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Comment by alelefant | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised at how polarized the usage percentages are. Near 50% are using between 1-5 times a month and a touch over 20% are using 26-31 times per month (daily). It sounds like people are either using casually or they throw all their chips in (not that I blame them).

Hopefully Wisconsin can join the club in the next decade.

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I think they mis-adjusted their ranges and it's probably a fat-tailed power law distribution. When you survey people there's going to be a peak around "smoke weed every day" but there's a gigantic range of usage between "I take a puff or two off my pipe every afternoon" and "I spend all of my free time stoned out of my mind".

What's also interesting is that you would expect that such extreme polarization would show equally extreme negative effects, if they exist, since it means you have a large population of users exposed to high doses where negative effects should be most obvious.

(Imagine that it takes 10 times per month to put someone at risk of going crazy, robbing or killing people, torching houses, etc. If the distribution of use was a straight line down to just a few % of the heaviest users reaching 10 times per month, you wouldn't necessarily see much of an increase in population numbers. But with a crazy distribution like that, it's >20% of users who would be exhibiting side effects!)

Reefer Madness was not a documentary. Going crazy? Robbing and killing? Arson?

You've clearly never smoked pot.

EDIT: As pointed out by the replies, I clearly didn't do my research before responding ;) Apologies.

You are replying to http://www.gwern.net/ :-D My money is on him having smoked pot.

Check gwern's site :)

http://www.gwern.net/

He has experimented with lots of drugs, up to and including LSD.

By the way, a close relative does smoke pot (it's legal in my country, Uruguay) and we believe it has brought to the front some (probably preexisting) mental problems which could be described as "going crazy".

I do support legalization, but it's not entirely innocuous (it is my belief it's milder than alcohol, but then again, alcohol does bring some extreme reactions and kills a lot of people)

I was being sarcastic about peoples' fears about marijuana, yes, and hopefully making my observation a little more salient: since the distribution of consumption is so ridiculously bimodal (look at pg15, it's amazing), that means there are a lot of people getting extremely high doses, but without obvious ill effects.

It's hard to believe that heavy (daily) users would be purchasing that much marijuana since it's legal for an adult to own up to six plants at a time (or twelve per household). It seems unlikely to count all of their usage as part of the marijuana market.

Growing your own marijuana will be similar to making your own beer or wine. It takes a lot of work and time and therefore most people won't do it. But yeah, of course some will.

I think a lot of people are growing it casually on their own. I see plants in backyards all the time here in Denver. It's not really that comparable to homebrewing which needs equipment and skill. More like gardening.

Okay but think ahead 10 years. Do you think that's going to linearly extrapolate to the entirety of the United States? Everybody's gonna grow pot now? Doubtful. It's a new exciting thing so a ton of people are doing it. Gardening takes work, growing great pot presumably takes a lot of effort (I have no idea, but I'd assume you'd have to at least do better than outdoors which takes $$ too).

anyone can grow zucchini in their backyard. my parents never harvested early enough, and overgrown squash tastes terrible.

amateur grow operations are not a particularly new and exciting thing in the area, though. nearly 50% of CU Boulder alumni in the last 20 years had a roommate they couldn't get to shut up about grow technique.

How long have you actually lived in Denver? Gardening in the high desert takes quite a lot of equipment and skill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping

Homebrewing is for nerds who miss the over-clocking watercool rigs of their counterstrike days. Skill and equipment, sure, but the equipment is on eBay and you never need to go outdoors.

Growing is more work than most people have interest for, just as home-brewing is not practical for everyone.

square foot gardening, little to no maintenance other than keeping "weeds" out :)

People frequently and vastly underestimate how much people are willing to pay for the convenience of paying somebody else to do something for them.

Yes, but only to the extent that they themselves aren't willingly paying for the convenience of having somebody else do something for them.

When they are, well, that's just common sense. When they aren't, well, those who do otherwise are just being indulgent.

Housekeeper? Indulgent. Startbucks coffee? Convenient.

The (social) legitimacy of expenditures is usually a matter of custom, not economic analysis.

I wouldn't call 4-5 times a month "very casual" -- that's every weekend.

4-5 times a month would tend to be weekends only. If it was drinking you would consider that to be pretty casual.

Every weekend is "regular" usage. I equate casual with occasional. 0-2 times month, with no regular pattern.

Fair enough, "very casual" wasn't the best adverb to use. I agree with dyladan's point though; drinking on the weekends would certainly be considered casual in my circle of friends.

You clearly weren't in a frat ;)

(thankfully) ;)

That's offensive.

Get over it.

That's not surprising. You can use cannabis once or twice a week (in moderation) and not suffer any significantly negative effects. But once you start to use it more often then that, you're basically going to be in withdrawal all the time unless you're just baked 24/7. It's not really any different than any other drug.

There is no withdrawal with Marijuana (unless you smoke it with tobacco). It's not physically addicting. Now people say "well but it's mentally addicting". Well so is reading a good book. I don't want to make Marijuana appear completely safe (it's definitely not), but addiction is not one of the resulting problems.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/kicking-pot-habit-lead-withdraw...

The withdrawal symptoms aren't especially serious in the grand scheme of things, but they're still unpleasant enough to discourage people from getting stuck in that 5 - 20x per week range.

With first "offenders" being "diverted" to "treatment" there is all kinds of quackery going on in the "treatment" business, ranging from true believers in reefer madness to profiteers, to nudge-and-wink "treatment" that is just barely serious enough to keep people from going to jail instead.

With all the perverse incentives in play, I'd sooner trust the TSA's numbers for how many terrorists there are with long fingernails.

There are many more attendees of M.A. meetings than there are of people in recovery, trying to quit reading because it's had life-altering effects on their minds.

"Addiction isn't a problem" is the biggest myth perpetuated in the smoking community. I'm not trying to make pot out to be any more or less monstrous than it is, but to claim that addiction isn't something that happens is to hide one's head in the sand.

> There are many more attendees of M.A. meetings than there are of people in recovery

A lot of people are forced to (or "elect" to) mandatory drug treatment/counseling as an alternative to harsher sentencing for first-time marijuana offenses.

Success rates are obviously low for these, for the same reasons that requiring all college students who ever drink alcohol to attend AA meetings would have low "success" rates.

You can't assume all people who attend drug treatment actually have a drug problem.

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