Different Views on Marijuana Under One Roof
A housemate disagreement over marijuana use sparks a larger conversation about mental health, coping mechanisms, and personal responsibility. One roommate believes daily marijuana use helps him function and feel balanced, while another questions whether regular use can quietly become harmful over time.
Dear Douglas,
I am living in a house in Hanoi with 2 other housemates. We get along pretty well, but have an ongoing disagreement about one thing. One of my housemates smokes marijuana every day. He says it puts him in a good mood and that he is able to function fine. He compares it to others who take anti-depressants or other medications. The other housemate uses it once in a while, for parties or on weekends. I have tried marijuana and decided that it is not a feeling I like and fear it is harmful.
Can you offer an opinion on the way that marijuana effects people and whether it is innocent and harmless, as my housemate says, or whether it is a bad idea and can be harmful if used too much? Maybe you can help add some food for thought to our discussions.
Thank you,
Peter
Dear Peter,
Thank you for the question and a chance to offer some ideas for consideration. I don’t believe there is a consensus about the benefits and risks of using marijuana. I will offer some of my opinions.
Expanding our consciousness has long been a curiosity of the human species. We can do that in a variety of ways including taking drugs to generate “highs” that alter our perspectives and creating “peak” experiences that involve the excitement of high risk…like rock climbing or parachuting or other extreme sports. We have the capability of creating intense emotions, like pleasure, elation, excitement and euphoria. These feelings represent the parameters of what is possible in the human experience.
One thing we have learned about the pursuit of intense positive feelings, is that the pursuit of these feelings requires more and more of the experience to attain the same intensity. For example, a person might feel elation the first time they were able to surf a wave standing up the whole way. But, soon the same experience is no longer as exciting and the surfer will want to find bigger waves and to ride it for longer. Humans have found many ways to pursuit pleasure that lead them into behaviors with unwanted results. Of course we know of drugs, alcohol, gambling, gaming and porn…as addictions that can ruin lives.
I hold the belief that there is value in following our curiosities in ways that expand our experiences and offer ways of seeing and thinking that are beyond the schemas or our exposure. I think it is good for people to try things that are on the edge of their comfort zones. The risk is that they get caught in those pursuits; the benefit is that they are able to integrate these experiences into a grounded and stable life.
A grounded and stable life includes the use of our thinking capacity, our emotions, and our body as sources of information as to how we respond and make choices day by day.
For the sake of brevity, I will focus on emotions here. When we feel anger it is because we perceive something to be unfair or not right. When we feel fear, it is because we perceive a danger or a threat in our environment. When we experience frustration it is because we are thwarted from what we are trying to accomplish. All emotions help us guide the choices we make and are necessary to the decisions we make.
Smoking marijuana every day alters the way we experience our emotions. We stimulate endorphins and produce more dopamine than is coming from our natural experience. If we are angry and then smoke marijuana, our anger dissipates in favor of the good feelings of being high. When done regularly, we find that we are avoiding the issues related to our anger and do not make the appropriate adjustments in our lives that the anger is telling us about. Our authentic experiences of emotions get usurped by the choice to alter our moods. Over a long period this can be very problematic. For example, a man told me that he recently got divorced after being unhappily married for 14 years. He said that it was when he stopped smoking marijuana that he finally faced the issues he was avoiding with his wife…the result of which was to break up the marriage. He blamed his marijuana use for not listening to his feelings and acting in accordance with them.
For me it is possible to expand one’s experiences in a variety of ways, including selective use of drugs. I don’t believe that constant use of drugs help us to be connected to ourselves in a stable and grounded way. I see many people who are managing depression with marijuana…but not with satisfactory outcomes.
I hope you have some more ideas to consider with your housemates. Remember…we learn by living and healthy discussions are not always about who is right or wrong…but what truths we can bring to the large discussion of how to live life.
Enjoy,
Douglas
