neveradmitmyid

Marijuana tends to affect people in one of two ways: they either get subdued or they get infatuated. Many people appear to get calmed and relaxed, they could just go to sleep, with pot affects them. Those that marijuana infatuate tend towards creative, intellectual, and creative intellectual pursuits. I am one such infatuated pot smoker, which I keep pretty much secret, because due to my pot smoking infatuations I've gradually made my way into uber secure work environments simply because I'm competent and fascinated by the work; while my counterparts are constantly burning out. It's a job to them. To me, it's fascinating play.

Let be real: I've worked on the R&D stage of a Chinese research project for a State supported Ancestor Worship software where people's ancestors are recreated in 3D, their "ancestorial home" is made available in pieces and parts the software user must purchase with real currency, and the user is encouraged to discuss their day to day life issues with their observing and consoling animated ancestors. The software is a complete Orwellian Spy while masquerading as all your ancestors listening, offering advice, and demanding gifts that cost real currency. To say the least, I spooked the hell out of that situation.

I've been a heavy, 1 oz. of Indica a week smoker for decades, while being an extremely productive lead and principal software engineer on dozens of highly visible tech products. I am part of a heavy smoking, high tech collective of startup and career research individuals from companies people use everyday. I start my day with a combination of THC and caffeine, which folds into a deep work and research focus lasting the entire day. Over time, fellow high tech heavy smokers have identified one another, forming a moderately secret heavy smokers network that support one another in non-legal places, sometimes meet at big conventions, or we realize a number of us are at an airport at the same time and all meet in the smoker's den.

I'm a heavy smoker - an oz of Indica with 2 grams of powder hash added per week is my mix of choice. I've been a heavy smoker since the 70's, and a computer science research scientist pretty much the entire time. I know I am an outlier, but there are more than a few like us: people that find marihuana to aid in their ability to focus. The work that I do is basically all day calculus, and being high enables my to hyper focus on the minutia of the issue at hand. It can take up to an hour to regain the details of what I'm working on in my head, and then it is statistics and calculus for the remainder of the day. I turn off my phone, quit any communications software, smoke a bowl or three and spend the next 8 hours in abstract symbolic land. It works. I'm quite successful, published, and respected for my work and generally easy going personality. It works. Also, I do not drink booze at all - I hate. Can't think!

I use it for focus when writing software. I'm a fairly heavy user, and it allows me to block out anything that would take me out of flow. I write scientific security software, often under deadline, and my typical day is an integrated coding, working out, and smoking bongs. I prefer indica, and tend to smoke about an 1 oz. per week - these days about $120. Each day I do a hard cardio, which seems to balance out the smoking and coding from (seriously) 6am till 10pm with a few 1 hour breaks to eat or do that cardio workout.

It's split between discussions of physical health and mental health. General consensus towards physical seems to be between belief they are a bit less than cigarettes to surprise and interest in pot being significantly less harmful, somewhat similar to a typical city's smog. Discussions of the mental impact are concession we all achieve flow and greater life stability from the high. Perhaps there is a general tendency towards mild hyperactivity among us, and we're a leveling self medicated crowd that all happened to be around when entertainment went digital. We all certainly know one another, at the multiple studios, now spread out globally. Over the last few decades we've worked at all the major animation/vfx/game studios.

Also, getting high is much, much less smoke than 1 cigarette, sorta. The hits, the draws, are much larger, but in 1-2 minutes you're done. Versus a cigarette is 15 to 20 draws over 5-7 minutes. Getting high 10 times a day is about the same as 2-3 cigarettes. Whereas a cigarette smoker goes though 10-20 cigarettes per day.

A somewhat odd reoccurring conversation we all have is discussing our dislike of long periods of not being stoned. I personally feel I get naively optimistic, and being stoned make me more critical. I am more easy going (too easy going?) when completely sober, and tend towards obsessive creative introspection when high. It is not a rare topic, the discussion of our long term heavy use, for those of us that are more health minded. In addition to my heavy smoking, I ironically am a marathon runner too.

We are and are not isolated. The studios tend to put us all together in a less traveled part of the lot, and beyond the fact that we all prefer to stare at our screens 12+ hours a day, we are social with each other. As I said, the bongs are in active use throughout the day. Anytime anyone loads a bowl, it gets passed to everyone in that room, who will pause, take a hit, join the conversation or simply look back to their screen. It's social and isolated at the same time.

There is a population of media developers that are fairly heavy marijuana users. By 'media developer' I mean animation, VFX, games, and other graphics & entertainment related type of software. We tend to be older, having been in graphics and media for 20 to 30 years for most of us pothead graphics junkies. We have bongs and all the typical pot smoking accessories out in the open at our offices, and they are in active use throughout the day, from the moment the day starts.

In general, we are people that write the core software of the renderer, the simulation, the shaders, the production tools, or other somewhat overly complex yet creative element of our work. We've been leads for 20 years, at least. We're all people that enter into deep states of flow when stoned, and many of us believe the pot is required to quickly enter flow and then stay there for hours on end as we develop.

We're split between people with pot belly and people that actively work out. The only consistency of this crowd is we all use pot to isolate ourselves into our work, and we're working in media production.

Now media production itself drives many people to drugs, simply due to the pressure of that ever present deadline. I'd like to clarify that the pot smoking developers I'm talking about typically ignore this pressure, mocking it, because they have already adopted an obsessive developer lifestyle. These are basically creative stoners that would work like this anyway, and are glad to get paid well doing what they love anyway. Also, this is all we do, pretty much 7 days a week. We're obsessive, the pot seems to aid that obsession, our employers like our productivity and look the other way towards our open smoking in the studio.

Personally, I smoke about 1 oz of high grade Indica per week. The typical pot smoker is 1/8th that.

Exactly. As a member of our security apparatus I can never reveal my daily use since age of 14. That was 35 years ago, and I am still the same serious athlete I always was, just a calmer one than when I can't smoke pot. From my anecdotal perspective, its the junk food and sitting around culture making people sick.