I confess that I find it surprising that some people here on HN freely admit using Marijuana. Worst-case scenario, couldn't YC be subpoenaed by the feds and requested to provide each user's email and IP address?
I know this sounds a bit too draconian, but didn't the last administration try to subpoena Google?
In most parts of California, it's effectively legal. While it's still technically against the federal law, the state law says that anyone with a prescription can buy it at a store and smoke it in their home.
Getting a prescription is as easy as picking a doctor off a list, paying for an appointment, and saying, "I get headaches. Pot helps."
It's available, reasonably priced, and you can have it without being hassled by the authorities. As long as you're not a total idiot about it, it's pretty much just another alcohol. No one cares if you smoke pot on the weekends, as long as you do good work.
We used to have a boss who obviously was into drugs. extremely volatile, and he'd often email 'the team' at weekends, with long incoherent rants about how badly we're all doing.
California does seem to have a culture of pot smoking for some reason.
Are you high? The only class of individuals that don't freely admit facts about their life in a public forum are politicians. . .are you a politician? Otherwise, getting that paranoid over some form of punishment is beyond rational.
That's your opinion. Mine is different. Invoking the principle of least privilege, if some piece of information on your personal life is of no use to the point you're trying to make, why reveal it? You gain nothing, and there a chance (though remote) that it will be used against you at some point in the future.
A thought experiment: suppose you were an alcoholic... would you admit it on HN? If not, why's that so? Is it illegal? Are you a politician? Maybe it's because of the social stigma associated with it. Well, guess what, not everyone shares the same values you do and in some more conservative circles, smoking pot would carry a stigma as well. That could harm you when looking for a job, for instance. I have seen that happening.
Maybe I am paranoid, but better safe than sorry, right?
Sure, they could. It would be a worthless case that's not worth the state's money to prosecute, however. Possession is hard to prosecute, and admitting to once using some weed on the Internet is even harder. ("Yeah, I just said I smoked weed so that people would think I was cool." Case dismissed.)
I suppose they could get a search warrant for your place, but this is so exceedingly unlikely that it is not worth worrying about. Pot is technically illegal, but only the most flagrant displays of use are worth the government's time to prosecute. (And, it's decriminalized in many places now. Not everyone is in the US.)
You're right. To be honest, I am not too concerned with the state trying to prosecute me for having smoked a couple of joints in college. The state could try to do it, but I don't see what it would gain exactly. I am more concerned about how confessing (hypothetically speaking) to have smoked weed in the past could harm my career in the future.
For example, four friends of mine started a laser company after the dot-com crash in 2001. They needed $25 million of venture funding, and they got it. However, some (if not all) the VC firms hired private investigators to conduct a background check on my friends. The PI's researched and scrutinized their entire lives (both professional and personal). The PIs were so good at the job it was almost nauseating. Make no mistake about it, this kind of info can be used to find your weaknesses, and can be used against you. In fact, they used that info against my friends with devastating effects as soon as the company had some problems. It was not pretty.
So let's say your friends admitted to smoking weed, and the paranoid VCs pulled out. That just means some other VCs would have invested instead.
(As another example, I have long hair. That means there are certain jobs that I probably couldn't get, as some companies have corporate policies against that. Do I care? No. I don't need those companies for anything.)
"That just means some other VCs would have invested instead."
I would say that would have worked if you wanted to build a software company. This was early 2001, the entire Tech bubble had just collapsed. It isn't very easy to find venture capital when you need tens of millions of dollars to afford world-class lasers, electronics and clean rooms. The scale and ambition of the project constrain you because there aren't many sources of venture capital of that magnitude.
I don't have long hair, but I wouldn't want to work for a company who had a policy against it either. Such a policy would only make it clear that the company had the wrong values and priorities.
As far as I know it's not illegal anywhere in the United States (yes, making that assumption here) to admit to using it, talk/write about using it or publish information on growing or using it. That is what freedom of speech provides us.
Acting on any of those things is a different story.
I know this sounds a bit too draconian, but didn't the last administration try to subpoena Google?