*beckons over If you're ever going to be intoxicated, don't excessively drink alcohol, never take pills or snort cocaine, or do anything with heroin or synthetic heroin ever, but smoke weed. Now, I'm saying, do this before you do anything else, I'm not saying "you need this in your life," or "this will be sure to make life better." PHYSICAL There are few negative effects on the body in general. When compared with alcohol, the legal recreational drug, it's absolutely health food. Combusting and inhaling plant matter in general could be healthier, but you can inhale it as a vapor or cook with it, and in any case, marijuana smoke is less harmful than tobacco smoke. Where the former is an expectorant and opens the airways, nicotine in the levels found in tobacco cigarettes constrict your airways and blood vessels. You hear people talk about how a joint equals however many millions (not really) of cigarettes in terms of tar, but the tar doesn't get lodged in constricted airways and also there aren't any of the deadly chemicals that are in mass produced non-organic tobacco cigarettes. There are some studies which say that heavy usage of marijuana can irritate your pancreas; there are contradictory studies which show it helps treat pancreatitis and has no discernible negative effect on the pancreas itself. It DOES NOT kill your brain cells... oxygen deprivation does. The study where people first got this "fact" involved chimps who were made to wear gas masks and breathe marijuana smoke for as much as thirty minutes at a time without air. After many trials one died (wonder why). In the short term, it affects your memory, many of the receptors for THC in your brain are on the hippocampus, the area responsible among other things for memory storage, therefore when stoned, old memories can be recalled with (often exceptional) clarity while one which should have been created recently, while high, may be a little hazy. They may take a second to remember or escape you entirely (improves with tolerance). I'd go into other possible physical side effects and benefits but there needs to be more research; there's been barely any and what little there has been is largely biased. Maybe it'll cure cancer, maybe it'll affect your brain development as an adolescent, who knows? I smoked a decent bit in high school and I've recently tested at near genius IQ level for what that's worth. There are no major physical withdrawal symptoms. I recently went from consuming a very, very high level of THC daily in both marijuana and concentrates to stopping cold turkey and experienced heightened depression, a general disorientation of my homeostasis, blood pressure that wasn't doing quite what it ought to, a slight sluggishness in reaction time and coordination (very slight, I'm quite mobile and agile so I notice even a little sluggishness of nerves easily)... maybe a bit of sleep trouble, not too much. But it was gone in 2 or 3 days, I didn't get the shakes, I didn't get sick, didn't throw up, didn't stalk the streets asking random people for weed... you'll hear this a lot and it's true, not one death from marijuana, the receptors in your brain are not near anything responsible for keeping you alive so it's simply not affected. You'd suffocate in the blaze before you overdosed on the THC in marijuana smoke. If you have a weak heart, beware palpitations. MENTAL Weed is light compared with serious psychedelics such as LSD or even shrooms. Maybe some people are just not in a good position to get high at all in the first place. What is being high? Well, it's a change in the way your mind works, a change in your perception. Think about the way an animal with different eyes, a different kind of nose and different ears must perceive the world. A dog, a cat. A dog needs only several molecules of a substance in his nose to identify it, think of a dog with his head out the window of a moving car, he must be getting an incredible sensory rush the likes of which we can't imagine. Just like a dog can't imagine what it might be like to read a good piece of literature. Human sensory perception is not the final say on the nature of reality, on our surroundings in general. When stoned, one may look at a few square inches of soil or tree bark, for instance, and perceive a larger scene than someone who's sober staring down into the grand canyon. In short, being high is life magnified... the good and the bad, however. Some people have a hard enough time dealing with life the way it is, at normal intensity. When you're high, you realize things that you may ignore in your daily life because ignoring it is part of your habit, you see, we are based on habits and being high can sort of pull one out of the trench he's been walking down. Marching blindly on without looking left or right because he knows there's only dirt there, he hasn't thought to look up and over because why should he when he's got to make time down the path forward? For instance, you may have been a bad friend or a bad son or anything, and you may not have cared, you may not have thought about it. You may be a bad person currently and in being high, you may realize this and if it's something you can change, you may realize that you need to change it. There are things we can't change which we may also dwell upon; maybe you were a jerk to your mom and she's dead now, maybe you ruined a friendship and can't get it back (it's not over til you're both dead, baby, get in there and show true selfless love). Maybe you realize that humanity is a cancer spreading across the face of mother earth, blotting out her beautiful lifeforms with concrete and poison, maybe watching the sunset over a highway in front of a power plant makes you cry like an American Indian. These things which hurt us which we cannot change are what Hunter S. Thompson referred to as "grim meat-hook realities." Something as common to you as the street you live in front of may not seem like it could horrify you and make you feel pain for the loss of nature, the likes of which you may never have known, but it bloody well can. My point here is that marijuana is not a good crutch, it's not something to lean on though it can be used that way. If you do and you really have an addictive personality, marijuana isn't going to cut it for you, you're gonna want more, you'll want to drink or take pills, something. That's not any fault of marijuana's (poor innocent plant never asked you to smoke it) it's your fault for being weak. Marijuana can actually, in bringing on an objective perspective, let you see your addiction and analyze it (not just to a drug but to food, [salt sugar and fat, my man] to television...). One note here, things you "realize" when you're high may not always be true. You gain incite when you're high, but don't jump to conclusions. The same that can be said for every day living can be about the high life, just remember it's magnified. I could go on I'ma cut it short (Edited somewhat for punctuation, typographical errors, you know) It's worth it if you're strong enough.