High Scores: What’s the Link Between Video Games and Weed

Video games and pot are a match made in pixel heaven. Boy does time fly when you are stoned playing the latest installment of Battlefield. Quick question, do a few hits make you totally unbeatable in Mortal Kombat X? Must investigate that after finishing up with this article.

If you can relate, you know how stunningly aware you when gaming after a joint. You do stuff even the game developers never knew players could. Hours whiz by while defeating Titans, swinging around Gotham or beating the living daylights out of online opponents. The fatalities scare me a bit, though. And suddenly, it's 4 a.m., and you have to be at work at 6.

But this comes with the territory. Video games and weed are enormous time sinks where entire hours seem to vanish mysteriously. The hocus-pocus behind this logic boils down to their addictive nature. On one hand, you have video games. Video games are your brain’s ultimate crush. Nothing will get your eyes off the screen, or your hands away from the controls. Your brain simply won’t let you. It’s as if it won’t listen to you until you find and vanquish the Joker. That’s all that matters.

Weed, on the other hand, presses all your pleasure buttons. Tons and tons of endorphins course through you. You feel like you’re in a Nirvana within a Nirvana, and every single of your fantasies are there to explore. Enough said.

Combine weed and video games and endorphins meet adrenalin. Brain heaven that’s what it is. You get great excitement, at relatively small stakes. The only thing that matches the entirely exhilarating experience is skydiving naked while drinking a boatload of Mountain Dew. Wait, they should make a game out of that. Dibs on the copyright.

However, a lot of people ask if there’s an inherent danger of combining the two addictive recreational activities. Of course, there’s the distinct possibility of warping through an entire year, but that isn’t so bad is it.

The science types have done little research. What is available is shoddy, and can’t really answer our question. But some studies show marijuana addiction falls at around 9 percent while video game addiction is anywhere between 3 to 12 percent. For context, smoking stands at 33 percent while booze comes in at 15 percent. I can definitely live with video game and weed addiction numbers, even when they are combined. But what we'd really like to know is, does pot affect reaction time? I don’t mean the stoned to lunar system kind of pot, but small hits. They should give us numbers on that.