THIS BUD'S FOR YOU, NOT ME

In the words of the NOFX song "Herojuana": "Why be sad when happiness can
be bought for a little more than free Modern-day prohibition At what age
can I choose how to live If God created plants and buds that I find and
abuse then who are you to judge me."

NOFX captures the sentiments of many marijuana smokers I have encountered:
"Marijuana is a plant. Marijuana makes me feel good. Marijuana is natural.
What's wrong with it."

I don't even want to touch on whether marijuana should be legalized. I
don't want to mess with the question of whether it's wrong, either. My
issue right now is with how smoking marijuana messes things up.

For me, dealing with a person who smokes marijuana pulls me in every
direction. Objectively there isn't a lot of ambiguity involved for me, but
when it involves someone I care about, my opinion becomes blurred.

Let's say I have a friend who smokes way too much marijuana. I think we can
all relate. We'll call him Mot, which is not backwards for anything.

Mot says marijuana makes him happy. He says it helps him deal with some
clinical problems he has. It makes him more relaxed and more talkative;
rather than serving as an escape from his true self; he says it is the
means by which he is able to realize his true self.

I don't have much to say in response. I always thought I could trust my
intuition to know my feelings about most anything. So I consider this: When
it comes to him smoking marijuana incessantly, I get an uneasy feeling. So
how come I continue to have a hard time reconciling this issue.

The reason I don't smoke marijuana is clear. I hate being out of control of
my body.

I think that's a reasonable enough idea, from which no one could possibly
get hurt. But even with this seemingly uncontroversial stance, I am faced
with Mot's reasoning that it is silly to bar myself from fully exploiting
what nature has to offer me.

So then I turn to the same nature argument Mot uses to support his
position. I say smoking marijuana creates artificial situations for meeting
people, circumstances under which persevering, meaningful connections
aren't made. Then Mot will ask me how meeting people while smoking
marijuana together is any different from meeting them through any other
shared enjoyable activity.

Well you're not getting to know each other's real selves, I say. He says
some of the best connections he's made have been with people he met through
smoking, because not only did that present the opportunity for him to meet
them, but they were more comfortable and expressive under that influence.

I press the matter: "Isn't marijuana an artificial way of solving your
problems, making yourself feel happy." Mot says it's just like doing
anything else to make yourself happy, like eating. But I reason that we
need food to live. Mot says he has clinical conditions that make it so he
needs marijuana to live. It gives his life a degree of enjoyment.

Well, I don't like it because it demonstrates lack of respect for health
and value for life. This is the point on which Mot will make a small
concession - not that he is disrespecting his health, but a factual one;
smoking comes with some long-term health effects. Still he says these do
not outweigh the benefits for him.

But it's messing up your life, I say. You can't get anything done because
you're high all the time. You miss class because of it and you sleep all
day. Are you making anything of your life. Then he asks me to re-evaluate
my ideas of what constitutes success in life. He tells me that for him,
this is what he wants to do with his life. This is happiness.

How do you argue with that. I don't know how to tell someone his goals in
life are wrong, except to say that it is destroying his relationship with me.

So finally I ask where feelings come into play in all this. Does it matter
that his refusal to quit what I consider a destructive habit hurts me.

Of course it makes sense that I can't put him on some kind of guilt trip to
make him change. But that is where I get stuck. I don't want to use my
feelings to make someone else feel bad, but that doesn't change the fact
that my feelings are hurt and will be hurt no matter how much I reason they
shouldn't be.

When it comes down to it, the only plea you can make with someone who
thinks smoking marijuana is good for him appeals to his feelings. I wonder
how someone can continue to do something that hurts someone he cares about.
But I know that I would do the same if it were over something important
enough to me. So here we pause and both wonder how I can ask him to take
away his happiness.

Still, that doesn't mean I can sit by passively and watch. The most active
solution I have come up with is to hang out with him when he's sober as
much as I can. At least when he's with me, he's not smoking marijuana.
Maybe he'll find out that being sober can be an OK way to be.