Researchers speak of “set and setting” as crucial factors shaping one’s experience of any drug, and marijuana in particular almost unfailingly fulfills one’s expectation of it, for better and worse. Lenson calls it “the great yea-sayer, supporting whatever is going on anyway, and introducing little or nothing of its own.” In my experience, cannabis can’t reliably be used to change one’s mood, only to intensify it. Smoking in a comfortable coffee shop with a dozen other people doing the same thing, I had no reason to feel paranoid, which is probably why I didn’t.
