What Do You Do When You Smoke Weed?

"Right now, weed exists in an in-between state. It’s not quite legal, but it’s not quite illegal either. It’s accepted, but not totally normalized. It’s not quite medicine and it’s not quite a beer and it’s not quite green juice, either. Whether the police treat it as a big deal or not depends on who you are and where you live."

Because weed is in this gray area, and people don't know exactly how they're supposed to talk about it, The Cut on Tuesdays host Molly Fisher decided to ask listeners, The New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino, Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld of High Maintenance, and others, what they do when they get high. 

The result is a list of activities – "watch romantic comedies, do some personal finance work, go to the grocery store, go running, Marie Kondo the house, masturbate, hang out with my 2-year-old, go to the zoo" – the hearing of which makes you feel like you're looking through the peephole into a stranger's inner life. 

And it feels good to hear accomplished people say that they smoke weed, because it debunks the myth about the stoned loser. At the same time, their reflections on their relationship with weed are nuanced: for some smoking is an escape hatchet, others have to negotiate more intensely between responsibility and forgetting about the rest of the world.  

In Jia Tolentino's words:

"The thing weed actually does for me is, it decouples purpose from experience. It places the experience I'm having over the purpose that it serves, which is why it's so pleasurable, and I think it's the function that makes it so precious to me because it's so hard to decouple experience from purpose in an age where everything is monetized."