How did it become artistic to get high? It is hard to imagine Da Vinci as a pothead. Drugs are a cheap way for untalented poseurs, curators, and hangers-on to purchase the aura of “artistic” without producing a single work of meaningful bold imagination.

As Anthony Kiedis said, “It’s easy to be a junkie. It’s not easy to be one of the greatest guitar players of all time, or one of the greatest writers.”

Marijuana makes you stupid, lethargic, paranoid, irrational, schizophrenic, emasculated, passive, complacent, and easily ruled. It is not the drug of revolutionaries; it is the drug of frat boys and social incompetents who have nothing in common with each other except marijuana.

Da Vinci would have been curious about the effects of various activities on his mind. With marijuana and most drugs this curiosity can be answered through observation: where is the art??? Where are genius potheads?

With a clear mind you will have confidence the flights of your imagination are empowered by genius, the breath of God, insightful and bold — rather than self-censored by doubts about their chemical origin.

Protect your neurons; take care of your physical brain. Nurture your physical mind — your neurological system — with sleep, exercise, healthy nutrition, optimism, travel, friends, joy, sunlight, and Kindness.

Unfortunately many artists use the drug culture to project an aura of coolness — while in fact they themselves do not use any drugs whatsoever. For example, a brilliant inspiring author (albeit of “horoscopes” in their most broad literary form), writes on his website:

“I was peeved that so few of “the antennae of the race” had enough courage to blow their own minds with psychedelics. How could you explode the consensual trance unless you poked your head over onto the other side of the veil now and then?

Pot, hashish, and LSD were very good to me (never a single bad trip), but their revelations were too hard to hold onto. As I came down from a psychedelic high, I could barely translate the truths about the fourth dimension into a usable form back in normal waking awareness.

The problem was that unlike the other techniques on the list, psychedelics bypassed my willpower. Their chemical battering ram simply smashed through the doors of perception. No adroitness or craft was involved on my part. One of my meditation teachers referred to drug use, no matter how responsible, as “storming the kingdom of heaven through violence.”

Gradually, then, I ended my relationship with the illegal magic. Instead I affirmed my desire to build mastery through hard work. Dream interpretation, meditation, and tantric exploration became the cornerstones of my practice.” (http://freewillastrology.com/writings/started.html)

Amazingly Brezsny goes on to write on page 21 of his book Pronoia, “I had not ingested (and still have not as of this writing) a single mind-altering substance, even marijuana, since 1985.” Why not state this clearly, upfront, as a straightforward guide to future artists?

Why is it so difficult for artists to say clearly, “Hey, I don’t do drugs. I don’t need them. You probably don’t either; they’ll almost certainly make you a worse artist. Nothing has destroyed more potential in our generation than marijuana. Protect your Mind. Rewire your brain with Kindness, not chemicals.”
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Rather than militarize our society while providing the false veneer of ‘hip counter-culture rebel’ to paranoid poseurs, privileged dilettantes, and salaried weekend warriors (who need self-medication to survive dream-crushing careers), we should end this false revolution of the anti-imaginative class: all drugs must be legal.

There is nothing cool about getting high; there is nothing rebellious or counter-cultural about using a roadside weed to become a pothead. Marijuana makes you incredibly stupid and does nothing whatsoever to improve your imagination. If you want to go to an idiot parade, watch a NORML march…no kidding, truly unbelievable. Go to a NORML march before becoming a pothead, please. (Many of my friends would be marching if they could wake up and remember the date.)

For an articulate alternative point of view, the comedian Bill Hicks frequently defended drug use as inspirational. Most people though do not take drugs for inspiration; they are not remotely capable of broadening their minds, they are not revolutionary, they definitely cannot retain a single meaningful interesting concept from the supposedly novel experience of smoking marijuana. Most artists were exceptional in elementary school. Long before experiencing drugs they experienced inspiration as a gift. Only then, long after, did some became fat angry drunks and has-been potheads.  2¢

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX1CvW38cHA

Lead singer for the rock band Kiss, Gene Simons, has the courage to speak out against fake Muses, “I have never been drunk or high in my life. I have never smoked a cigarette and do not stay in the same room as people smoking.”

An alternative point of view: “We have a lot of really bad prejudices about marijuana, and we need to expose them as a society, because they’re holding a lot of people back – I know they held me back. They made me – until I was thirty years old I thought pot was for idiots. A lot of people do. And it’s important to let them know, not only is it not for idiots, it’s a tool. You can use it. It can benefit you. This is not a benign substance – it’s slippery, like all other psychoactive substances if you are on the wrong path mentally, you can go off the deep end with it. Like everything else. Like alcohol or anything else.” Joe Rogan, JRE Podcaast #807