I regularly sit here in sunny California with my wax vaporizer pen, using cannabis, even gasp! while taking care of my children! I used it double gasp every single day of pregnancy, more than once a day! And horror to end all horrors, my DH, their father, uses it every day as well.
My poor children must be undeveloped little mites whose care has been utterly neglected by how slow and stupid it's made our thinking, and how muddled up we must be when we care for them. Probably they're seriously injured regularly because we simply can't be arsed to watch them because we're so very reefer-mad.
Do you detect a hint of sarcasm? Yeah, my kids are the children other people in the family look at with envy -- clever, funny, social, well-behaved, good sleepers, good eaters, who hit every milestone early. We're constantly being told by our family (his upper-middle-class somewhat conservative family, as well as my working-class family, both of which are well aware that we are daily users and that I used during pregnancy) that it'd be lovely if we had more children, and that it'd be unsurprising for people with kids as nice as ours to have a large family.
We're forever learning with the kids, we take them out and are museum members at several museums locally that we regularly visit, we take them on fabulous vacations and to see family members all over the US, by car, train, and plane. My income has tripled in the last 4 years, every single day of which has involved (usually fairly heavy) cannabis use.
I would expect that if you met me in person, you'd have no idea whatsoever that cannabis was a part of my daily life. Vaporizing combined with a large, well-ventilated house means that my clothes and hair don't smell of it. I don't trail off halfway through sentences ... okay, not any more than any other mother of an infant, I admit the sleep deprivation can cause something like that once in a while!
I would say we are dependent on cannabis in the same way anti-depressant takers are dependent on their anti-depressants. Both my husband and I were mental health disasters who'd tried therapy and more traditional prescription type drugs first. We were messes. I couldn't get myself together from anxiety enough to keep any half-decent job for very long. He was practically a hoarder who was spiraling into self-destruction and was absolutely miserable all the time.
Now we're a lovely middle-class couple with a life others envy. I think a lot of the idea about "stoners" comes from the "bad toupee fallacy." You think to yourself, my god, are there no good hairpieces for men, they're all so obvious and tacky ... until you realize that if the hairpiece really was quite good, you'd never know it was there. People only notice the bad cannabis users the same way they only notice the bad toupee.