Marijuana

It's not a subject LITD has ever posted about in and of itself, because it's never risen to the status of a front-burner issue. It's an opportune moment to look at it, though, given Attorney General Sessions's announcement that his department is going to rescind the memoranda that his predecessors had put in place regarding states where weed is "legal." Those memoranda basically established a hands-off policy.

Regarding the policy level, I'm with David French at NRO. His position is that it's time for Congress to make one last federal law about weed, one that gets the feds out of the business of dealing with it and sends the matter to the states. We already have some states serving as laboratories around the country, and it would be helpful to have more.

My point of emphasis could be put thusly: Let's not use the process to further polarize the country. How productive is it to call Jeff Sessions a bonehead for his position? He has current law on his side.

There are larger implications having to do with this relationship between states and the federal government. The parallels to immigration issues such as sanctuary cities are imperfect, since the main point about an illegal alien is that he or she has entered the United States. That that person entered a particular state is not very relevant. The sovereignty of the nation as a whole is what is in question in that case. Still, there is the element of defiance in each case, and it makes for an unresolved tension.

But I submit that, to a large degree, what began the process of mainstreaming weed was the great countercultural tide that reached its crest 50 years ago. Lighting up a joint was a gesture of defiance (in addition to experiencing the euphoria that had been the main point up to that time.) It added to the exotic promise of the whole tribal / communal ethos, particularly since a joint or pipe was passed around a circle of people. Hippies were generally just middle-class young adults, and a great many of them continued to smoke long after shedding the other trappings of that life.

But weed's place in American cultural history was entrenched by that time. It was clearly not a mainstream activity, but in certain pockets of society, particularly the arts and particularly music, it was common currency. Louis Armstrong, Lester Young and numerous other jazz musicians loved their smoke. Ricky Nelson and his buddies at Hollywood High were puffing it in the late 1950s. Cutting to the fabled 1960s, well before the hippies were openly acknowledging its place in their lifestyles, several of the clean-cut young pop songwriting teams of the Brill Building, furiously composing away in their cubicles, one clutching a clipboard to jot down lyrics and the other working out melody lines on an upright piano, were aficionados.

The plain fact is that musicians have been gravitating to it for nearly a century.

The sad fact is that a number of these artists were incorporating marijuana into a lifestyle that included actual addiction to a number of other substances. Bix Beiderbecke smoked it, but as an accessory to his actual jones, alcohol. It served as kind of an appetizer to Charlie Parker, whose signature habit was heroin. Uppers were ubiquitous in such circles as well.

This continued into the hippie era, as cocaine and speed quickly found their way into the Haight Ashbury scene, and, soon enough, heroin. Part of it was thrill-seeking on the part of naive young initiates. The other component was old-school dealer greed.

With regard to laws against it, let us not forget that it is a drug. It gets you off. Until mass numbers of citizens gave researchers and other interested parties a workable population to observe, there was not much in the way of data on its effects.

And except for the social component found in the passing-around convention, it did not entail the rituals and trappings of alcohol. There was no equivalent to the practice of wine tasting, the cocktail reception, retiring with the men to the study after dinner for a snifter of brandy, or stopping off at the corner bar after work to listen to the bartender's jokes and catch up on community news and scuttlebutt.

As the decades have passed however, and we have been able to gather some data and make some observations, we can see that a great many people have never gone from marijuana to stronger drugs. There are even people in younger generations, sociological descendants of the original hippies, who like a good smoke but hold pretty much everything else in disdain.

There is some empirical indication that for a great many people it diminishes ambition. Prolonged use is more likely to be found in the service-job population than in high-powered career fields - although one should not paint that with too broad a brush. Richard Branson, an inarguably self-made business success, is forthright about his love for weed.

What bears further examination is the chemical tweaking of marijuana we've seen since its "legalization" in certain states. In shops in Colorado, the clerk behind the counter can go into great detail about which strains are going to have a more exhilarating effect, and which ones are more sedative. This seems of a piece with the Silicon Valley phenomenon of micro-dosing LSD, which practitioners claim increases focus on work-related projects and even enhances gym workouts.

And this gets to the point I was making in my post about "mindfulness." The argument can be made that we are increasingly a society at home with fine-tuning our performance as workers and human beings generally, that our moods, energy levels and particular types of mental activity can be and ought to be calibrated for some kind of picture of an optimal life. Such manipulation of the essences of our very beings takes us pretty far afield from the natural state that was designed for us. (The Winston Churchill quip about how most of the world's work has been done by people who didn't feel particularly good may be applicable here.)

If there is a pill, serum or pipe for every occasion and for every challenge to which we must rise, do we not forfeit something elemental about our humanity?

And then we come to the spiritual level. If a person has no baseline of purely natural physiology and mental state, is he or she really in a good position to gauge whether his or her momentary choices bring him or her closer to God, or create more distance? And then how is one going to come to understand the need for grace?

In any event, it seems that enough people want ready access to their smoke, and also that no one has ever died from a weed overdose, that the time has come to decriminalize it.

But let's take the proper constitutional steps. Congress would pass legislation getting the federal government out of the business of being concerned about it. States would proceed as they wished, and we'd soon have even more results to observe and study.

It's not the biggest deal in the world, but it's time to move sensibly on it.