2,053 words
As a man who has far more historical perspective than most people merely by dint of the fact that I’m much older than most people, I’m startled by how drastically public attitudes have changed toward alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana since I was a beardless, clueless, and curious youth in the 1960s.
Back then, booze and cigarettes were as American as hot dogs, apple pie, and black men playing banjos. Mom and dad both smoked cigarettes — mom smoked Kents, dad smoked Parliaments. Mom didn’t drink, but dad drank enough to make up for her teetotaling: a full bottle of scotch or whiskey every day. Always hard liquor: Cutty Sark, Seagram’s, or Canadian Club. Never beer, but a fifth of hard liquor. Every drop in the bottle. Every day. Dutifully. Like it was his job. Like he didn’t already have too many jobs.
But mom and dad were both appalled at the very idea of marijuana. As was most of the country, except for the 4% of Americans who risked public scorn and possible arrest by admitting to pollsters that they’d ever sampled the vile demon herb.
Marijuana was the Devil’s weed, the “Assassin of Youth,” and anyone who encouraged people to get stoned deserved to get literally stoned. In public. With rocks. And a cheering crowd. The hysteria was so intense, federal money was funding the spraying of the carcinogenic compound paraquat over marijuana fields in Mexico, a policy that Ronald Reagan continued into the early 1980s, only he was spraying fields on our home turf in the state of Georgia. Rather than paying attention in class during my senior year in high school, I’d fill my notebook with cartoons mocking all the reefer madness.
If you had told me back then that in the far-off sci-fi futuristic year of 2022, Americans would see alcohol and tobacco as more dangerous than marijuana, I’d have wondered what you were smoking. If you’d told me that in 2022, more Americans would admit to recent marijuana use than recent tobacco use, I would have figured you’d swallowed a pound of magic mushrooms and were hallucinating.
A Gallup poll from August 16 found that Americans were split right down the middle regarding whether they thought marijuana was beneficial or harmful to its users or society as a whole. About 48% of Americans say they’ve tried it at least once, which is up from a mere 4% in 1969. The results also skew along age lines: about a third of those aged 18 to 34 report marijuana use, while only 7% of those over 55 say they currently use it.
And according to another Gallup poll released last Friday, more Americans now smoke weed than smoke cigarettes. This is a historical first. Current tobacco use (11%) is less than a quarter of what it was in the 1950s, while marijuana use (16%) has quadrupled since 1969. Alcohol use in America (67%) has remained constant since the 1930s.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says that nearly half a million Americans die every year as a result of smoking tobacco. They say “tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.” Recent Gallup polls find that 97% of Americans say smoking is “very” or “somewhat” harmful. Over 90% of Americans say it causes cancer. A similar quotient of smokers say they wish they’d never taken up the habit.
According to CDC stats, “excessive alcohol use was responsible for more than 140,000 deaths in the United States each year during 2015–2019.” This includes not only damaged hearts and livers, but the 11,000 or so people, many if not most of them completely sober, whose lives are cut short because some careless asshole decided to drink and drive.
Alcohol is also neurotoxic and can lead to various forms of brain damage, some of them irreversible.
But Americans have a strange and often paradoxical relationship with alcohol. According to recent Gallup polls, even the roaring majority of “regular drinkers” say that alcohol is harmful both toward those who use it and society at large. Despite this, fewer than one in five Americans say that alcohol use is morally unacceptable, and hardly anyone encourages its prohibition.
Despite all the anti-marijuana propaganda I inhaled during my youth, it’s very difficult to tally its death toll. It’s dangerous to smoke anything, but I’m unaware of any studies showing that smoking marijuana has led to lung cancer. I’ve also never seen documentation of someone dying from an overdose of cannabis.
Some point to stats claiming that automotive deaths have increased in states where marijuana is legalized. The problem with sifting through the data is that most tests for cannabis in the bloodstream do not distinguish between usage within the past few hours — during which intoxication and resultant impairment occurs — and the six or so weeks it takes for Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive component of cannabis, to be completely purged from the system. In stark contrast, you can chug down one droplet short of a fatal dose of alcohol, and it’s all flushed out of you within 24 hours. For that reason alone, it’s much easier to determine whether a car-crash fatality was alcohol-related — an estimated 40% of car-crash fatalities involve recent ingestion of booze — than whether the presence of THC in someone’s bloodstream was in any way related to a car-crash death.
