I am absolutely in support of legalizing marijuana. It doesn’t make any sense to me to keep it illegal when there is little argument that alcohol and tobacco are clearly far more deadly. Drunks are scary. They have little control over themselves. The word ‘drunk’ goes hand in hand with ‘belligerent’. Tobacco causes cancer, diseases of the lung, and birth defects. Both alcohol and tobacco are available over the counter. Although they may be taxed and wildly overpriced, they are readily available pretty much anywhere, at any time, to anyone.
Don’t let the age restrictions fool you. I was able to easily procure alcohol and cigarettes by the age of 10. There was this shady fellow who owned a liquor store just a few blocks from where I grew up. He sold bottles of Bacardi 151 with a pink screw top cap to minors, and all the Capri’s and Virginia Slims you could smoke. I am not sure why I had such secretary taste in my choice of intoxicants, but thank God I left those worldly ‘pleasures’ behind at a reasonably early age.
If I could get it, anyone could. I was one of those really awkward kids who couldn’t seem to do anything with panache. Some are born with the gift of savvy and manage to make everything look easy. I never had that ability, nor do I have it today, but then it was many times worse, and I was still able to ‘buy up’.
Recreational drug use to me is rather tiresome. I get really paranoid and time starts to not make sense. Those are the first things to go, confidence and awareness of the passage of time. You don’t know how important both those things are until you don’t have them. Also, I become insanely and unreasonably hungry. It isn’t the munchies, it is the ‘famines’. Perhaps it is the way the food sounds in my head that is so compelling. I need the loudness of chewing to drown out the world I am trying to block out because it scares me. Then, if I am so fortunate to have a life changing experience in my altered state, I am unable to remember it later.
What is bad about marijuana in a practical sense is that it takes away your ambition and makes you very tired and apathetic about everything. Therefore, being stoned is counter-revolutionary. However, the idea of marijuana, and the right to smoke it are important components in the realm of revolutionary thought.
Medical marijuana should not be opposed. Why would anybody want to keep someone suffering from a terminal disease, something that is treacherous and incurable, from a little bit of comfort in the midst of their intense discomfort? Not all people want to have to live on painkillers.
I was watching a documentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Ram Dass, a longtime advocate of psychedelics and their use in modern day shamanic exploration. He has a hospice in San Francisco, mostly to help those with AIDS and AIDS related illnesses, die a dignified and examined death. It is remarkably compassionate, the kind that seems to come to those who get high more easily than those who don’t. It seemed when they were tripping, there was a care and concern for others, which we don’t always see in real time. Something about being on these kinds of drugs makes people softer, more gently attuned to the needs of our fellows, more apt to help, or readily willing to be of help. Selfishness seems to vanish under certain chemical conditions.
Of course, there are some drugs that ratchet up selfishness levels to an unbearable degree, but those are not the substances that I think should be made legal or readily available. These are the white drugs that plague our communities. Lately, crystal meth has been an egregious problem within the gay populace. There is even an ad campaign running in New York that says, “Get crystal meth, get free HIV!!!”
Making something illicit shrouds it in a veil of mystery which makes it far more alluring than it deserves to be. If I had known how dumb drugs were to begin with, then I wouldn’t have done so many. It was the hysteria around drugs that made them glamorous. The inaccessibility is what made me want them. The availability of alcohol made me hate it fairly quickly. But the rarity of drugs, the difficulty in procuring them, created an undue aura that brought me back many more times than the high ever did. Every time I did drugs the conversation was the same. “Maybe this wasn’t a strong batch/bag/bindle/bundle.” Of course this never stopped me from doing more, hoping that I might catch some of that wildness, figure out what the hoopla was all about, understand why it was banned everywhere and available nowhere.
Drugs are never a good investment of time, money or otherwise. But if certain drugs were legal, even taxed by the government, in the way that booze and cigarettes are, and became corporate and boring like Zima or Mores, then there would certainly be an explosion of interest, a renaissance of reefer, where college students would have a couple of years worth of Spring Break, and then it would just kind of die down and nobody would give a shit anymore.
We should have the ability to make a choice about drug use. There should be education that goes beyond “Just Say No,” because the reality is that kids don’t say no, will not say no, will never say no, but if they “know” – it would give them a better chance at avoiding drug addiction, perhaps even avoiding drugs altogether.