This is totally irrelevant in multiple different ways.
And that's fine, because anecdotes aren't data!
But it's just hard to separate correlation from causation here. Not all people who drink or smoke or do other drugs are depressed, but plenty of depressed people will drink or do drugs.
Plenty of people that have natural talent or skill, or who worked long enough to get to "the top of their game" get complacent even if they do not regularly engage in any of the vices we're talking about here. Arrogance and complacency are hardly unique to drinkers and smokers.
Even from an anecdotal perspective, assuming that marijuana was a contributor to the person becoming complacent, it seems unlikely that the marijuana was a strong causative factor in the suicide attempt. There are a lot of people that smoke pot regularly, and by definition, most of them are not the best person at their hobbies or professions, and they're not committing suicide. There's obviously some deeper issues in play here. (And I think it might be totally reasonable to say that people that have those deeper issues should avoid mind-altering substances)
You can look in the comment section for this very article for multiple examples - I replied to someone who indicated that another person must have "depressing" nights because they stated that they sometimes enjoy having a night with friends listening to music while high, for example. Subjective opinions of how to enjoy an evening are greeted with being told they're wrong - a bit beyond even skepticism, even!
If us potheads start posting anecdotes about how smoking took us from being unsuccessful and contemplating suicide to successful and having wonderful personal happiness and contentment - basically the reverse of the original post in this thread - I'm sure we'd see similar levels of skepticism. As it is, the positive anecdotes are basically "It's fun and helps me relax", "I feel more creative while high", "It sometimes helps me approach things from a different perspective" and similar.
I think it's just the result of a cultural perception shift swinging hard the other way from the decades that drugs were demonized to now people looking at many drugs (mdma, marijuana and psilocybin especially) as miraculous substances that will solve all our issues. This happens with most shifts - it starts on one end of the extreme, then gets a reaction which swings the pendulum to the other extreme. In a decade I'm sure it will even out and we can have open conversations without reactions being so dogmatic.
Kids growing up in dysfunctional families (who might actually look OK from outside), or with some mental issues often desperately seek any kind of escape in whatever comes around. For many Alcohol, cigarettes and MJ are most accessible but sooner or later they find these substances don't work as they thought, the ugly reality is still there. So they move up the ladder for stronger escape.
Its false to paint MJ as cause of this, taking perfectly fine and balanced young individuals and bending them on path of addiction. Yet this is how it has been sold to public for past 60 years all around the world.
If I told a story about a kid who showed back up at band camp and had become 50 pounds heavier and hadn't progressed as a drummer, then went on to become a heroin addict etc. you wouldn't be blaming cookies. You'd stop and wonder what the hell was going on in his life.
Marijuana on the other hand…[0]
As I mentioned, I grew up with several kids like this. Most didn't attempt suicide (as far as I'm aware, anyway), but the possibility of confirmation bias aside, I certainly feel as though I recognised a pattern of paranoid delusion among young stoners that I knew.
[0]: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-07-16-how-cannabis-causes-par....
I'm not discounting the possibility that MJ can cause such things, but even the studies put the risk fairly low, and it's hard to separate environmental and genetic risks in the population they have available to study.
This is the part that doesn't follow. We have no actual indication that smoking pot had anything to do with his lack/loss of ambition.
I could give plenty of anecdotal studies where people became complacent because they got a promotion, or made it to a certain landmark, or realized that they were the smartest person in the room at the time, or a million other things. Complacency is not something that requires smoking pot to feel.
Like, I don't want to denigrate the person in the anecdote - but if your sense of identity is so tied up in being the best drummer among a certain peer group that when you lose that title you are going to attempt suicide, you have more fundamental psychological problems to deal with.
If pot was causing people to want to kill themselves because they weren't the best at something, we'd have a lot more suicides in the world. It's a massive claim, and one that requires proof beyond an anecdote.
This is what follows, or at least strongly implied, from OP’s post;
“ My friend spent the whole year smoking marijuana and being complacent”
We can only argue from what is in the story. Not what is not in it or what we’d rather wasn’t.
The OP shared a story, admitting its anecdotal.