Oakley Ray, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University, and Charles Ksir, PhD, Professor of Psychology at the University of Wyoming, stated in their 2004 textbook Drugs, Society, and Human Behavior:
“The subjective effects of smoking marijuana — the high — are quite difficult to study…
Almost all writers emphasize that a new user has to learn how to smoke marijuana. The first step involves deeply inhaling the smoke and holding it in the lungs for twenty to forty seconds. Then the user has to learn to identify and control the effects and, finally, to label the effects as pleasant. Because of this learning process, most first-time users do not achieve the euphoric ‘stoned’ or ‘high’ condition of the repeater.”
2004