Weed does carry certain cognitive risks. There is a temporary impairment of memory and attention span for the first few hours after smoking. Research has found that habitual users have a “significantly smaller hippocampus” than non-users, although it’s not permanent—“the atrophy can be restored following prolonged abstinence.” So to my knowledge, there is no evidence it causes permanent brain damage, at least among adults.
Perplexingly, modern public opinion polls find that Americans seem to be in lockstep with what the statistics suggest. Even more flabbergasting is the fact that the public agrees with both me and the statistics. They see tobacco and alcohol to be far more dangerous than marijuana. Although Americans are about evenly split on whether marijuana is beneficial or harmful, about two-thirds of them say it should be legalized. If the Democrats have two brain cells left to rub together, they should exploit that issue to the hilt.
I only imbibe one of these three items, and, as an aggressively cruel and contrarian fate would have it, it’s the least “conservative” and “traditional” of the bunch. And it’s probably the least dangerous — at least according to mortality statistics as well as opinion polls. And it’s also the only one that’s still illegal for recreational use in most states.
You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.
If you’re one of those team players who think that to be truly “Right wing” you need to be a chain smoker with gin blossoms who eats nothing but beef and potatoes, I’m pretty sure that’s why my dad never made it to 60. I have my own biases about these matters that override the tedious dictates of your perpetual-motion purity-spiraling groupthink HypnoWheel.
I’ve seen alcohol and prescription painkillers destroy family members. I’ve never had a family member who had problems with illegal drugs, though.
I’ve sampled illegal drugs — just about every kind I was ever able to get my mitts on. Some experiences were surprisingly fun, while others were nightmarish. But the only intoxicants I’ve ever used habitually were alcohol (from about my junior year in high school until I was almost 21; I never drank when it was legal to do so, and by the time it was legal to do so, I stopped drinking) and weed.
I came of age in the 1970s, when youth culture dictated that drugs were cool and alcohol was for squares who listened to Frank Sinatra and loved Richard Nixon. As a result, I’d smoked weed and dropped acid before I ever got drunk. Then there was a titanic cultural shift when Animal House came along in the summer of 1978. By the fall, kids were having keg parties in the woods.
In a little over three years, I’d degenerated into a late-stage, Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend-style drunk. Multiple car crashes, fistfights, blackouts, and arrests. The second-to-last day I ever drank, I guzzled three-quarters of a gallon of wine and then went to my job as a telemarketer encouraging people to renew their TV Guide subscriptions, and I didn’t even slur my words. The last day I ever drank, it was a full bottle of Colt 45 and a bottle of Sierra tequila — the brand with a cheap plastic red sombrero as its cap. Then I apparently got into a fight with two cops, or that’s what they said. I have no recollection of what happened.
That’s when I realized I was becoming my alcoholic father, which I promised myself I’d never do, so I quit. This April marked 40 years without booze. Don’t stand up and clap, because it’s not really an accomplishment. I’ve been extremely lucky in the sense that I’ve never been remotely tempted to drink again. I know it’s bad for me, and I know if I even had a sip, the whole sick cycle would start again. It’s been easy not to drink. What’s not so easy is being around drunk people. They aren’t nearly as delightful as they seem to think they are.
Regarding cigarettes, I tried to smoke them. I really did. I took the smoke into my mouth, exhaled, and then took more smoke into my mouth. No buzz, no euphoria, just a bad, filmy taste in my mouth. I didn’t get what the attraction was, although I realized it was highly addictive and could kill me. So I stopped. Just as with alcohol, it was easy. No hard feelings. If I was fidgety and needed some sort of pacifier, I’d chew on a toothpick or a stick of gum. Tobacco also gives a person extremely bad breath. I know this because I’ve dated a few girls who smoked.
The first time I got high on weed, though, felt like cannonball-diving through the looking glass into another dimension. It was more of a spiritual experience than anything I was ever able to get from going to church. I’ve likened the feeling of marijuana intoxication to having an electric blanket flipped on inside your body on a cold and dark winter’s day.
