The first person who offered me pot was a 4-year-old boy. You read that right. I was 17. My girlfriend, a Ritalin addict, wanted to visit some world traveling hippies she had met somewhere so we went to the run-down hotel where they were crashing and a cigarette was going around. Their 4-year-old was sitting next to me. He took a drag and then passed it to me. I had no idea. I pretended to take a drag and passed it to the next person.
Like Clinton, I’m not an inhaler. Having been a severely asthmatic child, breathing is important to me, so anything that fills my mouth, nose or lungs with smoke has no appeal. Throughout college, whenever I found myself in a similar situation, I did the similar fake-out and left before the conversation bogged down into too much mellowosity. I like provocative conversation and plans of action. Pot smokers like sofas, television, and silence punctuated by endless loop observations of the obvious. They are too content to change the world, or even change the channel.
Plus it’s nasty. It smells bad. Bong water is a whole other kind of vile. I’m not a fan of anything that someone puts in their mouth and then hands to me. Too much spit-sharing going on here.
Except for a caffeine rush from Mountain Dew, I am immune to most addictive substances anyway. Nicotine, alcohol, prescription painkillers – nothing does it for me. I have an Eeyore level of discontent that nothing can dislodge, even temporarily. Although the one time I did inhale at a Christmas party when I was making a feeble attempt to fit in, I actually did feel a lifting of my usual innate apprehensions.
I was lifted enough to get into a car with bald tires on a rainy night and not pay attention to my driver’s directional skills, and broke the windshield with my head when we hydroplaned into a guardrail on a Chippenham off ramp. Natasha Richardson died from less of an impact. I don’t know why I’m alive. After an ambulance ride to MCV and a full body x-ray, I proceeded to the next Christmas party, minus my holiday dress and underwear, which were scissored off in the emergency room. Just paper scrubs and party shoes.
That was 15 years ago, and I considered it a Message from God: Received. If I need to be in the game, back to Mountain Dew. Out of the game, extra strength Benadryl and an hour of C-Span works fine. ZZZzzzz. I will deal with life by continuing to be aggravated.
All that said, I support the legalization of marijuana. (If my driver had been drinking, I think we would have hit that guardrail a lot harder – and in a muscle car.) This really needs to happen, and soon. I have been in rooms full of beer drinkers and rooms full of pot smokers, and I’ll take the smokers any day. It’s quieter, less stupid, less marred by incidents of indiscriminate urinating. There’s definitely less fighting. And less vomiting. Pot is the drug of less. Less worries, less violence, less ambition, less money.
For those who are easily disappointed, angered, or frustrated by life, less can be more. I don't understand why alcohol is not only legal, but sold by the state.
I don’t believe pot is a gateway drug. And if it does have medicinal qualities, if it does ease nausea caused by chemotherapy or dulls the pain of arthritis, how is that a bad thing? Seems like a plant put on earth by God is being used as God intended, instead of pharmaceuticals cooked up on lab hot plates.
The columnist Joe Klein recently proposed in Time magazine, tongue-in-cheek, that marijuana should be legalized for seniors who give up their driver’s licenses. But there’s a good point here. Keep the Boomers sedated as they segue into substandard, under financed, understaffed assisted living and nursing facilities. If marijuana is legally sold only to those 62 and over, then everyone will want granny to live with them.
Klein also points out that decriminalized marijuana means fewer people in jail, that 47.5 percent of all arrests are marijuana-related. Police can concentrate on something more damaging to the public welfare.
It would save Philip Morris, not to mention California. Even when limited to medicinal use, pot is the largest cash crop in California with $14 billion in revenue. What kind of sin tax can you levy on that kind of moola?
It would reduce crime, like repealing prohibition did, by taking the transporting, sales and marketing out of the hands of the underground criminal economy and creating jobs for regular people.
Sure, at first the novelty of it being mainstream will make everyone eager to try it, but then all those, like me, who inherently don’t like the stink, the smoke, and the inertia will quickly move on. And as Klein writes, given the “assorted boozehounds and pill poppers” in talk radio and Congress, “the hypocrisy inherent in the American conversation about stimulants is staggering.” Bad influence on children? And Joe Camel, Captain Morgan, and the Budweiser frogs are what?
As more and more of the WWII generation dies off and out of political office and those born in the 1960s and later rise to power, it’s going to be a done deal anyway. The whole 20th century prohibition of it will seem like an historically quaint era.
No comments:
Post a Comment