You’ve heard it, your cousin has heard it, all the middle-aged nightly news anchors and high school health teachers heard it; smoking weed makes you lazy!
Tolking the devil’s lettuce is supposedly the first step in a lifelong downward spiral, which is why cannabis for far too long was referred to as being a “gateway” drug.
As the story goes, after partaking in this dangerous plant you inevitably will get “the lazies” and before you know it you’ll be flunking out of school or getting fired from your job before turning to a life of prostitution and cat food just to survive until your next “fix”.
Cannabis being a gateway drug is just one more piece of government propaganda that has been thoroughly flogged to death over decades of utter failure to provide any evidence to support their hardline claims.
Do you want to REALLY know WHY weed makes you lazy?
Well, (you might want to sit down for this)… ….weed “makes” you lazy because you’re already a lazy person who blames their own lack of mental discipline on a harmless plant, which, to be frank, is pretty weak behavior.
People procrastinate something fierce at school or work every single damn day and in entirely sober mental states. Fact is that MOST people tend to procrastinate on occasion and are inevitably, at times, “lazy” without the assistance of any substance whatsoever.
It’s called being human. We’re not machines. We evolved having plenty of time to just like sit and like observe mother nature, man.
The cannabis plant has been blamed for everything evil under the sun long enough. Yeah, Mary Jane has a tendency mellow people out, but some strains will get actually do the opposite and your gears humming along at peak efficiency.
Indica-dominant strains don’t have the same effect as sativa-dominants. To categorize them as simply “all the same” would be like lumping bell peppers in with ghost peppers; the subtle differentiations are key!
Yes, everything is technically a hybrid bro, I know. Thank you.
But did you also know that everything has its own unique genetics from various parent plants that also have their own unique genetics, and this constant cross-breeding stoners are famous for has resulted in an infinite combination of unique terpene, cannabinoid, and flavonoid profiles? They all produce unique experiences despite being “just hybrids.”
So yeah, let’s be real here. If you weren’t going to clean your apartment or wash those dishes, that’s your conscious decision not to do so and no one else’s, including plants.
Cannabis is in zero way restraining you from doing anything. Just look how active and motivated you can be when the munchies hit!
Lastly, even IF cannabis DID directly “cause” laziness it’s still every individuals free will to decide to blaze or not. Big dank frosty cannabis plants are sneaking up on unsuspecting productive individuals and self-immolating themselves into their lungs to prevent them from accomplishing things…
Shitty Studies Beget Shitty Stereotypes
Yes, some researchers have actually tried to study the effects of cannabis use on motivation. There are two notable studies, although both quite small and not very notable because of small sample sizes and whack methodologies.
That said, the study that most people cite to re-enforce their own lazy blame-shifting or to advocate for medieval legal reform is from a 2016 study from the Psychopharmacology journal titled “Acute and chronic effects of cannabinoids on effort-related decision-making and reward learning: an evaluation of the cannabis ‘motivational’ hypothesis.”
The sample size was just 17 people (shit, I could find 17 people who will tell you cannabis makes them geniuses), and their “motivation” was measured by the likelihood to act in a game in an effort to win 80p, £1.00, £1.20, £1.40, £1.60, £1.80, or £2.00.
For my fellow patriots, that equates to playing a game with the possibility of winning $0.85, $1, $1.29, $1.5, $1.72, $1.94, and $2.15, amazingly.
First off, take a random sample of 17 people off the street and try to get them to do anything for the change in your pocket and see what happens.
You’ll definitely find plenty who won’t bother, not because they’re weed addicts, but because when measuring motivation via a reward, that reward must be substantial enough to illicit motivation among “normies” in the first place, before adding variables such as cannabis use.
Secondly, “motivation” is such a broad term. It can apply to relationships, to fitness, to helping people, to caring for a pet, and yes, to playing the game of capitalism for two dollars and fifteen cents.
That said, if I had to pick the WEAKEST way to truly measure human motivation, it would have to be via capitalism. A lot of people downright hate capitalism because as it’s proven out time and time again it is at its core, a system of exploitation.
But that’s a rant for another day. Let’s dig into this laziness study a bit more..
