Has
Chico State’s smoking culture made us lazier as both students and
members of our community? I’ve decided that yes, it most definitely has.
Going to college in Northern California provides itself
with a great set of liberties, one of them being that for the most part,
Chico students can easily smoke marijuana wherever and whenever they
want.
There are few restrictions on the whole thing, which makes it that
much easier to get comfortable with the smoking fad.
In 2015, a University of Michigan study
revealed that 1 in 17 college students (5.9 percent) use marijuana on a
daily basis – which is actually a low number compared to the true
number of college kids that I know smoke everyday. However, the study
stated that this is the highest reported marijuana use from college
students since 1980, proving how prevalent smoking has become in
everyday college life.
It seems as if smoking is the No. 1 recreational activity for Chico State students. People get together and “sesh,”
or smoke weed with their friends while they talk, watch TV or eat,
generally while sitting on a couch or chair. While I will never deny how
nice this activity can be, I’m starting to think its prevalence is
taking away from time we should be spending doing productive activities.
Homework, studying, exercising, cleaning, being out in
nature – these are all things that are important for me to be a
successful, productive college student. However, all the seshing and
smoking with friends has served as a distraction from all these things.
When you’re bored and there’s “nothing to do,” I don’t think I’m the
only one who’s first instinct would be to text friends and see who wants
to smoke.
Smoking weed has become so incredibly normalized in Chico
State’s student culture, and it’s starting to take its toll. We should
be out in the community trying to make a difference or at least trying
to improve our own lives through healthy and beneficial methods.
Instead, it feels like we’ve given up on utilizing our free time in
vigorous ways and have traded it in for a life of lazily laying around
on couches mindlessly watching bad TV.
The worst part about all this is that we’ve come to just
accept this as the terms of college life. No one (including me) even
tries to protest it at this point. Smoking with friends is such a social
norm that students who don’t smoke are considered the black sheep of
the group. It’s almost unheard of when someone walks into your house or
apartment and doesn’t participate in the smoking.
Of course, I’m not calling for the complete shutdown of
smoking weed among students. Trust me, I would never do that. However, I
am calling for all of us to at least recognize the pattern that’s
emerging among all of us students. Everyone should pay attention to the
fact that we’ve become very lazy people. We’re putting productive,
beneficial activities on the back burner because none of us can rip
ourselves away from the life of smoking and socialization.
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