I’ve done it off and on — mostly on — since Jimmy Carter was president. Unlike with alcohol, I’ve never gotten into a car crash or a fight as a result of using it.
Over the years, there have been clear downsides to the habit. I don’t even want to begin to calculate how much it’s cost me monetarily, mostly due to the fact that it’s been illegal almost everywhere until very recently. And the fact it’s been illegal means, as a man of implicitly ill repute, I’ve taken an unforgivable amount of stupid risks over the years merely to replicate that internal-electric-blanket feeling. When $100 for weed doesn’t seem nearly as expensive as $100 for food or $100 toward your electric bill, maybe that’s a sign that you like weed a little too much for your own good.
I do get fuzzy and sluggish if I overuse it. And I’ll awake in the middle of the night to plow through every morsel of food in the refrigerator like a bear at Yosemite pawing through dumpsters filled with half-eaten picnic fare.
Every so often, realizing the financial and legal risks, as well as too much lassitude, too much coughing and hacking, and too many attacks of the munchies, I’ll abstain. Sometimes for a week. Sometimes for years.
But now, due to the fact that the 2018 Farm Bill effectively legalized Delta-8 THC, nearly all of my weed problems have been solved. Delta-8 is an isomer of Delta-9, the primary intoxicant in marijuana, which is explicitly forbidden in federal law. But Delta-8 is entirely legal — even here in Georgia. It’s also affordable. And I can get just as high eating a store-bought Delta-8 gummy or two as I could risking my lungs and my freedom smoking a joint five years ago. My cardiologist says that the main risks from smoking weed come from the smoking part, not the weed itself. Knowing how high-strung I naturally am, he encourages me to eat the Delta-8 gummies. And so I do. With no ill effects.
This is unprecedented. My well-being directly aligns with the law and public opinion.
It can’t be happening.
I must be high.
* * *
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52 comments
Being way older than Mr Goad, I find the attitude changes even more stark.
I live in a very Blue city and I had a neighbor, of the professional class, who was very comfortable going out in public with his Black boyfriend but who hid in his high-fenced backyard to smoke cigarettes lest his reputation be ruined…
The studies showing long term, deleterious effects of marijuana use are kept in the same drawer as the studies showing masks can’t stop virus particles. A large study out of England showed that marijuana causes schizophrenia and other psychological problems. Anyone who’s worked with a pothead has seen their general laziness and lack of motivation. Next time you come across a junkie on 8th Ave near Penn Station, ask him what drug he started with. The government wants Americans high and unmotivated. Pot helps with that.
I urge caution. If you have to toke up, don’t go hog wild with the stuff. I’ve seen people really waste their minds. For one example, I had a college roommate go from a promising student on full scholarship to a complete loser:
https://www.returnofkings.com/174309/marijuana-makes-men-stupid-and-lazy
I know someone just like that. Just smokes weed and cigarettes all day and plays game and can’t hold a job.
I always enjoyed weed best in moderation. I used to be disciplined and would only smoke on the weekends. It was a nice way to unwind. I also did good in college when my smoking was regimented like this. I eventually started smoking more and my grades tanked.
I’m now into cigars. I get a buzz but I’m functional. I only smoke weed now on special occasions. The last time I had weed was some weed tea about a year ago. Edibles put me on the moon.
I think the idea that most Rightists today believe that a proper man of the Right is “a chain smoker with gin blossoms who eats nothing but beef and potatoes” is a once-true stereotype that has long since fallen by the wayside. People my age (I’m nearly 50) grew up around drugs as a fairly common thing, and most people I know in these circles, at least in America, don’t see it as a big deal, and some of them use or have used themselves. People in our milieu under 30 don’t seem to even think twice about it.
I’ve known some very creative and productive people who were or are regular weed smokers who swear by it. I’ve also known a lot of losers who ruined their minds and who could barely keep it together enough to hold down any sort of job, and in some cases who wasted great talent, who swore by it. Like with any drug, including alcohol, it depends on the person whether you can successfully integrate it into your life or not. As for me, although I tried it several times it never had much of an effect other than to make me feel uncomfortable and paranoid, and then I’d go to sleep for a day. But I have absolutely nothing against people using it or it being legalized as long as I don’t have to smoke it, and as long as the horrible stench is kept far away from me.