Looking at the study’s above graph, yeah, I can very easily see sober people being like, fine, I’ll follow the rules and get this $2, while the participants, once stoned, were like, what’s the point?
Also look at the Y-axis, we’re talking like .2 of a difference in response bias here, hardly anything significant enough to be making sweeping conclusions about societal level interactions with cannabis.
Oh, it’s also worth mentioning too that two of the study’s authors also work for the pharmaceutical industry so you know, proven criminal organizations that conspire to thwart any potential economic challenge to their pill empires.
Then there are other studies, like this one, that try to measure cannabis use and its impact on motivation regarding physical exercise that found that a majority of respondents (81.7% yay vs 18.3% nay) actually “endorsed using cannabis before and/or after exercise”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, to anyone who has ripped a joint and gone on a hike, there was also a positive correlation between cannabis use and perceived enhancement of exercise “performance, enjoyment, motivation, and recovery.”
This particular study was done by the University of Boulder in Colorado with no declared Big Pharma lackeys as authors.
For a truly conclusive measure of how cannabis can impact all forms of motivation, (not just those dictated by our current form of capitalism) I believe a larger meta-analysis is required that takes into account broad surveys of massive portions of the population regarding multiple factors such as happiness, accomplishment, self-worth, future outlook, and general well-being.
Then, survey that same group asking whether or not they have used or currently use cannabis and how often. Then look for patterns.
Maybe one day we’ll get more nuanced and balanced with our cannabis studies, but for the time being, there just isn’t nearly enough evidence published to support the claim that smoking weed makes you lazy.
In fact, there are an equal amount of studies indicating the opposite.
Yet the media and government still promote these false narratives as some kind of half-assed 80s scare tactic to make you feel guilty when smoking, and that right there is what we call sum bullsheeeet.
Everyone Should Take More Breaks Anyways
It’s all good though. Scientists, bureaucrats, stoners, we all drop the ball once and a while. Sometimes we just get a little side-tracked and lose sight of our long-term goals.
When this happens and procrastination sets in you’ve got to get yourself pointed in the right direction and start taking care of business without resorting to a scapegoat just to have an excuse to prolong your laziness.
Also, just know it’s perfectly fine to take a break once and a while. Touch some grass and look for some animals in some clouds. You’re not a machine, and neither is anyone else, so embrace your organic humanity and chill the fuck out once and a while, you deserve it!
Cannabis is loved by millions, and it’s only fair for everyone to be left to make up their own minds about it without society attaching all kinds of negative stereotypes like all stones are lazy.
The plant has existed for thousands of years and will continue to do so for thousands of more years and throughout all of this humanity, technology, “progress”, setbacks, challenges, triumphs, they will all continue onwards unabated.
Don’t Equate Stillness to Inactiveness
Honestly, I think what a lot of squares misconstrue about cannabis and its effects is the false equivocation between being in your own mental space aka “zoning out” and being “lazy”.
When I get super ripped, my mind wanders off on endless trains of thought. If those mental train tracks ran like the roots of a massive tree, each one would be sprouting out into yet another concept, memory, question, or future thing to do.
During this state of mental exploration, I might outwardly appear to be zoned out and thus could be assumed to be committing “an act of laziness” when in reality, I’m just pondering big questions like are we alone in the universe and what am I going to eat for dinner?
Also, yeah, some indica-dominant strains will make make me feel more couch-locked than others. If that’s a problem for you, then just smoke a more balanced hybrid, or if you’re up for it, spark up a gassy sativa instead!
I guess I should apologize for any shock the clickbaity nature of this blog post, if you stone regularly you likely know in your heart weed isn’t making you lazy.
So next time someone drops that old bullshit line that weed makes you lazy or kills your motivation please have the courage to contradict those statements. We all need to take responsibility for our own actions instead of passing the buck off onto a plant that is guilty of nothing besides simply existing.
What mankind chooses to do with it and what they do after consuming it is entirely our own prerogative.
Here’s a picture I took while “being lazy” on a trip to Denver wherein I was blazing everyday but in which I was up at 8am and visiting as many dope tourist destinations as I could.
What do you think? Does weed make you lazy or is it the greatest personal motivator since caffeine? Sound off in my poll below!
