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In other words; you really need to find a high functioning heavy pot smoker to give the theory credence - and I don't think that is going to be easy.

Carl Sagan. Richard Feynman. Steve Yegge. Thousands of others.

If you're involved in a creative profession, of which I think that software development is one, then smoking marijuana boosts your ability to function.

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Yeah. I know a lot of heavy pot smokers who are also heavy programmers.

The only correlation between heavy pot smoking and low performance is that people with nothing to do in their life also enjoy smoking pot.

That sounds like a much more plausible explanation and fits just about all the evidence in my environment (quite a bit of evidence actually).

Further, people with your typical high-powered "successful" jobs are almost without exception routinely drug-tested, so they are forced to make a choice between continuing to smoke and having their careers. Talk about selection bias...that's not even factoring in the illegality of the thing, which strongly biases the sample of smokers towards those with less to lose if they were caught.

Uh, what? I've never heard of a (programming) job requiring a drug test. It's just not all that illegal anymore -- doctors prescribe it and you get it at a state-certified pharmacy.

The only FUD your post was missing was a link to Reefer Madness.

Interesing point; I'd have to mull on that (I wonder how heavy they were as users - anyone know?).

(as a programmer I found that pot, which I tried for a couple of months - see elsewhere for my reasoning - didn't personally boost my ability to function, but instead tended to hinder it - particularly when not high)

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