I've personally seen the benefits of marijuana--a stress reliever, pain killer, mood lifter, appetite enhancer...I could really go on forever. It baffles me that a harmless plant (nobody's ever died from marijuana!) is illegal, while alcohol and tobacco are perfectly fine in our society.
In fact in my developmental psychology class, I just learned that pregnant women sometimes smoke marijuana to relieve morning sickness and to improve their appetite. Upon further research, I learned that doctors believe marijuana isn't a teratogen (something that causes a birth defect in a child, such as alcohol and caffeine) unless combined with tobacco.
I'm not saying marijuana is the best thing in the world, I'm just saying it's not as bad as most people make it out to be. I've seen first hand that some people just can't handle it. Some use it occasionally and appropriately, while others become pot-heads and well, we all know how they are. Unfortunately my younger sister Lili discovered she enjoys smoking weed and proved that too much of a good thing can turn into something bad.
With finals only a few weeks away at Adelphi University, my younger sister was faced with a big issue, in the words of Afroman: She was ‘gonna go to class, but then she got high.’
Elisa Miller, a freshman from Garden City, New York, had to recently withdraw from two of her classes due to her excessive absences. She admits that she’s missed the classes so much that she can count the few days she’s gone with her fingers.
Not only did she have to withdraw from two classes, she is failing her psychology class and her only hope of getting any credits this semester is her Creative Writing class. Her plan to pass her Creative Writing class is to not miss anymore and to “lower her dosage of Mary Jane.”
Elisa, also known as Lili, hasn’t been going to class because she fell into the habit of smoking weed at least three times a day daily after she “discovered the best weed in the world, purple haze.”
The student claims that smoking purple haze would make her feel so laid back and carefree that she wouldn’t even think twice when she would skip class.
“It’s not that weed unmotivates me, it’s just that I don’t find it as interesting as other things,” says Miller.
On her ‘sick days’ Lili would smoke marijuana and enjoyed exercising, rollerblading, playing with chalk, and having laughing fits at the mall.
Now that she is facing the consequences of all her “nature walks” she is trying to cut back on smoking. Her plan is to only allow herself to smoke in the night after she’s done all her work, which shouldn’t be too challenging now that she only has one class to attend.
Though she had to learn the hard way, she believes it was a lesson well learned. Lili is now urging her pot- smoking friends to learn from her mistake and to get their priorities straight.
“I realized I can’t smoke so much weed and that I should try in school because this feeling I have right now really sucks.”
Let this be a lesson: Smoke responsibly! Weed can be a nice mood lifter, but it's not fun anymore when you turn into a burn out. For the record, I did not encourage her pot-smoking throughout the semester, nor did I know that it was affecting her school life in such a harmful way.
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