When I first wrote the bit about Stacy having an addiction to sink into, pot was a no brainer. Zack and I have both known people who have retreated into a cloud of smoke, justifying their overuse by pointing to the lack of physically addictive substances and the purported health benefits. It seemed natural that at least one of our characters, having gone through the trauma of losing a loved one to undeath, would react this way.

There is one confirmed danger to pot. We tried presenting it here, and it’s not really the pot itself. It’s about the easy escape it can provide. Stacy’s decline was never about the specific drug. It could have easily been booze, video games, casual sex, thrill seeking, or any one of a thousand activities that we can use to run from ourselves and our problems. Escapism isn’t necessarily bad, but too much of anything is never good.

But that’s a different question than the one we usually ask: whether pot is physically bad for you, and the question of legalization. As a creative type, I think people expect me to respond with feel-good memes and Cheetos, but I prefer facts. Whether it’s good or bad, I want to know why and how. Unfortunately, pot has been illegal for so long that we barely have any reliable data to go on.

Instead, most of us were “taught” about it growing up through things like DARE, the “Your Brain On Drugs” commercials, and my personal favorite, Cartoon All Stars to the Rescue.

In fairness, it was a good idea: using crossover appeal to guarantee an enormous audience of kids, who could then be educated on the dangers of drugs. But in execution, you only learn that whoever made this had about the same relationship with facts that you’d find in, well, a children’s cartoon. Not to mention that Cartoon All Stars showed people doing drugs and then getting to hang out with their favorite cartoon friends all day. Which proves that doing drugs is a bad thing… how?

Then again, they’re all kinda acting like dicks, so, there’s that.

Hell, at the end of the day, cartoons too are just another form of escapism. Leaving real life behind for another world to live in and through because you just don’t want to be where you are, or who you are, right now.

I’m really not condoning any one position here. I just wish I knew more. I wish we had that data, so we could make good, informed choices.

But until we do, the next best thing is to have someone like Stacy to learn from. Someone who has navigated the shades of grey, who knows that dealing in absolutes has never yielded a conversation of substance, much less the truth. Someone who understands that a drug doesn’t have to be illegal to be addictive, or even a drug at all. Someone who’s been through the trenches and came out on the other side, wiser for it.

Someone who may have run away for a while and stumbled along the way, but still came out alright.