Vintage Outlandish!

This Content From 2003 (or earlier) see index

Dope

"Marijuana is rejected all over the world. Damned. In England heroin is alright for out-patents, but marijuana? They'll put your ass in jail. I wonder why that is? . . . . The only reason could be: To Serve the Devil - Pleasure! Pleasure, which is a dirty word in Christian culture."

-- Lenny Bruce

The wackey tabackey

I get stilly when I'm high, and even when I can keep a good face on thing, it's still whackytown in my head. Dope makes me vulnderable, open, shields down, and it also makes it hard for me to listen to anything except music. This tends to leave me lonely and cold if I don't have a good set of thoughts to work through or some good people to connect with.

Dispite my wild fantasies and dreams, I'm no Hunter S Thompson. I don't smoke a lot of dope. I'm not a stoner. I actually grew up with a lot of prejudice against pot, first because I was a child-sucker for the totally baseless "just say no" ad campaigns (so affected, I remember being afraid as a 3rd grader that my friends were using cocaine behind my back), and second because of my high school experience.

In high school, pot was like lemonade. So to better define my own identity I didn't smoke. Ever. Eventually, I loosened up in college and got high a few times. But my experiences with other psychadelics (especially LSD) left me with some degree of contempt for marijuanna. First of all it really doesn't take you there, no matter how much you use. Secondly, I still recall the moment very clearly on a rather tense acid trip, a friend saying about a fellow tripper who wanted to go outside but for various reasons couldn't: "Ok, this kid needs to go outside. Somebody just get him some pot." That left a lasting impression on me: a solid example of how drugs cease to be portals or catalysts of experience and come to replace experience alltogether.

Lately I've been better about loosing my prejudice against dope. I still don't think it's something one should do all the time. Just like anything, moderation is key. But I'm much more relaxed in my opinions, and I'm less likely to belittle others for being high and more likely to take a small hit myself.

Finally, on the legalization tip, I think the fact that dope is criminal is ludicrous. But I also don't buy the whole "medical marijuanna" trip. It smells hokey, although there is some research supporting it as a pain-killer for people with AIDS and Cancer. The truth is there's nothing wrong with getting high, and I wish there was someone respectable out there with the balls to stand up to 200+ years of puritan tradition and say that. Instead you've got a lot of flakes talking about "medicine" and winking at you while our government spends billions to lock people up for non-violent crimes. That's not a long-term solution, friends.