(So, smoke sativa, and don’t blame weed for your own personal issues)

If I have heard it once, I have heard it a 100 times.

“Oh, I wish I could smoke weed all day like you do and stay as productive as you are!”

“I can’t believe you smoked weed and then cleaned the house, made a full dinner, and baked bread for everyone!”

“I can’t wake and bake, or I am lazy all day.”

All. The. Time.

If you follow the blog you have an idea of what my morning routine looks like, and you know it normally involves a couple dabs, a bong bowl or two, sometimes some gravities, all before I leave to go do my very productive job where I not only can’t make mistakes, but it would be very obvious, very quickly, if I did. Admittedly, I do use marijuana medicinally, as well as recreational, however, I am never made lazy by it, and firmly believe people aren’t “made” lazy by weed.

First, if people are feeling “couch locked” it’s is normally due to the strand of weed they are consuming. When my friends or family tell me, some weed knocked them out and made them sleep for days, I find myself laughing, when they tell me they imbibed some strong Indica.

Knowledge matters.

If the weed is top shelf because it won a cannabis cup award, and that award is “Best Indica” then I believe you, it did knock you on your ass. That is what it does. Indica is generally recommended for pain management and is recommended for insomnia. Why? It is a more nighttime weed. In a future, and much longer, blog post, I will be outlining some new research that discusses the various terpenes, and how they are potentially responsible for some of these effects, as well as flavors, but for now, I will leave it to a much simpler explanation. There are two main “types” of weed, and Indica is like “nighttime.”

If you are like me, and you smoke weed or concentrates all day, you frequently end up seeing them as daytime and nighttime formulas. Not to say there are only two kinds of weed. The row of several kinds of Sativa literally right in front of me is proof of that. If they were all the same, I wouldn’t bother labeling a bunch of different jars with their names and contents. Hybrids are also frequent and tend to bring a great “best of both worlds” to the party, but, despite all of this, none of these types of weed are to blame for if you spark up and suddenly don’t do anything for hours.

The weed, Indica or otherwise, is not making you lazy.

You are making a conscious choice to be lazy, and you happen to be smoking weed while you do it.

Indica, or “in da couch” may be recommended for sleep aid and pain relief, and yes, even the most veteran stoner has been locked into place and slept for hours from a good strong Indica, but, none of us were made lazy from the Indica. The Indica merely did its job.

If you had plans and you ingested the Indica, you did not do yours.

The simple truth is twofold. Indica can make you a bit more sedentary then you had planned, but it isn’t going to make you a fundamentally lazy person. It isn’t going to stop you from taking care of your obligations, it isn’t going to stop you from being a productive member of society. (I love that song too, it’s even on a Spotify playlist, but sorry Afroman, the weed isn’t to blame for your room, your girl, your bills, your anything. Weed is awesome.)

And two. While yes, Indica CAN make you a bit more stationary, why would you smoke it if you knew you had to do something? That is, you, setting yourself up to fail, and then blaming weed.

Well, no, thank you, again, weed did it’s job, you failed to do your job. If you know that the only weed you have makes you too drowsy to function, don’t spark up.

If you only ever smoke Indica? Maybe try Sativa. I smoke it, and then I write, I work out, I clean, I work, I drive my sober friends crazy with how productive I am.

The thing is, for me, weed helps me be productive, because it is medicine, and for others, it is too.

Pain pills also make people drowsy, but we are hardly maintaining draconian bans on those, are we?

A medication can have side effects, and those side effects can vary from patient to patient. Those side effects can also be, ahem, misdiagnosed when you are living in a state where marijuana is not legally recreationally or medically, leading to you getting your medicine from less…orthodox, suppliers. (Dealers can’t always know if the weed is actually Indica/Sativa/etc most of the time, making medicating in illegal states tricky) These illegalities are not helped with people going around claiming “all weed makes them too lazy to function”.

You may not be medically helped by cannabis, but other people are. You may feel too lazy to function on weed, but many aren’t.

Weed making you lazy is no reason to encourage it to be banned, as many medications can make people drowsy. So why encourage false information? Believe me, this false information that cannabis makes you too lazy to function, hurts legalization, even if you say, “oh I love weed!” afterwards.

Unless the reason is much more sinister, and involves someone being truly lazy, wanting to blame their problems on other things. Those excuses always exist, and if they don’t have weed, they blame alcohol, their situation, everything, except the real reason, themselves.

Weed doesn’t make you lazy. You are just lazy.

If you know you need to do something, don’t smoke Indicas, and if you have problems with handling weed, and are the type of person to blame their problems on others, don’t bother smoking at all.

You don’t need to waste your time, you need to get to work improving yourself, you lazy jerk, and someone else could actually enjoy that bud.

If you are offended, okay, cool. Are you willing to stop being lazy? I am not interested in arguing semantics. I want people to be their best selves. For some, that means weed, for others, it does not.

But I promise you, it does no one any good for you to blame anything but yourself on you being lazy.

Please take this time to read my path to not being a lazy P.O.S. It is a quest in progress, and I encourage you to join me if you find yourself falling into the trap of being lazy and blaming others. We can do this.

“But Abbi, how can you possibly know? How can you know that the weed isn’t to blame? I just smoked, and I can’t be bothered to do anything now.”

Because, I was exhausted and lazy from a long day of work, and I smoked a bong and a few dabs, sat down and wrote this blog.

The weed didn’t make me lazy.

I even took a dab or two of a home pressed Indica blend of wax. Still kept writing, no problems, no crippling laziness. No sudden urge to crawl under a blanket, eating Pringles and watching Netflix. I sat at my little desk table, covered in research, art supplies, weed accessories, and my laptop, and I got to work.

I love weed, and I don’t want to encourage a stereotype, more so one that is so erroneously wrong, so I make it my mission to call out laziness when others blame it on weed, and strive to never match the stigma of a lazy stoner.

Want to try and be productive and smoke weed? Cool! Try smoking a good Sativa, stay hydrated, make a list of what you want to get done, and start completing that list.

We have a stigma to break, so pass the bong and let’s get to work!

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❤

Abbi

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