When it came to my attitude toward weed, I used to be an uneducated asshole. In my early high school years, I would constantly lecture any of my friends who smoked weed, saying that it would kill their brain cells, get them addicted and ruin their future, and how they were “so much better than that.” I had no clue what I was talking about.
Nothing specific fueled this hatred for weed in my head; it was just random tidbits of information I had heard throughout my life and naively chose to believe. Previously, I wouldn’t even consider liking a guy if he had any interest in weed, and now I couldn’t date someone if they held the same stigma toward weed that I did.
Looking back, my judgment wasn’t just misinformed — it was a product of systematic fearmongering. Growing up, I absorbed media portrayals of “stoners,” or chronic smokers, and the lingering consequences of the Reagan-era War on Drugs. I grew up with D.A.R.E., or Drug Abuse Resistance Education, assemblies at school and “Just Say No” public service announcements that framed weed as a slippery slope to failure, which, to avoid, required a hard-line commitment to zero curiosity.
My high school health teacher warned us that smoking only once could lead to heroin addiction, while posters in the hallway equated a joint with a syringe. No one, including my health teacher, mentioned that cannabis had been used medicinally for millennia or that the “gateway drug” theory was unsupported by decades of research.
Instead, drug education leaned into morality tales, not science. I never questioned these narratives until I actually educated myself, and it became clear that, with constant misinformation and fearmongering as well as mainstream culture’s tendency to cling to tired beliefs despite growing evidence of cannabis’s benefits, the War on Drugs continues to do more harm than good.
My educational institutions’ approaches backfired spectacularly. By painting all drug use as equally dangerous, programs like D.A.R.E. made it harder to distinguish between real risks, such as overuse by teens or whether weed really did kill brain cells. As I got older, I witnessed as my friends, who had used weed for years, continue to do so without descending into chaos. The “lazy stoner” stereotype crumbled when I met grad students who used weed to manage anxiety and artists who microdosed for creativity.
I not only realized how much I’d been lied to, but it became difficult to trust any of what I had been taught, even if they were true, effectively destroying weed education’s saving grace. The often extremist and uncompromising educational tactics meant that teens would have to experiment and educate themselves when faced with reality.
The horror stories I’d absorbed weren’t just exaggerated with no end; they actively diverted attention from real issues, like why Black communities were (and still are) disproportionately arrested for possession while white students get shrugs and eye-rolls. In some cases, these horror stories also actively fueled support for racist narratives, and vice versa.
As we look forward, destigmatization and healthy approaches to weed cannot be confined to simply outdated education — it’s that stigma persists even as legalization spreads. Weed is now a billion-dollar industry, with gummies even being marketed as “self-care,” but the people overwhelmingly criminalized for it rarely benefit. Meanwhile, the “bad kid” labels I had internalized shadowed medical users and casual smokers alike.
Destigmatizing weed isn’t about pretending it’s harmless. It’s about replacing moral panic with nuance: acknowledging its benefits, like pain relief, without ignoring potential risks, like overuse by teens. Most of all, it’s about asking why we were taught to fear a plant more than the systems that weaponized it.
Suhiliah Lall is a sophomore majoring in cinema.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.