Bears are a close evolutionary cousin of ours, by the way.
Fun fact for the High Times readers: in Bhutan, cannabis
indica is a weed in the literal sense - it grows along the
side of the road. Much to the dismay of my hippie friends,
people there don't smoke it much. The wild variety is supposed
to be harsh and low in THC, and the Bhutanese would rather
chew betel nut and drink hard liquor anyway. They do feed
it to pigs, as a way to increase their appetite.
One of many biochemical similarities between ourselves and
our tasty porcine friends.
In his book After
The Ice, Stephen Mithen asks us to imagine a prehistoric
shaman inhaling the fumes from herbs in the fire before drawing
on the cave wall. Being stoned doesn't just help when you're
hunting animals. Artists from
Louis Armstrong to Jon Stewart will tell you that weed
helps hunt and capture memes in the murky forest of your own
sense memories. I think the best modern analog for cave paintings
of hunters isn't painting at all, it's video games like Doom,
Quake, Unreal, Halo. Just the titles of these games give me
a shamanistic tingle.
We put people in prison for many, many years for marijuana
possession and sale. If it's a multiple offender, the sentence
might be life. Try to imagine spending the weekend in jail.
Try to imagine spending a month. Why do we do this much psychological
violence to people? What are we so afraid of?
One clue can be found by comparing any group of randomly
chosen drug users and any group of drug offenders doing time.
Every racial, class and ethnic grouping has its percentage
of drug users, but nearly all the inmates will be black or
Latino. Weed is much, much more illegal for black and brown
people than for white and Asian people. Class is almost as
big a factor. As usual, the Onion captures the situation best
with another headline: Drugs Now Legal If User Is Employed.
Here's Chris Rock from his HBO special Never Scared. Contains
much salty language.
The rules about which medications are allowed and which are
taboo is highly contextual, subject to all kinds of social
and political pressures. Memetic evolution has been steadily
accelerating in the past hundred years, and rules about drugs
are no exception. In my great-grandparents' lifetime, heroin
was widely available in drugstores. It was Bayer's brand name
for tincture of laudanum, better known to us as morphine,
then a common over-the-counter remedy for a wide variety of
minor aches and pains. It even had a nice art deco label.
Coca-Cola originally contained small amounts of cocaine (and
wine!) Also, as the hippies love to point out, during the
Revolutionary War years it was in fact illegal not
to grow hemp. Here I have to be a wet blanket and point out
that the variety that make good ropes and sailcloth is not
the kind that gets you baked. Still, there's good reason to
believe that Benjamin Franklin liked to pass that dutch, as
Missy Elliott would say. If you want a responsible and non-hysterical
history of drugs in America, I highly recommend Eric
Schlosser's Reefer Madness. The conclusion it reaches
is one I've found well-suupported by the evidence of my own
observation: we can try to regulate drugs all we want, but
we'll always fail. America has the harshest drug penalties
of any Western country, and yet we dominate global demand
for cocaine and heroin. My friends from abroad complain that
all the drugs are too strong here, from the astonishing
caffeine content of Starbucks and soda to the steadily climbing
THC content of weed.
Dr Susan Blackmore,
my favorite science writer: "I use illegal drugs for
inspiration." Michael Bloomberg, NYC's best mayor
in a hundred years: "I smoked pot, and I enjoyed it."
This I read off the side of a bus in Manhattan. Why isn't
the mayor in prison right now? Or, why is any other drug user
in prison? Did you know that nineteen prison warders
out of twenty support decriminalization? To people who genuinely
believe in excessive punishment for self-medication, I ask:
What are you so afraid is going to happen when we inevitably
back the laws down? What are you imagining will happen to
society? Could it possibly be any worse than our current drug
policies? I think we need to start talking the anxieties through.
Have you ever seen The
Untouchables? It's not a great movie, but it performs
a remarkable psychological reading on America. The best scene
is when Elliot Ness and his fellow cops ride in dramatically
on horseback (horseback!) to intercept the rum runners as
they cross the Canadian border. Remember how alcohol used
to be illegal, by the way? It was in the Constitution and
everything. Can you imagine? So anyway, the convoy of trucks
loaded with barrels of whisky gets repeatedly raked with machine-gun
fire, and booze is gurgling out of them in long arcs as the
nerdy accountant guy mows down one mobster after another.
He runs out of bullets when he gets to the last guy, and takes
him down with the butt of his gun. Then, flushed with victory,
he looks around, and clandestinely takes a big gulp of whiskey.
I think this one action unintentionally works as the most
concise possible history of the American war on drugs.
Hunter on Homogenic 