Shortly before Christmas, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the attorney general to reschedule marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug. It was framed as sensible, modern, overdue. A tidy bit of bureaucratic housekeeping. Another sign that America is finally “growing up” about weed.
That depends on what you mean by growing up. Weed has medical applications. Pain management. Nausea control. Specific neurological conditions. Fine. That argument’s settled. But medicine is not the story here. Recreation is. And recreational weed now dwarfs medical use so thoroughly that invoking cancer patients has become a rhetorical fig leaf. Weed today is not a treatment, but a pastime. A permanent pause button.
My gripe is with recreational marijuana. The kind smoked, vaped, dabbed, or eaten, then defended with cult-like enthusiasm by people who insist it makes them “more creative,” right before entering a 12-hour coma on the couch, drooling, and waking up with nothing to show for it except regret and an appetite.
I used to smoke it. Regularly. The most productive thing I ever accomplished while high was deciding I would “definitely start tomorrow.” Tomorrow’s a very popular destination among weed smokers.
Recreational weed is now everywhere. Legal, normalized, celebrated. Sold as self-care. And yet, for all its cultural saturation, it remains one of the most aggressively unproductive substances ever popularized.
Other drugs, at least, have ambition. Cocaine, for all its horrors, at least produces motion. It turns people into nocturnal janitors, scrubbing their apartments at three in the morning while drafting business plans that won’t survive sunrise. Even fiction understands this. Patrick Bateman was a psychopath. But his apartment was immaculate, his grooming obsessive, his schedule ruthless. Alcohol, meanwhile, has fueled an astonishing amount of art, literature, bad poetry, and catastrophic decisions. Whole shelves of Western culture exist because someone drank too much and kept writing anyway. Psychedelics inspired musical movements and philosophical schools—most of them wrong, some interesting, all of them energetic. Even nicotine has kept civilizations humming along, anxious but awake. The point isn’t that these drugs are good. It’s that, unlike weed, they at least pretend to want something from you.
Weed does none of this. It doesn’t inspire crime sprees or manic binges. It inspires lazy days, which metastasize into lazy nights, then weeks, then—if left untreated—entire lives. It rewards inertia. The stoner isn’t dangerous. He’s worse. He’s content to do nothing and call it enlightenment.
This is the drug of sloth. Weed convinces users that waiting is wisdom and apathy is insight. Why strive when you can vibe? Why build when you can “process”? Why confront reality when you can soften it until it stops making demands?
There are no great weed-fueled innovators. No world-changing breakthroughs credited to chronic cannabis use. Silicon Valley has its micro-dosers and its caffeine addicts. Wall Street runs on adrenaline and ambition. History’s great builders, artists, and obsessives weren’t famous for being perpetually stoned. They were restless. Driven. Often unbearable. Weed dulls exactly those traits.
Even rebellion loses its edge. Weed once symbolized resistance. Now it’s corporate, packaged, marketed in soothing fonts with names like “Calm,” “Chill,” and “Sleepy Cloud.” Weed has gone from protest to product. From counterculture to comfort culture. It no longer questions authority. Instead, it numbs the people who might have.
The modern defense of weed insists it makes users more reflective. Kinder. More open-minded. Perhaps. It also makes them slower. Dumber. Less inclined to act.
What weed really excels at is lowering standards. For conversation, creativity, life. Everything feels fine when you are high. Mediocrity becomes acceptable. Boredom becomes profound.
This is why weed may be the worst recreational drug of all. Not because it destroys people outright, but because it convinces them they don’t need to be better. It doesn’t push users toward the edge. It keeps them comfortably in the middle. Forever relaxed. Forever stalled.
So regulate it. Tax it. Allow medical use where appropriate. But stop pretending recreational weed is benign. It’s not a gateway to greatness. Rather, it’s a gateway to stasis, avoidance, stagnation. And in my view, that normalization ranks among our worst cultural mistakes.