I'm working on a story set in university. I remember from my time at university that it was fairly common for some students to indulge in the wacky baccy, and as that's a standard part of the university experience for a lot of folks I thought it would make sense to write characters who indulge in getting stoned themselves.
Unfortunately I don't have any direct personal experience of using the stuff (Neither I or my friends ever really tried it to any great extent) so I can't really draw from experience.
Of course there are plenty of examples of characters getting stoned in all kinds of popular culture (movies, TV shows, books, etc) but they almost always seem to be played for laughs (unless it's an over-the-top anti-drug film like Reefer Madness). I'm sure a lot of the time stoned people are pretty funny, but I do wonder how much of the typical portrayals you see in mass media are accurate and how much is just playing up stereotypes and jokes about it (I suspect the latter is far more common than the former).
Typical portrayals tend to feature at least one of the following:
- Talking in a nonsensical way
- Spouting non-sequiters
- Fainting (usually immedeately after saying something funny)
- Laughing and giggling
- "The munchies"
- "Deep" conversations that aren't really about anything much.
- Paranoia and "freak-outs"
- etc
Are the sort of depictions you see in mass media of using marijuana bear much resemblance to reality? If I were to include a character that uses marijuana then does anybody have any tips or guidelines for creating scenes involving casual drug use that don't resort to just copying the sort of goofy behaviour that is commonly used in portrayals of such characters?
UPDATE: I thought I'd add a couple of examples of the sort of stereotypical behaviour I'm talking about