Schneier on Security

Joe Patterson • January 31, 2008 7:59 PM

The one of these that bugs me is #8, which starts:

“If the risks of smoking marijuana are coldly compared to those of playing high-school football, parents should be less concerned about pot smoking.”

That may be true, if the only risk you care about is death. I don’t know any parent that’s afraid their child might overdose on marijuana. I do know some who are afraid that if their kids smoke pot, they’ll become lazy stupid slobs. This may be a valid risk. From my own personal observation, I have determined that I am aware of pot smoking among a higher percentage (no pun intended) of lazy stupid slobs than among the rest of the population that I’ve met. To me, there are three likely reasons for this:

1) smoking pot turns you into a lazy stupid slob. I know of at least one firm counterexample, so it’s certainly not universal among pot-smokers, but this theory is probably the most common thing that people think.

2) lazy stupid slobs like pot more than the rest of us do. While entirely possible, parents don’t like thinking this because it means they have no control. If smoking pot causes stupidity, then maybe they can keep their kids smart by keeping them away from pot. If stupidity causes pot smoking, then their kid is either stupid or not, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

3) lazy stupid slobs don’t care as much whether or not I know that they smoke pot. This is probably true whether or not 1 or 2 is also. And it’s a difficult sampling bias to avoid.

Joe Patterson • February 3, 2008 2:14 PM

@unary

That’s just another way of looking at #3. I said it in terms of the stupid not caring whether I knew they smoked pot or not, but it would be just as valid to say it as the smart caring whether people know they smoke pot. A more thorough statement would be that lazy stupid slobs who smoke pot are less concerned about whether other people know that they smoke pot than respectable productive intelligent people who smoke pot are. It’s just a matter of relative concern.

Just to be clear, the stereotype of lazy stupid slob pot smokers is one I tentatively accepted without much thought until such time as I met a strong counter-example (an energetic, motivated, and generally brilliant biochemist who smoked a lot of pot, but was completely unlike any pothead stereotype). At that point, I did put some thought into the stereotype and realized the strong potential for sampling bias and mistaken assumptions of the directionality of the causal relationship implied by any correlation that might be found.

As a parent today, I am more concerned about my kids smoking pot than playing football, but it has nothing to do with a risk of death. It doesn’t even really have much to do with a fear that it will stunt my children’s brains. The real risk I’m hoping for them to avoid is jail, which is probably the worst side effect of almost any means to achieve momentary chemical euphoria.