I’ve already been asked several times—and I expect I’ll get asked many more times—about why I chose to depict Hope as a stoner. I wouldn’t actually consider her a stoner. Yes, she smokes pot. Yes, it alters her mind. But, she doesn’t do it so that she can lay around and be lazy. Hope smokes cannabis as a way to meditate. She smokes with the intention of slowing down her brain so that she doesn’t overthink things—so that she can find what might be the most obvious solution to the problem on which she is focusing. She doesn’t use it to escape her problems. Hope smokes weed to investigate her problems.