Marijuana may be even safer than previously thought, researchers say

For my part, smoking cannabis is great for me, especially for programming. I find both that I feel more focused and that I am more capable of juggling multiple tasks. The "listener" in me comes alive, and I'm better able to empathize with the author who, three years ago, wrote the class from which I'm inheriting for a slightly different use case.

Sometimes I spend the morning under coffee's spell, writing really great tests, to then get as high as I want and spend the afternoon making them pass, with the aesthetic sensibilities from some high-quality indica powering me through ensuring that my code is readable, reusable, and maintainable. Even if I get a little too high, I always know that the tests I wrote will keep me tethered to a more grounded demeanor.

However, the effect of the herb that I most treasure is that just a little bit of weed tells me what I so often forget: that I need to get up and go for a walk to get some real thinking done.

Sometimes the reefer also tells me other things about my habits: I've had too much coffee. I was too hard on a colleague or friend earlier. I need to stop fussing and just merge that pull request.

After smoking fairly consistently for 13 years, I seem to be blessed by having no negative effects of which I am aware. I think it's just a great plant and part of a healthy, whole-food-and-drugs lifestyle.

How bout coffee, energy drinks, cold medicine, most prescribed prescription medicines have some blurb about possible mental effects, tea, kava, nodoz caffeine pills, numerous herbal products ... We only complain about certain psychoactive drugs, and not others. Theres no logic behind it aside from residual cultural Puritanism, so looking for non cavalier logical behavior is likely to be fruitless.

Also it varies by state, and there are quite effective tests for THC, and we've got megatons of state laws on the books WRT inattentive and distracted and negligent driving that cover it quite well. Finally we have endless nuisance laws such that all of us are always criminals all the time that can be selectively enforce by cops on pot smokers, much as "driving while black" has been criminalized in certain areas.

Like yourself, I don't smoke (gives me an awful headache) but given the total net effect of prohibition, my kids are more likely to be killed as innocent bystanders in a shootout than killed by a stoned driver, so I'd prefer the lower risk. On the assumption that use patterns would change significantly with legalization (I'm still not going to smoke, my grannie still isn't going to smoke, its based on the "logic" that if abortion is legal nobody would ever have children, ever, which is pretty laughable). This logic is often seen in hyper-authoritarian areas. I live in a free area where cops won't drag me out of my house and shoot me if I paint polka dots on my house, of course nobody acts like that, but people who live in hyper authoritarian areas always under some HOA jackboots assume all humans would uncontrollably paint their houses purple polkadots unless the stormtroopers keep order under violent force.