There are reasons MJ tends to be a progressive drug

Drugs are bad. Just say no. Etc.. The very healthiest possible lifestyle probably doesn't include any recreational drug use, including caffeine, nicotine, etc..

This OP is not about whether MJ is good, bad, etc., but rather, what kind of drug is it?

I see its primary effect as loosening the connection between the executive ME... ego, consciousness... and lower case "me," being the whole of the human organism.

But, rather than function declining catastrophically the person gets along pretty well because 90% of the time our consciousness is not dictating, but rather rationalizing to maintain a dictatorial sense of control and of conscious cause-and-effect.



Stoned people are less executive, and the web of rationalizations our conscious "me" constructs to insist that everything makes sense is weaker.

As a result, for instance, talking heads on TV may appear to be insane, and commercials doubly insane. And maybe what they are doing is, in fact, nuts. It is worth thinking about.

Taken at face value, absent the hammering 24/7 insistence of consciousness that the world makes sense, a lot of stuff really doesn't make sense. Should it?

Sometimes things are funnier. When we laugh there is usually some contradiction involved. With the gruff authoritarian "me" slightly less in control the personality isn't quite as good at tamping down and rationalizing whatever seemed funny.

Seeing things with a *relatively* innocent eye (I am talking about a relative reduction of effect... a few percent) makes people less certain and more questioning. It is a drug that meshes with what we think of as a hippie mind-set. Less aggressive, less dogmatic, more open to incongruity.

(Compare that to the promotion of the ego alcohol provides. Also fun, but a more self-agrandizing and agressive sort of fun. There is no certainty liken drunken certainty.)

So the *relative* LW preference for MJ seems sensible to me. It (temporarily and in relative terms) makes ones' own consciousness less authoritarian over ones self, and it tends to make authority appear comical.

There can be a paranoid downside to that, of course. With consciousness less integrated the "me" can feel adrift. We are, after all, talking about a small change in how we see systems of egoistic rationalization and pretense and artifice that we have constructed to get us through the day.

It is not always fun to have one's rationalizations revealed to be flimsier than one might wish. On the plus side, however, it usually doesn't take much to distract from such ruthless self-examination.

So yeah... I get MJ as a hippie drug, and I get why it is probably slightly more compatible with tolerance and non-violence and such. And versus alcohol, for instance, more ammenable to art and music and compromise and contemplation of nature and meditation, etc..