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It surprises many people to learn that cannabis use originated in Arab cultures. As an Arab myself, I was surprised to learn this fact in a class at the University of Miami with a professor who argued that use of the drug first appeared in the Arab world. It is called hashish, a drug people use to calm down.
Consumption of drugs is largely governed by social conditioning and programming. In the Arab world, smoking is very popular and normalized; however, smoking today is highly stigmatized in the United States. Conversely, drinking alcohol is religiously forbidden and culturally frowned upon in Arab cultures; however, drinking is highly normalized in the United States.
Culture comes first; everything else comes second. We are hardwired to follow our social conditioning. The truth of the matter is that the laws governing cannabis, which are changing in Minnesota, come secondary to cultural norms. We see legalization of cannabis in many states largely because society has become increasingly accepting of its consumption.
A major reason why people consume cannabis is social conditioning — peer pressure, cultural norms. That is the external factor. Another major reason people consume cannabis is to cope with their internal emotional states.
Most people struggle to cope with their emotions — and in the modern world, we are socially conditioned to look for quick, external fixes for our discomfort. We are discouraged from looking to inside sources for solutions because they require hard work and patience to master the process of self-transformation.
When we want to alter our mental state (to have fun), we often turn to external sources such as smoking cannabis or drinking alcohol. Regardless of the cultural meaning we attach to that behavior, the fact that we need drugs to change our emotional state suggests a failure on our part to manage our own emotional state. By extension, this suggests that we fail at being effective human beings, who are capable of managing their emotional states from within.