Interestingly, Revilo Oliver was quite pro-drug. He wrote an essay in which he lamented the fact that drugs are so strongly prohibited, pointing out that before the mid-twentieth century, when America was much healthier and more of a “white” country than now, you could walk into a corner drugstore and get opiates or amphetamines or just about anything you wanted without even a prescription. Oliver wrote that people who were normal could handle it without allowing their use to become a problem, whereas those who destroyed their lives through addiction were simply being weeded out (heh) through another one of Darwin’s selection tools. This has always sounded perfectly reasonable to me.
I’d love to hear Revilo Oliver talking about Sanskrit while stoned.
I’ve read almost everything Oliver wrote, and there is not a single line about him being “pro drugs”. Do you have any quote about it?
Oliver loved his ciggarrettes to the point of cancer, literally. Oliver liked to drink wine and good scotch, but drugs?
Oliver was **The** Square for his times.
Then you obviously haven’t read Oliver’s essay “When We Were Sane”: https://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/sane1.htm
I quote: “When cocaine, laudanum, and similar narcotics were comparatively inexpensive and available to everyone, there was no problem of ‘drug addiction.’ That is a highly significant fact and worthy of your best attention. There was no problem (except in the clamor of the “unco’ guid”) because our racial ethos had not yet been nullified by our enemies and fools, and we still retained, on the whole, the sanity of common sense. . . . When the effects of a drug are common knowledge, use of it in a free society should depend only on the decision of each individual. . . . A civilized society necessarily protects its individual members from domestic and foreign violence, physical or economic, but it cannot protect individuals from themselves and exhibits its own deterioration when it madly tries to do so.” I suggest you read the entire thing, as those are just highlights, but he makes his position clear.
I’m not saying that Oliver himself used drugs (although perhaps he did; he doesn’t say either way in this essay), or that he encouraged others to use drugs. He merely believed that the freedom to decide for yourself whether or not you use drugs should be a right for people living in a sane, civilized society. And he was correct.
“I think the idea that most Rightists today believe that a proper man of the Right is “a chain smoker with gin blossoms who eats nothing but beef and potatoes” is a once-true stereotype that has long since fallen by the wayside.”
Back in the early 90s, I attended a few Latin Masses, out of antiquarian interest, and ran into a group of young, Ivy League “conservatives.” This being NYC, I made sure to cultivate such a rare connection. It was like Metropolitan, but with music by Laibach. Anyway, some were members of something I think was called Tradition, Family, Property (TFP), an organization that staged protests carrying such banners, like a mediaeval tournament. I was invited to a symposium of theirs upstate, in a castle (?), where we were regaled with lectures on the necessity of recapturing the spirit of General Douglas MacArthur (always named in full and reverently). Anyhow, during a break we were out on the lawn and I spied one of the speakers, who looked and sounded like Ernest Borgnine. He was sitting in a lawn chair, surrounded by worshipful acolytes. He was smoking a big cigar, and at one point grunted, in a voice hones by years of smoking and drinking Four Roses, a propos of nothing, “I smoke cigars, ta keep da fegz away,” which was greeted with rounds of sycophantic laughter. Damn, we were edgy!
“Weed is for niggers . . . . Have a little self-respect.” – American History X
Marijuana use was pioneered by our Aryan cousins in India. Blacks are engaging in cultural appropriation!
It’s doesn’t seem to have served them well.
I nominate you for CC comment of the week.
It’s high time the dissident right star appropriating leftist terms for our own advantage.
“Have a little self-respect. Never cite Hollywood movies as proof of anything regarding real life.” —Me
Why not?
Oh, that was a jape.
American History X is for wignats. Romper Stomper is much better.
They’ve made a sequel. It’s a miniseries with almost all the same actors – all grown up!
That’s news to me. I’ll check it out. Thanks for the info.
I was gonna respond to what you said, but then i got high: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeYsTmIzjkw
Fact: weed damages your brain. Fact: weed damages your lungs. Fact: weed affects your emotions. Fact: weed affects your motivation. Fact: weed makes you lazy.
