American media has really been shockingly pro weed/cannabis for the past 20 or so years. Really astounding to witness considering the well known downsides to human health and cognitive function. Main characters smoke weed as a cool disobedience, in sitcoms even.

Wonder what is behind it, from my perspective it's quite remarkable.

I think it became socially acceptable because there’s not a huge reason to hate on it.

The risks to cognition and health exist, but they’re no where near as bad as alcohol or cigarettes (and the negative effects basically don’t exist at low, even moderate doses)

The biggest negative effect of using weed regularly is it seems to slowly kill people’s motivation to do stuff over time. It will turn just about anyone into a couch potato. That’s more dangerous than any other effect IMO.

Because the Schedule 1 prohibition was ridiculous. This is the cultural pendulum swing to normalize it and push legalization.

Since the 1960s and the emergence of the New Left, and the introduction of the Frankfurt School and 60s post modernism into academia, there has been a widespread belief amongst a large segment of the population that everything traditional is wrong. A social stigma is merely ignorance, that which is seen as bad is actually good, traditions are wrong. All of these things need to be overturned for the enlightenment. Since society deemed marijuana bad, it is therefore good. As those people who were went through that indoctrination in the 60s as students got older, they got into power. They took power in universities. By the 90s they were pushing all of the ideas as the status quo. Students in the 90s then took those ideas, and when they got into power in Media, they pushed those ideas into all movies and tv.

I think there’s probably some adjacency to other things which make people feel good, but are ultimately bad for them. Gambling, alcohol, porn, infinite scroll social media. There are a few people making a ton of money on this stuff and the social costs aren’t something they care about.

I am not sure I'd say I'm "against" it since broadly speaking I don't think it should be illegal, but I am against it in the sense that I really think that absolutely no one should be smoking weed. It's kind of an unearned opinion; I don't know anything about medicine or health or anything like that, but I hated what it would seemingly do to my friends in high school.

I'd have friends that would be more or less down to earth, start smoking weed, then start finding and watching videos of Alan Watts and Carl Sagan and convince themselves that they knew everything in the world about physics and philosophy, and they became utterly insufferable in the process, and whenever anything negative about weed was ever said, they would provide me a lecture about how weed is a cure to pretty much everything and how no one has ever had a negative effect from it ever in history.

I think there's been a huge over correction; there was so much bullshit about the dangers of weed that people started acting like it's some miraculous cure-all and ignoring actual issues.

This was such a visceral turn-off for me that I to this day have never used weed, and the idea of using it still kind of makes me viscerally annoyed. It's entirely possible that my friends were insufferable teenagers purely because teenagers can be insufferable, and that's not even unlikely, but the way I remember it is the weed making them annoying it. Not saying it's rational, just that memory and human brains are weird.

Probably because almost everyone has done it and it's fun.

People were smoking weed even when it was socially unacceptable and illegal. Then they were going to jail for a decade or more because of it. This simply did not make any sense. I believe most of this is a backlash effect.

Weed was the worst thing ever. Weed is the best thing ever. Eventually weed will be in the same category as coffee.

Maybe because like 65% of the nation is in favor of legalization and a huge chunk of the nation has been smoking weed for 70+ years without crisis?

> American media has really been shockingly pro weed/cannabis for the past 20 or so years

Really? I think the opposite is true.

Given 1/6 adults admit to using it, I think it's totally underrepresented in media -- in theory 1/6 characters would be using it.

It's only very recently that I see characters who just casually say something like "I take a gummy for a long flight" or whatever, rather than be a stereotypical comedic stoner character.

I feel like really it's alcohol that's glamorized in the media, and before that it was smoking.