I’ve never really been all that keen on changing my consciousness with drugs. Never really sought out anything beyond perhaps a wee addiction to caffeine and when I got older, an affection for alcohol. Even going through college, where drugs were in abundant supply, I simply wasn’t interested. Life was complicated enough. However this event at work did get me to thinking about what I missed out on. Was there something worth my curiosity?
I know there isn’t anything there. I can answer my own curiosity with what I know already. Nothing is free in life, if you are given something for free, then you are the product. This works for online bits (like Facebook and Twitter) as well as for the more seemly bits, like drug use. The first hit of whatever it is is free, that’s to get you used to it and to enjoy it, and eventually to crave it and become addicted to it. That’s my problem, I’ve got a good idea about what drugs would do to my brain if I let them. Whatever it is, it doesn’t really matter, eventually blows out one homeostatic chemical balance system or another, leaving you with bad skin, rotten teeth, a burnt-out libido, and at the end of everything, a shorter life. The candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long.
But this is just my part of it, what about these others? It’s truly an awkward situation when people who are supposed to be upstanding folk turn out to not be. Some people are quite cavalier about their past drug use, as if none of it was a crime. You hear them mumbling on about using cannabis, or cocaine, or heroin – whatever it is – and everyone laughs and smiles and secretly accepts it as perfectly fine. It’s truly an American thing, this duality between wanting to be seen as puritanical versus privately being just as grubby, if not more so, than everyone else in the world. I don’t get on people for what they do to their bodies as long as they keep it to themselves. As a child of the war on drugs, and I do understand about statutes of limitations, but a crime is a crime. It’s one thing to confess that you committed a crime and quite something else when you do so for applause. That gets me really bent out of shape. If abusing drugs is a criminal offense then let it be that. If someone who abused drugs uses their past as a joke to get a laugh, then the people laughing have to take a long hard look at the reasons why they are laughing. Perhaps if you clap and laugh and perhaps, just dwell in a certain doorway and huff along remembering your criminal past, perhaps it is time to decriminalize drug abuse.
This is what the war on drugs has taught me. That we really want it to be over, we all secretly want drugs to be not-illegal, and we don’t really care when someone abuses drugs. We just need to get over this whole wanting to appear pure thing that we, as a country, have this complex over. This particular thing, wanting to appear one way but secretly being something vastly (if not diametrically opposite of) to others. We want to be chaste, we want to be monogamous, we want to be drug free. What do we do? We screw around, cheat, steal, lie, and drop whatever we like whenever we like it.
I would be fine if it was one way or the other, but not both. The American mirror as one too many faces.
Answering War
Many things occur to me out of the blue when I least expect them to strike. It’s as if a part of me has been working on a problem, chewing on it, and when it reached a solution it gathers up all its paperwork and knocks on the front of my brain and says “Here, we’ve done all we can do, frontal lobe, here’s this for your consideration.” And I stand there in the middle of something really mundane and I’m stuck. I stop moving and much like when you open your door and find a brightly colored box with a bow on top, you spend all that time forgetting about what you were doing and stand in shock at the box. So it was with me earlier this evening.
Apparently a part of me was working on military strategy. Turns out part of the paperwork also included a method to cause a cease of conflict and effectively short-circuit a war, going from conflict, skipping over death, and moving to resolution. How you ask? I was myself shocked at the answer and it comes from mother nature herself.
If you grow a very large amount of Cannabis Sativa, dry it out thoroughly and then set it on fire, then blow the resultant smoke out onto the battlefield, saturating every square inch with a thick white fog in about 15 minutes time all combatants will spontaneously stop giving a damn about whatever it is that they were fighting about and put down their weapons and sit down on the ground, some may lay down, others will likely lean back on their elbows. The key here is that every combatant will stop caring about killing and just want to “hang out” and “take in the majesty of this place, maaaaan” some may fall asleep and the rest will be overcome with feelings of euphoria, laziness, and extreme hunger.
Then, once you’ve smoked both sides until they have stopped fighting, you roll in hot dog carts, pizza carts, falafel carts, whatever. They go ding-ding-ing onto the battlefield and since everything is free (it’s war, this is what you pay for…) everyone is calm, feeling just fine thank-you-very-much, and the idea of getting a gun and killing someone else is about as far from anyones mind as humanly possible. You’ve just eaten five pounds of whatever and really all you want to do is take a nap.
Those that might be wearing gas masks will see the beatific joy and happiness on their fellow combatants faces and perhaps they’ll be encouraged to take off their masks. If not, then you still have to contend with an angry army, however if you continuously smoke them eventually any gas mask will saturate and stop working and people have to breathe. Over time, those that hold out with masks will just stop caring and get hungry like all the others.
This method would work perfectly for a peacekeeping force between two belligerent sides, so, for example, Americans versus Iranians – the United Nations peacekeepers cultivate millions of tons of dried cannabis sativa and start working on a smoker-gun and then we drop them into the middle of the battlefield and they just sit back with a beer in their hands, on a folding chair, making sure the machine chuffs out smoke nice and evenly. It doesn’t matter what your religion is, what you are fighting about, or anything. Once exposed to this smoke, nature will take its course. The course is not war, killing, or death – but rather just relaxing, taking in the sights, and wondering where the nearest falafel cart is.
I dare anyone to challenge this idea.