I'm not worried that the kids won't listen. I'm worried they will give me that look of...
“Dad, you are such an idiot.”
was plenty of social pressure against drug use in the 1960s. Despite the era’s reputation for pervasive “better living through chemistry,” Gallup polling information from 1969 indicates that marijuana had been tried by only 4% of Americans. Again, such statistics are not perfectly reliable due to people like – following in my father’s footsteps – me. I was so stoned in 1969 that I couldn’t have figured out which end of the pencil to use to fill out the Gallup Poll survey. Social pressure (“Get a job!”) caused me to snap out of it. But I had friends who didn’t snap or even bend to social pressure. I don’t consider cannabis to be a terribly harmful drug, but people who continued to consume it heavily into middle age are... porch furniture. Get a can of paint and color them vague. Then there were those “freaks” – we actually called ourselves that – who were probably already dealing with as much psychic malformation as they could handle. They took psychedelic trips to...? They never call. They never write. We haven’t heard from them since. I was a reporter during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and early ‘90s. I went on police ride-alongs. I visited crack dens. Description would require a Dante or a Milton. The hellish thing about crackheads
being arrested and jailed was that arresting and jailing them was beside the point. Being a crackhead was hell. Maybe I’m just lazy and what really bothers me about drug legalization is the difficult work involved. If drugs aren’t prohibited by legal rules, then I have to go through the trouble of thinking hard about drugs and thinking hard about how to explain to my children (for one example) and to myself (for another example) why drugs are prohibited by the rules of common sense. I have to hold forth to the kids (and the world) about the hazards of pot, crack, smack, and (to quote Hunter S. Thompson) “a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers,” plus whatever synthetic nut dust got invented yesterday. I’m not worried that the kids won’t listen. I’m worried that they’ll look. I know that look. I’ve already held forth to the kids – cigar in one hand and beer in the other – about the hazards of tobacco and alcohol. The look I get... “Dad, you are such an idiot.” And that’s how I look arguing with myself about drug legalization, especially with this molting libertarian angel squatting on my clavicle and twisting my ear.
American Consequences 41
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