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With an increasing number of states legalizing recreational cannabis in the U.S., it isn’t hard to find people who smoke weed on a daily basis. Across America, however, a stigma around smoking marijuana remains.

Ainsley Holman, 21, is a senior studying magazine, news and digital journalism at Syracuse University. Throughout her academic career at SU, she has held the positions of University Girl Magazine editor-in-chief and TriDelta rush chair, and she regularly smokes weed to cope with anxiety and stress. She grew up in Texas, where recreational cannabis is still illegal. This is her account, as told to a Daily Orange reporter. All quotes are in her words, edited lightly for clarity.

I started smoking regularly fall of my junior year, so only a year and a half ago, but I used to think weed was so bad for you. I thought it had a lot of bad connotations, but as I started to do it more, I realized, “Oh, that’s all just things people told me to freak me out.” But I feel like over time the way I view weed has definitely changed, especially being from Texas.

My friends from Texas don’t really see weed as an everyday thing. They see it as a once-a-week-when-they-go-out kind of thing, or they never use it. They think it’s bad, because some people see weed the same way they see harder drugs. So I think that the space they hold for weed is very negative and not as routine as my friends that do smoke. My close friends pretty much all smoke — my TriDelt friends, my Bandier friends, all my PhiDelt friends all smoke, and the culture around it is just so familiar. No one really bats an eye. When I’m hanging out with my friends, we sit in a circle and pass around a bong almost like a talking stick. It’s very casual; it’s something that brings us together.

As I’ve started to become more familiar with smoking in the past year, and how it can be used in a more medicinal manner, I’ve begun to frame it as something to help with my anxiety and my mental health. It has this sense of calmness that I don’t think I can get from other things and brings me a lot of peace when I’m really stressed out. Smoking has made me a lot calmer. I was a super irritable person in high school, and I had a very short fuse, but now I’m much more chill. I think half of that comes from developing my frontal lobe and the other half came from smoking weed. Smoking has a good impact on my life, and if it starts to have a bad impact on it that’s when I would stop, but for now it’s been good.

I don’t think weed is for everyone. I think that sometimes if people aren’t in good mental states, or if they get paranoid, anxious or have depressive states in everyday life, sometimes smoking can accentuate that and make it worse. I know people who are super paranoid and anxious, and weed just makes them more paranoid and anxious. So they’re not going to smoke. I also think it’s not good for people who are using it for the wrong reasons. I think that’s why intention is super important when it comes to smoking weed habitually, because you’re doing it to chill at the end of the day and view it as a recreational thing. I think that’s fine. I think that’s great. But people who see it as a dependency, whether it’s for something that they’re trying to avoid, suppress or cope with, I think that’s when weed becomes something that’s maybe not for everyone.

I wish people wouldn’t take it so seriously. I think that weed can be something super cool and super fun for people who are doing it for the right reasons and are doing it safely. Something I would definitely like to see change is the stigma that people who smoke are lazy or dirty, that kind of stuff. I feel like weed has become more normalized in that, like, it’s kind of like a separate conversation.

I feel the gentrification of the marijuana industry is super prevalent. While you can have dispensaries like MedMen open, where white Millennials are running around buying gummies and dispensaries in L.A. that literally feel like an Apple store, at the same time, there are so many people in jail in our country predominantly from underrepresented communities for weed-related crimes. It’s crazy that that’s going on at the same time. The stigma is starting to change, but only for a certain group of people that have been deemed socially acceptable to smoke weed. I would love for it to change in direction where all these people that are in jail for weed-related crimes are freed and it’s legalized for everyone but as of right now, that’s not the case.

Published on April 20, 2022 at 12:42 am