Also a fact, even when it comes from a Hollywood movie: weed is for niggers.
“Weed is for niggers” rings true about as much as meth is for white people. Given the choice between pot and all of the opioids and meth going around, I’ll happily stick with the preference of the fellas.
Then mushrooms are for whites.
I tried ‘weed’ 2 or 3 in my twenties, and even a smidgen of ‘hash’ (yikes!) and again later, at about 50, and both times it hurt my throat. So, when my body sends me a message via its pain center, I pay attention. Same thing happened with cigarettes, so I’ve avoided them all my life as well.
I’m telling this just to balance the equation — I imagine I’m the only lone duck on this subject. But, honestly folks, we really have to do something to stop this horrendous flow of drugs into this country which are enticing and then killing some of our finest White young people. We’re focused on Whites here, and that’s our choice, but we should be concerned about this epidemic affecting all our younger kids. We should make this a priority.
“It can’t be happening. I must be high.”
Jim is modestly alluding to his most iconic movie role. (NSFW of course)
https://youtu.be/orpRETovV-A?t=32
When Old School was cool.
https://youtu.be/KUT59GwE7rA
Like many societal trends, the pendulum that has swung far in one direction will go back to the middle. Increasingly people see no free lunch with weed, though it might make you eat a second lunch.
There is evidence for smoking marijuana leading to increased lung cancer (links below). Tobacco is probably a bigger contributor as it’s not uncommon for people to smoke 20-40 cigarettes a day, but not 20-40 joints.
I don’t think weed should be legal, but I don’t think the criminal penalties should be too severe either. If you are too dumb to score illegal week, you probably shouldn’t be smoking it. A number of studies show that when ‘youths’ smoke a lot of weed they have worse math scores, lower intelligence and much lower chances of finishing high school. Then you get to foot the bill for their manifold issues of systemic racism. Americans are fairly lax compared to Asians as it is. More weed and other drug use will accelerate our subjugation.
And there are a lot of studies showing increased risk of permanent psychosis in heavy THC using teens, difficulties with chronic depression, etc. States are catching on that delta 8 is likely a milder form of delta 9 and a number have regulated or prohibited it.
Heavy drinking is plenty bad, too. But mild to modest drinking, esp red wine, prevents heart disease, stroke, death. I’m not aware of benefits of weed beyond feeling good and numbing the pain. If one guy with a back injury does physical therapy, and the other daily weed, which one goes back to work and which one on disability? Awaiting the data on that. But sporadic use is likely no big deal, and if I imbibed in the past… not saying.
Some comedian has a routine that the problem with drug addicts is that they don’t know to do drugs right. That meth user making your cheeseburger with a smile at 3 am is doing fine… until they’re not I guess.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23846283/
https://mbmj.org/index.php/ijms/article/view/10
https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/jgo.18.79302
Most people I’ve ever known take alcohol and weed together.
There’s been a campaign to normalize and extend cannabis use over the last 15-20 years and I suspect at least some parts of what’s being presented here are the fruits of that campaign.
I used to follow this stuff more and I got the impression the medical use case arguments, reasonable as they may be in some cases, were being used opportunistically, as a form of cannabis advocacy in general. Then, then ‘lite’ spin offs like CBD, CBN and then the harder Delta 8 appeared as something you could just buy. People were being softened up.
I’ve watched how CBD and then Delta 8 have been promoted over time. Delta 8 became a way of dealing cannabis to people in a legal loophole within the supplement market, while simultaneously insisting it’s ‘not’ cannabis to fit within the laws in a particular jurisdiction. But as Jim says, who’s a hardcore user of cannabis, it satisfies him.
Still, people are wired differently and have different responses to stuff. I never cared for being stoned myself when I was younger. It made me feel like shit actually. I used to do it to ‘fit in’ mostly. I can’t really think of a memory of ‘man I’m so glad I was stoned then’. As I got older I barely touched it.
I don’t want to sound like some pious prude either, there other things that I think are way better than cannabis or alcohol that I have used at least for periods. We may each have our own poisons.
