how bad do you think marijuana really is, honestly?

In my experience it affects different people different ways. I’ve met people who after 6 months of smoking pot lost all their ambition for anything but partying and were generally worthless for anything else. I also met people who were successful professionals and have been smoking pot daily for decades and are as lucid and cogent as anyone you would ever meet. I would say it depends on the person. The one thing I am pretty sure about is that the laws against pot do more harm than good. Locking someone up for years or decades because they were in possession of pot doesn’t help the person nor society; it ruins their life and costs us $billions.

I got so many thoughts on this …The wrong perception that it can make you paranoid is due IMO to the fact it can make your eyes squient/close up and red eye,glazed …so the paranoid feelings people get are that from worrying about being noticed because there smoking buddys have at some point said “your eyes look f**ked man” or sumin…Then you go out in public ,feel the buzz and think you must look as ya mates said = paranoid…but its a healthy paranoid state of mind…its being aware of yourself and your surrondings, being aware that some people may look at you and suspect your stoned, thats healthy and realisticly sound if you are stoned coz you no doubt do look stoned…Of course you do have a large percentage of the population who just should not do any subtance `es that may effect perception of reality wheather good or bad but with healthy ,mentaly well balanced people , it cant make you paranoid IMO…maybe a hightened state of conscienceness that can be perceived as looking too deep,because your paranoid lol

There are two particularly important issues here:

(a) from the purely medical point of view: marijuana is less dangerous than many other “recreational substances” such as: alcohol; tobacco; Cola-Cola; and Big-Macks. It can even be beneficial in alleviating the symptoms of some pathological conditions.

(b) from the legal point of view: it depends upon the jurisdiction in which the individual is using the substance. In states and nations where its use is legal (or at least “decriminalised”). I am quite clear, in my own mind, that democratic society has a right to elect its own leaders. Those properly elected leaders have a right to enact legislation which should then be considered universally binding upon ALL persons who are either permanently, or temporarily, resident within that society.

I guess I am instinctively a prohibition era Elliot Ness (“Untouchables”) type of character. I really do not accept that civil disobedience is an acceptable method of opposing legislation that one does not agree with, except in the most extreme of circumstances. For example: when living in a jurisdiction in which there exists genuinely contradictory legislation, making it impossible to uphold one legally binding statute, without simultaneously breaking the conflicting legislation.

Personal Conclusion:
there is little, if anything, wrong in using (or selling) marijuana, if it is legal to do so; but it is without a doubt just as iniquitous as committing any other criminal (or civil) offence, in jurisdictions which happen to deem it to be a criminal (or civil) offence.

I don’t think its that bad. But only if you don’t use it all the time as side effects over becoming addicted is perminant and hard to live with for others around. X

Well, you can feel good using marijuana, and it’s not bad, of course :) However, you should never forget about negative effects that can lead to serious health problems. I suggest you to read some articles like this one - http://alcoholism.about.com/od/pot/a/effects.-Lya.htm and think twice before using it next time.

If you get addicted, yes. If you illegally get it, yes. For some reason my city allows people to grow marijuana. They don’t realize that it creates a larger amount of people illegally buying/selling/trading weed. Our city is very “smart” and filled with a lot of “normal” people.