Being a pothead greatly contributed to feelings of stupidity, fear, and loss of identity. Kind of like a vacation into being retarded and slightly schizophrenic for about 5 years.

Pot --
This is what happened to me on it.  When I first experienced the appealing sensation of the drug I became awed at what seemed to be the presence of God and the light and beauty of experience and living in the moment that it afforded, especially when listening to music and viewing art, making art, and writing.  Everything became intensely beautiful.  I thought that it made my brain "right", that I was able to connect with nature as I wanted to; and that on it I was experiencing the world the way that I "should" be experiencing it.  But really it's not the "right" way to experience things, it's just a different way of experiencing.  It makes much more sense that the faculties that I was born with and have developed over the years while sober are the "right" way of experiencing things.  The hard part is, that in real life, everything is not always shiny and golden and beautiful.  Real life can be difficult and tiring sometimes. 

It's a fact that marijuana makes my thoughts not as clear.  There are definitely different neuronal connections going on in the brain.  It seems like something like neuronal scrambling happens. 

The intense experience of beauty while stoned released dopamine to create an orgasm-like effect.  Because everything became beautiful, when I was taking an art class, I thought an exercise that I had done for design class was really amazing when it was not.  I was  much more sloppy with my work because everything was beautiful, even sloppy art homework.

 I am much more aware of energy when I am stoned.  Everyone's body language is super-intensified.
Every subtle movement that the other person makes contains either a no or a yes wherein I can sense fear or love, fear being no and love being yes.  This intense perception of fear and love from others (on an almost psychic level) makes me feel afraid, then I start to think that the other people who are stoned can sense this fear in me (which they probably can), so I feel even more afraid. 

But then the brain changes gears; shifts to a different idea.
It's harder to pay attention, easier to get distracted.  I did not notice this for the first few months.  When I started to notice this, I started to second-guess myself, which created insecurity.  This began to create fear as well.  I was smoking all the time.  Not constantly, but several times a day when possible.  I didn't do it every day until I got with a certain guy.  When I started to notice that it was making me mentally "slow", I started to develop fear of other people.  Fear that they would notice that my brain wasn't working very quickly, or that it was working differently than a normal person's, on a kind of level of insanity.  Smoking pot is not a sane experience.  If I wish to be sane I should not smoke it. 

It feels very spiritual, but that can be achieved on a more peaceful level through prayer and meditation.  There is a sense of the closeness of God but there is a fakeness to the God feeling sometimes.  I tried meditating on it one time because I was feeling really nuts and I sensed, where my body is usually filled with light upon the completion of meditation, that there were little black prickly things at the edges of my body that the light could not disperse because of the influence of the pot.  Perhaps it is a false sense of God.   

Feeling stupid sucked the confidence out of me.  I used to be confident, now I am not.  Smoking it again will only decrease confidence more and not smoking it ever will only increase confidence.

"God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind."  Therefore, I feel that God does not want me to smoke pot because it causes a lot of fear and God does not want me to be afraid.