On September 6, comedian Joe Rogan conducted a live interview with business magnate and Tesla CEO Elon Musk on his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. The conversation lasted approximately two and a half hours, and the two discussed a wide variety of topics—the dangers of artificial intelligence, the future of the fossil fuel industry, underground highways, flamethrowers, and more. The interview provided a remarkably personal glimpse into the mind of one of the world’s most ambitious inventors and entrepreneurs.

However, one segment of the interview has sparked (no pun intended) some controversy. Shortly after the interview’s two-hour mark, Rogan lights a blunt filled with tobacco and marijuana. He passes it to Musk, who asks, “It’s legal, right?” before reluctantly taking a puff. The interview was conducted in California, where marijuana is just as legal as the whiskey the two sipped throughout the interview.

Musk admits in the interview that he is “not a regular smoker of weed” because he “doesn’t find it’s very good for productivity.” Although the marijuana seemed to have little-to-no effect on his behavior, Musk’s decision resulted in some significant blowback.

The next day, Tesla’s stock dropped 6.3 percent, and both the company’s chief accounting officer and head of human resources announced they would be resigning because of Musk’s behavior. Various media outlets—Fox News, CNBC, Inc., Bloomberg—published articles criticizing Musk’s marijuana use and making far-fetched allegations that his actions may have violated Tesla’s Code of Business Conduct and Ethics. The most extreme accounts suggest that Musk would be wise to resign from Tesla immediately.

However, not all coverage of the incident has been negative. Forbes published an article positing that Musk’s marijuana use merely brought to light the general public’s need to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the drug.

“Let the man get high if he wants to get high,” said famed astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson in an interview with TMZ. “He’s the best thing we’ve had since Thomas Edison.”

Gwynne Shotwell, president of Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX, recently said at a satellite industry conference in Paris that “Elon is a brilliant man,” and that he “is as lucid and capable as he has ever been. I wish people would not focus on triviality.”

Though Musk has previously been criticized for exhibiting seemingly impulsive behavior on Twitter, the significance of his contributions to the automotive industry and the fields of alternative energy and space exploration far outweigh his few questionable tweets. Moreover, the exaggeratory attacks on Musk’s character and his decision to smoke marijuana represent a glaring double standard between marijuana and alcohol.

It is only natural that Musk, as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, is held to high standards of behavior by his peers. However, assuming that someone is unstable or morally compromised for taking one puff of a blunt is simply unreasonable (after all, 14 percent of all American adults admit to using marijuana regularly, according to a recent Yahoo News/Marist Poll).

Nobody would think to pin similar accusations against someone who takes a swig of alcohol, which has been repeatedly proven to be a deadlier substance than marijuana. In fact, The Lancet, a medical journal funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, recently published a study on global alcohol use. It found that in 2016 alcohol was the leading health risk factor among people aged 15-49, with 3.8 percent of female deaths and 12.2 percent of male deaths attributable to alcohol use. Though marijuana can and often should be considered a health risk, its potential to damage one’s health is significantly less than that of alcohol.

Not only has there never been a documented death linked to an overdose of marijuana, but marijuana is increasingly prescribed as treatment for many medical conditions such as Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, Alzheimer’s disease and various forms of cancer. As for the potential health benefits of alcohol, the researchers who conducted the study in The Lancet wrote that “the level of consumption that minimizes health loss is zero.”

In accepting Rogan’s offer to smoke marijuana, perhaps Musk wanted to deliver a jolt to the public perception of marijuana by attempting to steer the drug away from its persistent status as taboo. Regardless, Musk was likely aware of the level to which the interview would be scrutinized by the media. Why, then, would he take the risk of smoking if he suspected it might result in negative press?

“If Musk had done any research about Joe Rogan’s podcast beforehand, he probably knew that there was a possibility he would be offered weed,” said DePaul senior Ollie Kahveci. “I think his decision to smoke it was spontaneous but also an attempt to appeal to a younger audience. It will definitely make a lot of people reconsider their perception of people who smoke weed when they see one of the most influential and financially successful people in the world smoking it.”

Whether Musk calculated his decision is unimportant, as it will likely make for an inconsequential moment in his career. Where it may prove significant, however, is in the public discourse surrounding marijuana. Musk managed to turn the stoner stereotype on its head with a single puff, and the whole world watched. This moment shouldn’t change our opinions of Musk. It should challenge those of us who harbor negative, uninformed assumptions about marijuana and those who use it.