Via Narco Polo:

Our myths about drugs are responsible for a lot of unhappy drug taking and unhappy drug abstaining.

This rings very true with something I’ve come to realize about the drug culture, marijuana especially because it’s easy to smoke regularly with no ill effects. Maybe the glib way to say it is to quote A Scanner Darkly:

Don’t blame the drugs.

I’ve been thinking about this the last few months: What’s the difference between happy, healthy, daily, life-long smokers like those who run the Amsterdam and the BCMP and etc., and people who say things like “I think I’m smoking too much”? Why the different moral attributions to fundamentally similar activities?

I half suspect that some people take some drugs to signal that they’re not feeling well (I’m trying very hard to abstract without generalizing). Weed is the safest drug to do this with — if I had spent my EA severance on alcohol I’d be dead now — and so becomes the outlet of a lot of middle class safety-bellion.

It’s all down to point of view: a lot of unhappy drug taking and unhappy drug abstaining. This is my big beef, writ large and simply: There are lots of socially-accepted lies that function only to make people unhappy. In my sunny moments I think this societal Puritan sensibility is just a hideous accident.

You can probably tell this from my last few posts, but I’m oscillating violently between acceptance of the fundamental absurdities and a kind of raging-panic over them. I’m heading to the family doctor soon to discuss, and I’m going to be asking for one of those almost-prescriptions for medicinal cannabis. I’d like to avoid Xanax et al. in favor of something natural, with a long history of safety, which I know works from personal experience.

There’s a dangerous aspect to anti-drug moralities too: One of the big problems treating seriously insane people is convincing them to take their meds. Somewhere along the line they’ve been convinced that drug personalities are less desirable than sober ones.