Quote Originally Posted by Frickr
That when you smoke pot, your short term memory is lost forever. and you get dumber the more you smoke.
i have prob a far better memory then alot of other people, and i havent seen any decreased inteligence.
Yeah, but that doesn't necessarily prove the rule. I smoke a pack a day and I have low blood pressure. This is not the norm. Not saying you're wrong, just saying, it's a poor argument to make that because something affects or doesn't affect you in a particular way, it must be globally true.

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I just find it funny whenever I see an anti-weed image or commercial or whatever. It's amusing that they try to stress that it's not cool, even though the vast, vast majority of users never make a claim that it is cool. Over a substantial timeline (i.e. ignoring one-time users or first-time users), people do it because they want to, and for no other reason -- and stoners, I notice in general, could give half a sh*t whether people think they're cool. Weed is not like a particular brand of clothing or a genre of music. Something that affects you as much as weed is never going to be something pursued consistently just to uphold an image. Maybe the first time or two a drug like weed or tobacco might be taken largely due to peer pressure or to see how it affects your image (in addition to how it makes you feel), but no one's going to keep it up as a front: they either like it and continue, or don't like it and discontinue. The anti-drug campaign's largest fallacy is the image that somewhere, perhaps in your neighborhood, a teenager is being forced to get high, as though drugs were abundant, cheap, and obtained as easily as soft drinks, and as though drug users have nothing better to do than try to force the weak to use substances with them.

In one of the "talking dog" commercials (which are especially amusing because they're animated like children drew them, as if first graders were commonly offered weed), a person is about to smoke a joint but feels badly about it and asks his dog to smoke with him so he feels better. The dog disapproves, the person cries, and with any luck the person decides to make the right decision and not smoke... but the reason it's the right decision for him is because, clearly shown from his misgivings about smoking as well as his possible unresolved emotional issues (not to mention the fact that he can hold conversation with his dog), he's obviously not at all into it and doesn't enjoy it much. The commercial succeeds in sending an incredibly obvious message: if you try weed and don't like it, don't continue using it. The people who try it and don't like it are almost universally going to discontinue use in the first place, though! Meanwhile, the people who try it and like it and want to use it again aren't going to listen to the commercial anyway (because they've made their decision already), but actually are totally justified in shrugging it off as an irrelevant ad, since the message in it really isn't even aimed at the people who enjoy getting stoned. The ad neither presents relevant information to the experienced smoker nor discourages the nonsmoker from trying weed once. It will presumably affect the decisions of a small amount of individuals with weak constitutions who are easily swayed by advertising in the first place, but outside of that the commercial has no real point, because all other target audiences' behaviors are basically unaffected by the ad, and would be the same even if the ad was never created and aired. This upsets me cheifly because I know that in all likelihood my tax money was used to make this Captain Obvious of 20-second spots.