Pubdate: Tue, 16 Jan 2007
Source: Stanford Daily (CA Edu)
Copyright: 2007 The Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation
Contact:  http://daily.stanford.org/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/952
Author: Darren Franich
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?115 (Marijuana - California)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?225 (Students - United States)

IRE AND VICE: THE CUTEST LITTLE ADDICTION

Being a chronic complainer and all-around prick, I often criticize 
members of the Stanford Administration for their many, many 
shortcomings. But I am no misanthrope. The sun is shining. Our 
basketball team just nuked the state of Washington. Jack Bauer went 
fucking vampire on a terrorist. So, bright-side-of-life time. I won't 
bore you with impolite chastisements of hard-working staff members 
like Jane Camarillo, upon whose metaphorical shallow grave we all 
shall dance the tango, and Greg Boardman, who reportedly wants to ban 
drinking games in freshman dorms -- a silly rumor, since only a 
complete poltroon would want to ban drinking games, and you and I 
both know Greg ain't no goddamn poltroon.

None of that negative nattering, Nick. Today I'm offering hymns in 
praise of the hardest-working administrator on campus, who makes life 
worth living for a substantial part of the student body -- especially 
on weekends and during reruns of "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." He is the 
lowest-paid person on campus and receives no medical coverage. His 
retirement plan involves several court dates and a haircut mandated 
by his defense attorney. Yet, unlike Hennessy, trapped in his ivory 
tower money bin, this administrator has the common touch -- he speaks 
directly to the students, albeit through an untraceable pay phone. 
I'm speaking, of course, of the CMD -- the Campus Marijuana Dealer, 
or the Pot Provost.

Back in our parents' day, marijuana had a certain rebel flavor. 
Lighting up was a giant middle finger to the system, to mom and dad, 
to Nixon. Times have changed. I do not mean to suggest that everyone 
smokes pot -- most jobs require drug tests, not to mention cognitive 
ability; many people don't like paying for it (fortunately, it grows 
on trees); and some kids just don't like the anxiety, the high, that 
exploding feeling in your eyeballs. But I have never met anyone my 
age who is truly against marijuana, on ethical, moral or even 
biological grounds. When you light a cigarette, you get angry glares 
and unfunny cancer jokes; friends and family disown you, shocked, as 
if you'd suddenly admitted a lifetime membership in the Hitler Youth. 
When you smoke a joint, people giggle and ask for a puff, just a 
little one, man, just enough to make the colors smell good.

That's where the Pot Provost comes in. Let's call him Roland, a 
composite of several helpful young men (and the occasional woman) 
I've had the pleasure to meet here at the Farm (only for research, 
officer, I swears it). If Roland were lazy, which comes with the 
territory, then he'd have been kicked out of several dorms for stupid 
mistakes ("That? That's just a lamp."), whipslashed from Roble to 
Cedro to Manzanita, perhaps even expelled for a year. If Roland were 
greedy, he'd have moved from semi-legal drugs to quite illegal drugs 
(the kind that gives you nosebleeds and supplements anorexia), 
smoked-snorted-ingested his own stash, become paranoid that the cops 
are onto him -- which they are. But Roland is smart, kind, quick to 
grin. He only sells to his friends, and you are his friend, because 
to know Roland is to love him. Calling him a drug dealer seems so 
drab; calling him a criminal is simply bad manners. For a 
hyperactive, heavily-caffeinated, type-A culture like ours, Ro! land 
is Doctor Feelgood, giving you a mandatory dosage of 
Chill-The-Fuck-Out. Unlike Santa Claus (that fascist), Roland doesn't 
care if you've been naughty or nice. Roland, like anyone with half a 
brain, knows that the good things in life come in shades of gray.

Because I am a skeptic, blessed with Catholic guilt and cursed with 
mournful conscience, I cannot find it in myself to embrace marijuana 
the way some of my friends can. I am suspicious of its powers of 
supposed mind expansion, frightened by its addictive power, paranoid 
that even when you turn off the smoke detector the tiny camera inside 
the ceiling light is still feeding images directly to the police 
headquarters. I am not quite convinced that marijuana should be 
legalized; partially because that means all the lame people could get 
it, but also because I have seen what smoking too much can do to you. 
I have a close friend who has already squandered several of his 
opportunities. I do not think that marijuana was the cause; but 
certainly, the wake-and-bakes at lunchtime, the 4:20 bowl and the 
late nights watching Cartoon Network were not helping matters.