There are people who just like cannabis and they find it chills them out or whatever, For blacks it’s part of their vibrant culture, and the system is biased and punishes blacks merely for being blacks and having this vibrant culture we are told. While there are whites who maintain all kinds of ideas about the ‘magic healing’ of the hemp plant and how it can cure any illness, which in my view is just an elaborate hippy justification for their own need to be stoned.
I see money and lobbying being presented as freedom and choice. But it’s the intensity of the lobbying and potential open market and a kind of moralizing atmosphere around a particular drug (‘it’s been oppressed like brown people’, ‘it’s not as bad as alcohol’, ‘it helps pain’) which may decide which become legal and which don’t.
For instance, there’s a big international market in a drug called Kratom at the moment, which some people might know here. It’s an atypical opioid from the East sold as a supplement. I read it even has its own in lobby in the US which has taken the heat of it at least at times with the FDA and so on. And advocates make a similar case. If you don’t crazy with it and mix it with other stuff (although people do of course) most people will probably be ok. It’s not exactly a high it gives, although it can at first, but it has pain modulating effects, and it is said to be helping some people get off hard opiates. I.e there’s a moral atmosphere that’s been generated around it. Personally I think it’s garbage but some people think it’s great as a recreational lifestyle drug apparently and can’t live without taking 60-80 grams a day of the stuff (it has dependency potential).
But just like with Delta 8, it’s tempting to look at what’s marketed within the supplement industry as a friend. I’m not saying people can’t benefit from some supplements, I think they can. But the industry itself is a cesspit in many ways.
So I take a cynical view on legalization and availability. Yes there can be upsides, but I see the goal as the expansion of markets, a more drugged, incapable, out of it population of consumers less able to formulate adequate responses to the things being inflicted on them. (For every ‘high functioning’ stoner like I guess Jim, there’s a 1000 who are basket cases. In fact many who smoke weed don’t look happy, they look like a mess: agitated, paranoid, confused almost in pain sometimes.) But it’s really the meta effect of a more compliant, more open minded population that is the big win, intended or not, for our overlords. And one drug can be replaced with another one over time as the moral one, the trendy new one and the cycle continues.
It’s all personal freedoms right ? Choices. Don’t tell me what I can put in my body!
Don’t tell me what I can put in my body!
But in this case, diseases caused by alcohol, marijuana (and tobacco smoking) should not be insured and the person must pay for his medical treatment in full.
Why stop there?
Cardiovascular disease is by far the leading cause of hospitalization and death in the world and diabetes is right up there, costing the health care system $trillions per year. Since diet is the main cause for CVD and diabetes, maybe anyone with a poor diet should not be insured as well?
Maybe. This is natural selection/survival of the fittest.
The propagandists in favor of Marijuana consumption have been very successful in convincing the world of the benign effects of Marijuana use on the body and mind. They’ve convinced people that consuming Marijuana makes one mellow and peaceful as opposed to alcohol which makes one surly and combative.
But perhaps Marijuana use doesn’t always make one mellow:
https://nypost.com/2022/07/06/did-reefer-drive-highland-park-parade-shooter-robert-crimo-to-madness/
“We have known for at least 15 years that cannabis use can increase the risk of psychosis in susceptible people by about 40%, according to the medical journal Lancet. “
https://peoplepill.com/people/kevin-janson-neal
https://dailycaller.com/2022/06/08/new-york-times-texas-uvalde-shooter-grandma-smoke-weed-marijuana/
Alex Berenson wrote an interesting book on the possible link between Marijuana use and violence titled “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence”.
On the other hand, Elisjsha Dicken, the Indiana mall hero, looks to me like he might engage in regular Marijuana use (and I have absolutely no evidence supporting my conjecture other than his half opened glassy looking eyes in the photo from the following nypost article ) so we can maybe chock that up as one in favor of Marijuana related violence:
https://nypost.com/2022/07/19/indiana-mall-hero-elisjsha-dicken-returned-fire-just-15-seconds-into-shooting/
As far as it’s medicinal qualities, this study suggests Marijuana use doesn’t help with anxiety and depression and increases the risk of addiction:
https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/medical-marijuana-does-not-help-with-anxiety-depression-doubles-risk-of-addiction-study-says
A possible example of the mellowing effects of Marijuana use:
https://youtu.be/eQI38JutjrQ?t=966
During Covid in early 2020 I made the gross error of transitioning from beer to 94-proof gin (I was then 39). For 2.5 years now I’ve been tempted to imbibe like at no other point in my life. It’s a struggle. I set limits and know the danger, but I always want a martini. Always. Recently I heard an ominous anecdote that has only reinforced my moderation: a bartender said that when he saw lifelong beer drinkers switch to liquor they rarely survived much longer after that.
