TRUE CONFESSIONS OF A NON-TOKER
I’m one of the few boomers who’s never tried marijuana, writes Allen Abel.
More than 22 million people have attended a travelling exhibition sponsored by the Drug Enforcement Administration of the U.S. Department of Justice and entitled Target America: Opening Eyes to the Damage Drugs Cause since it opened in 2002.
Now add one lone non-pothead to the list.
The display currently is on view at the Maryland Science Center on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. At the entrance, one is confronted by the wreckage of a 1994 Thunderbird whose driver, “a 43-yearold male who tested positive for marijuana, cocaine, benzodiazepines and opiates,” killed a 31-year-old mother of three in a fiery Ohio crash.
“What is left are these,” reads a placard near the twisted debris. “The crumpled car, the accident, the stolen goods, the lost dreams ... the children and the families, the spoiled land, the bills we pay, the price.”
Thus jolted, we move along to “an actual South American jungle coca processing lab,” then “a recreated Afghan heroin factory,” and then walls of posters and racks of handouts proclaiming the equal and inimical menace of Cannabis sativa.
“Heavy marijuana use in the teen years has been shown to cause a loss of several IQ points,” a poster says.
“MYTH: It won’t hurt you, it’s just a plant, a natural herb,” we read further on.
“FACT: Marijuana can impair your JUDGMENT causing you to do things you might REGRET.”
“Isn’t smoking marijuana less dangerous than smoking cigarettes?” asks a brochure called Tips for Teens.
“No. It’s even worse,” the flyer insists. “Five joints a day can be as harmful as 20 cigarettes a day.”
All this in a state whose governor signed a law last month reducing the penalty for being caught with less than 10 grams of weed from a criminal to a civil offence punishable by a fine of $100 US or less.
“Decriminalizing possession of marijuana is an acknowledgment of the low priority our courts, prosecutors & police attach to this issue,” tweeted Maryland’s Martin O’Malley, a probable candidate for the U.S. presidency in 2016, should Hillary Clinton be too buzzed out of her mind to succeed the Honolulu stoner who runs the White House now.
Which brings me — at my editor’s insistence — to me.
Spending an hour touring Target America makes me even more satisfied than usual that I never once have sucked on a crack pipe, shot up with heroin, freebased cocaine, brewed crystal meth in a motel room, smoked a brick of opium, dropped a tab of LSD, popped a handful of uppers, raved on ecstasy, partied with Molly, gulped OxyContin like Skittles or worn nasal strips like California Chrome.
Neither, if it must be made public, have I ever smoked marijuana in my entire six-and-a-halfdecade lifetime.
“You’re practically the only boomer who has never tried pot, and your observations, coming from a culture where it’s being completely destigmatized, are of interest,” my boss inveigles in an email.
“Pot is so common, why have you never smoked?”
The accusation is true. I never have licked, rolled or smoked a joint, or eaten one of those hempfilled brownies that my psychedelic college roommates used to bake in the Sixties. (They also put mescaline in Jell- O.) I was with them in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco during the very Summer of Love in 1968, but I left them in line at the Fillmore West and took a bus across the bay to watch the Oakland A’s play a doubleheader.
I’ve never even seen Reefer Madness.
But “common” and “destigmatized” are powerful words, loaded with personal histories, political biases, and the presumption that anyone else can tell you what is and isn’t cool.
Even without marijuana, my life has not been short of impaired JUDGMENT, and deeds that I REGRET. Nor would I ever indict my friends as felons because long ago, or still today, they enjoyed whatever feeling comes from drawing that acrid smoke down deep into their souls.
By the time my nine-year-old daughter is in university, weed will be legal everywhere on this continent. Target America and the Drug Enforcement Admin- istration lost that war to Cheech and Chong and Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg a long time ago. But knowing that I’d be a dad 36 years later wasn’t why I didn’t go to Woodstock with the rest of my friends, that weekend in ’69. It just wasn’t my scene. It still isn’t.
“We need to teach our kids how to deal with peer pressure, how to feel good about themselves,” a woman named Susan Fox from the DEA tells me as I walk through the museum.
If that is a strength that my parents left me, I can only thank them.
Maybe getting high is the greatest show on Earth, and I’ve made a great mistake by missing it. Maybe I’ll need marijuana as medicine in the coming years, and I will need to follow a doctor’s orders. We will see.
Then again, caffe latte has been legal for my entire lifetime, and I’ve never tried that, either.