I don't think this is a good argument against marijuana. One mark of 
a thing's greatness is how many lives it ruins. As Bill Maher says, 
"Dark Side of the Moon," an album unthinkable without drugs, is good 
enough to justify 100 kids dead from drug abuse. Just because 
something is bad in excess doesn't mean it cannot be useful in 
moderation. Potheads who claim that marijuana is not physically 
addictive are making the wrong argument. Everything is addictive: 
exercising (it can't be healthy to ride the stairmaster for two hours 
every day, guys), eating (or not eating), the presence of another 
("love" if it's emotional, "lust" if it's physical). Of course 
marijuana is addictive: it ignites the pleasure centers, makes 
strange things sensible and sensible things mindfuckingly vague.

Why do we like marijuana? The National Institute on Drug Abuse has 
one of the most charmingly square answers to that epoch-defining 
question. Young people "use marijuana because of peer pressure. 
Others may think it's cool to use marijuana because they hear songs 
about it and see it on TV and in movies." This is highly inaccurate: 
as anyone can tell you, marijuana isn't cool; cocaine is.

What are we against, if we are anti-marijuana? Several studies (most 
of them conducted by the British, those logical arseholes) indicate 
that the physical and mental side effects of cigarettes and alcohol 
are far more drastic. Think about it: Cigarettes make your teeth 
yellow and turn your breath to charcoal; if you smoke one inside, the 
smell lurks for days, and unlike marijuana, which smells of the deep 
eternal wilderness and splendid days lost to history -- a caressing 
odor, if you will -- cigarettes smell abrasive, like a tire fire in a 
pile of fossilized Mammoth shit.

Alcohol is a trickier comparison. What worries people who hate pot -- 
and what frightens me most -- is the perceived loss of control. On 
some basic level, you feel more in control of your faculties when 
you're drinking than when you're getting high. This is an unhealthy 
fallacy. Alcohol feigns control by shutting down excess pathways in 
your mind -- you feel more sure of yourself, of the rightness of your 
cause, which is why you get into fights and drunk-dial ex-girlfriends.

Weed, conversely, adds new layers and levels to your perception of 
the world, opening up hidden back roads of the mind. It doesn't take 
control; it just gives you too much. Weed makes you question reality; 
alcohol makes you accept it wholesale. Pick your poison, or compound 
them for the Saturday Night twofer. I maintain that high school 
students would be safer if they smoked more weed; there would be no 
bullying, no vomiting, no deaths from alcohol poisoning (it must 
stick in the craw of anti-pot activists that you can't die from 
smoking too much). Everyone is friends when you pass the peace pipe.

I am skeptical. I am an unconfident man, prone to fits of paranoia 
and recrimination. I have wasted whole years of my life pondering the 
long chronicle of mistakes I have made -- I shouldn't have gone to 
Berlin, I shouldn't have gone to Stanford, I should write more, I 
should write less, I should have chosen a major with job prospects 
beyond "writing a failed novel" and "dying alone in a trashcan, my 
only friend an imaginary flying pink elephant named Randy." This is 
the J. Alfred Prufrock side of my personality, rhymes with "emo 
bullshit." Although I try to come on like I'm Hunter S. Thompson 
crossed with Teddy Roosevelt and Jesus H. Christ -- the great rebels 
of history -- the sad truth is that I usually feel better about 
myself when I follow the rules. Clean lungs make breathing fun; a 
clear head allows you to focus. I get no thrill, only anxiety, from 
breaking the law. When you get older, you start to enjoy the lamer 
things in life.

But what rapture, my friends, what gorgeousness and gorgeousity that 
ascends your spirit skywar toward the swoony marshmallow heavens! How 
all the colors of our earth, made drab and funereal by the society of 
eternal spectacle, seem to glow with freshly gilded bombast after 
just the barest puff tickles your lungs! Your eyes, like windows into 
the fever dreams of a fallen angel. Can this be so terrible, every 
once and awhile, to take a break from reality, to hear the music of 
the spheres, even if all you do is watch reruns of "Battlestar 
Galactica?" Some of my favorite memories from high school involve a 
bucket, a water bottle with the bottom cut off, a lighter and that 
little nugget of transcendence; even though it was everything else 
that got me into Stanford (editing the newspaper, speech and debate, 
community service, good grades), it was those little reveries -- for 
good or ill, in small ways and large -- that made me who I am.

So the next time you see Roland, whoever he or she might be, make 
sure you thank him or her a little bit extra. In a world of straight 
lines, the Pot Provost throws in the curves. He will never be offered 
a job at Harvard -- a good thing, because without him, this campus 
would be so much less interesting, man. 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake