Personally, I was 18 when I tried pot for the first time. I'm 20 now; I felt then and continue to feel that it happened at just the perfect time in my life.

Just having graduated from high school, I was ripe for new experience, anxious about the future and confused about the state of my life. Basically searching for I-didn't-know-what, and trying to figure what life is all about.

The posts on this page all seem to address the technical/legal end of the question, but what I feel is almost more important than the extent to which one is "mature" and "ready for the responsibilities" of marijuana use (though this too is quite important) is the state of an individual's psychological/spiritual relationship to life, to other people, to one's own existence in the world itself. When we talk about maturity, we mean more than just being considerate of others while stoned or not driving while totally fucked. I'm talking about how much somebody has taken the time to really contemplate life, death, and the purpose of our being here, sharing this earth together. Past a certain age, it is inevitable that all of us start asking such questions... this happens at different times for different people, and so does maturity.

Most of us recognize that smoking pot can be more than just having a laugh with some friends, more than a social drug or a way to relax. Like other psychoactives it can (and should be, sometimes) a mind-blowing, private, consciousness-opening experience that is capable of teaching us much about ourselves, if we are only willing to listen. I feel that marijuana ought to be used for this as much as for social leisure, and that as part of the legalization movement we have to challenge cultural stereotypes about its users that say we are all lazy irresponsible stoners.

A person's experience of marijuana on the whole--what it is, what it is for, what it can do for you--can be incredibly rewarding and liberating if they start at an age when these problems (of self and identity, meaning of life and spirit and of the universe) are already being dealt with seriously. Pot should not be something that we are initially peer-pressured into, and informed of what to expect by a group with a limited cultural mindset. Pot is an experience which precludes definition; it is irrational and individual and we each have to make what we want of it.

We all know that things change dramatically in the post-high school/ college period. We begin to think about the "real world"--what it is and what it should be, and our place in it. This is a good time to try pot if not a little sooner.

At the age of 18, I was a late-comer to marijuana by today's standards. I see now that it was the perfect time for me because of the ideas that had begun to occupy me. For the past year, I'd begun to read the mystics, to discover the irrationality of love, to question my atheism of many years and redefine it as pantheism. I was reading lots of Buddhism. My new best friend was a hippy who challenged my preconceptions about drugs, and I took the plunge. It changed my life, helped me work through many problems, made me feel good about existence. And yet waiting until that point in my life was the best part about it, because only then was I ready for the spiritual substance it provided. Every time I smoked I was in awe, ecstasy; you know what those first few times are like. I waited two or three weeks between each "spiritual occasion" because I was almost scared of the effect it had on me, igniting that spark which was, for me, a glimpse of the infinite.

Well I know not everybody can relate to all of this, because I mean c'mon, "it's just pot." Well yeah. I know.
But that first high, man... I think everybody knows.
We can't trivialize it.

That's why I think it should be tried at an age when we know enough to separate our individuality from the culture. When it won't just be all about getting fucked up. I voted for age 17, when most people have begun to experience enough of life, the good and the bad, to be mature, to know who they are. Or what they're looking for. Or at least to know that they DON'T know.

There's nothing wrong with the recreational experience, but when you realize that there can be more than that, I think THAT'S when you're ready.