I’m kind of surprised we don’t hear more from the media on the changing attitudes about substances and food along with demographic change.
Something like “As America becomes more diverse, we are moving away from the unhealthy lifestyle choices of Whites and towards the more healthy living of the Sun People”.
That was a great read.
Nice on the no drinking.
Since 2008 for me. Like you say, it’s easy.
Drinking is dumb. Morally unacceptable even.
There are pot smokers I’ve liked, but I’ve never liked a pot smoker while he was smoking.
Honestly, I don’t believe I’m capable of being truly objective about pot, simply because of the associations: one’s likelihood of eventually saying something like “one love,” showing the gesture of peace and smiling stupidly is just too high a risk to take.
And every (yes, every) pot smoker I’ve ever known who tried to convey something profound when high profoundly failed even as he or she, of course, was none the wiser and quite self-satisfied.
Greg’s Against Pot says it well. The pleasures of pot, for many, are hard to deny. But some pleasures, I’d argue, are best forgoed.
I’ve never liked a drinker while they were drinking. Never had a pot smoker I’ve just met slobber all over me, hug me, and tell me they love me. Never had a pothead start a fistfight over nothing. I’ve had it happen multiple times with drooling shitheads who can’t hold their liquor, though. And statistics seem to suggest that far more white lives are lost to “traditional” vices such as alcohol and tobacco than to weed. It’s not even close.
I’ve also never spelled it “forgoed,” no matter how high I was.
Those are all valid points that I wouldn’t disagree with.
In this article and others, you’ve referred to your familial experience with alcohol, and even though you could have still arrived at the conclusions you’ve reached without it, it would understandably stoke your passions about the subject.
In my own case, experience with several family members and their unbalanced marijuana usage, as I commented, makes objectivity, for me, difficult. But, writing the random thoughts I had (in the comments section of your article) could reasonably be taken as a critique of you personally.
Sincerely, that wasn’t the point, and I’m sorry if I came across like some dick taking oblique shots at you. You’re a good writer and I appreciate your contribution to CC.
P.S. I own the mistake: trusting the first past-participle search result that pops up is sloppy work. I’ll leave it there, uncorrected, as a cautionary tale for posterity. 😎
I’m very tempted as a conciliatory gesture to say “one love,” but I can’t bring myself to do it.
We can agree that white lives matter, at least to us.
Lol
Yes, they do.
The most objectionable attribute illegal drug users have (I find) is their insistence on talking about drugs.
As referenced In the article…”PLAY FASTER! PLAY FASTER!”
https://youtu.be/zhQlcMHhF3w
I used to smoke weed, didn’t “quit” per se, but did stop because I stopped enjoying it. Once every six months or so, it seems, I smoke weed and then go “yup, I’m not enjoying this.” Makes me think too much.
I can say that most people who think pot makes you a loser, know some absolute successful dynamos who they don’t know smoke weed almost, if not every, day. Business men, etc.
I’ve never known weed itself to wreck lives. I’ve known the law against it to wreck lives and careers.
Wouldn’t delta 8 fall under the analogue act that allows the DEA to go after drugs that while not explicitly forbidden by law are structurally similar to those that are illegal?
The DEA seems to have been good with respecting state’s rights on the whole weed legalization thing.
Weed always made me feel either depressed or paranoid, and nearly always unable to think or function normally, so I quit in my teens, back in the 1980s. However, most of my friends were heavy pot smokers. They never seemed to want to do anything fun. Instead they sat around playing D&D alot. The worst thing about them was their apathy about important social/political matters such as immigration and race “people are people maan. Doesn’t matter what color skin” kinda shit. Then what they were deeply passionate about were things such legalization of pot, and other stupid left wing causes. I eventually just paryed ways with them. I still largely view most potheads as lazy, shallow, and having very poor judgement. Typical Leftist traits. I believe that is why the media promote it so strongly.
