But honestly? We beg to freaking differ, thank you.
Does sparking up a joint make you feel like you’re the king of cool? Do you think the giant cloud of smoke makes you look mysterious? According to a newly released study, it might have the opposite effect on the people around you.
Boooooooo. We need all the help we can get.
Anywho, researchers at Harvard Community College in Santa Monica, California, recently took the time to find out just how people see you as a pot smoker, and the results may be surprising to some of you. Researchers found that depending on users’ IQ, hygiene, income, and environment, smoking cannabis may make you appear less cool to people.
The study stemmed from Dr. Wallaby Frank watching the cult classic “Dazed and Confused,” in which there’s a scene where Matthew McConaughey’s character asks another actor if he had a joint with him. The guy tells him no, and McConaughey responds with, “It’d be a whole lot cooler if you did.”
Dr. Frank thought McConaughey’s character was the epitome of cool and, by default, should have had his own joint. This scene lit a fire with Frank to figure out what exactly it meant to be cool in relation to cannabis.
Frank and his team of professors interviewed 374 participants, ranging from ages 12 to 99, who all claimed to smoke cannabis three or more times a week.
Frank said, “We also put a big fat red stamp on everyone under the age of 18 because you’re a kid and barely have a brain to begin with,” so it’s unclear why they even included them in the study. And, for what it’s worth, anyone who claimed they smoked because it was “cool” was immediately deemed uncool by the researchers.
“Many people assume that they’re automatically cool just because they consume marijuana, but in reality, this is untrue … Do you know who also smokes weed? Narcs,” Jill-Rose Neemoy, a researcher involved in the study said.
Other signs of “uncoolness” associated with smoking cannabis include making less than $35,000 a year, being more than $10,000 in debt, never having traveled outside of one’s country of birth, and having a diet 60% or more dependent on processed foods.
Researchers also found that some other odd factors made people seem uncool, including tipping less than 20%, having sweaty palms, shaky knees, the inability to play the piano, deciding to start an entire social media account dedicated to guns and weed, guns and shrooms, weed and shrooms, shrooms and coke, weed and coke, or coke and pills.
Factors that made cannabis smokers seem cool were dark humor, punctuality, a true passion for the cannabis plant that includes knowledge of cannabinoids, classifications, and a knowledge of the industry as a whole.
Dr. Frank said it was an incredibly difficult study to measure. He said that participants would show up dressed really nice, reeking of weed, with a big smile on their faces, and the researchers assumed the participant was cool. Then the researchers would ask what year World War One started, and the participants would have no idea which deemed them less cool.
“But on the flip side of that, someone else would come in dressed like a hippie, with no shoes on and sticks in his beard, but then he’d get to talking about theoretical statistics, free jazz, and endocrinology,” Frank said. “By the end, I’d be sitting there wondering who was actually conducting the study, me or him?”
With the new year just around the bend, maybe let this be a reason to try and get your high another way than smoking. You don’t want to be the only person judged for being a monster because you are smoking your cannabis instead of eating it or vaping it.