and played video games and watched lots of UFO videos on YouTube alone in my room!” Seems unlikely.

REASON WEED SUCKS #5: YOU GET OBSESSED WITH IT

After getting addicted to weed, it’s like you have to have it to feel okay. You spend all day needing to be high. You spend hours driving around with your friends simply trying to get a bag of weed. Entire nights are cancelled or Not Good Enough because you didn’t smoke beforehand. Drama ensues over Who Smoked Who Out and who bought the last bag of weed. And when there’s no way to get it for the time being, you find yourself smoking the saliva drenched ends of rancid joints and scraping the tar out of a metal pipe and smoking it.

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That said, I’m all for legalization, if only to end the massive waste of taxpayer money that is the Drug War, and to make it easier for sick people to get some pain relief. I have no moral problem with weed. I will not judge you for smoking weed, because I believe that smoking weed and being a Good Person are not at all mutually exclusive. I just don’t like it. I am a veteran of smoking weed – I smoked it heavily for four to six years of my life. So I feel somewhat justified in my bashing of weed. And I know that some people identify very strongly with weed, so to those, I say: congratulations for getting all the way to the end of this article! One would have thought you’d be off watching Windows Media Player visualizations to Bob Marley by now.