Marijuana is the most benign out of the three. It doesn’t cause physical dependency, does little damage to one’s health, and users don’t really pop babies in the oven thinking they’re turkeys.
Strains of marijuana vary in their characteristics like any other cultivar, such as those in the United States that have been genetically engineered to require roundup, which is an endocrine-disrupting pesticide (according to some guy on the internet anyway). The food is probably more degenerative here than the weed, but who knows? I am aware that smoking weed is a sacrifice of some things to gain other things and I validate the practice of sacrifice. If there is a ghost in the plant that is feeding by slowly scarring my internal organs and giving me visions in return, this is a fair trade that I am willing to make. I love the weedgeist.
The main dichotomy in classification is “sativa” and indica”, which refer to “landraces” which were cultivated traditionally in places like India and Afghanistan, respectively. Sativas tend to be taller plants that take longer to grow because they come from nearer to the equator and have adapted to the long season. Indicas tend to be shorter and grow faster. Ruderalis is a Russian variety that is barely psychoactive and has a very short growing season. Ruderalis is bred with other varieties to produce “autoflowering” strains which have more lax light requirements and flower more quickly than either varieties. Most weed on the market today is a hybrid of sativas, indicas, and hybrids, and they are often grown indoors under lights or outdoors in the summer.
Sativa highs tend to be more up and mental, and are useful for things such as creativity, energy, amusement, etc. Pure sativas, which are rare, are said to be trippy. These are rarely grown now, but were a more common thing to get ahold of in the 60’s and 70’s, and seemed to very much aid the creativity going on at the time in music, along with a spiritual change and a mood of liberation and in fact an actual liberation from the degenerate American monoculture of the new mass media of normie television and radio. We probably wouldn’t even have the mental capacity to dissent as we do now if the boomers did not dissent from their parents’ ways enough to make counterculture a part of the culture to the extent that it is now. Someone had to speak up about how bored they were, and they did. A culture that is boring does not deserve to live. A culture that is boringly patriotic can not apprehend the treachery of what America has done, out of pathological loyalty and the need for maintaining narcissistic illusions of satisfaction with mediocrity and comfort – keeping up with the Joneses.
Indicas tend to be more down. They say like body highs, euphoric physical feelings, good sleep, pain relief. These come more from the north and are what traditional hashish was made with.
Hybrids are traditionally crosses between two varieties, including crosses between other hybrids. Most of the weed in America is hybrid.
Ruderalis was, I think, discovered within the last century in Russia in the wild. It is weak in terms of potency for smoking, but when cross-bred with other strains, the offspring can be made to have the short flowering time of Ruderalis while attempting to select for phenotypes which also have the highest potency, coming from the drug/medicinal cultivar.
While THC is the main psychoactive thing in weed, there are also terpenes. Terpenes are what gives weed it’s smell, and what you may not know gives different strains very distinct smells. Natural and synthetic terpenes are also used in fragrances, but cannabis is a plant that naturally produces a lot of terpenes. A little birdy once jumped off of the branch of a pine tree and told me that the pine tree is related to weed. A common terpene in both is pinene, which is also in pine-sol which you may have mopped the floor with. You can look more into terpenes if that interests you. They seem to be responsible for the subtlety of the different strains and their effects, which make different strains better for different medical problems, or for creativity or relaxation or sports or whatever. The Emerald Cup has classified cannabis they judge into six categories based on terpene profiles.
https://theemeraldcup.com/terpene-classes
If the wight would get over their D.A.R.E mommy ways, they would realize, as blacks have, that there is a lot of opportunity for them in cannabis legalization. In one black entrepreneur’s interview, he said that his goal was “to create as many black billionaires (might have been millionaires) as possible through cannabis”. Of course, this is praised by the woke-dominated cannabis industry and culture, and in fact, anti-white discriminatory laws have been passed that make it so that blacks have preferential treatment in obtaining cannabis growing licenses, which are awarded according to a racially tilted lottery. This is an unambiguous economic attack on white people. Even so, there is not enough supply to meet demand where I am, in a legal state. Cannabis is a profitable business and something to think about for the empowerment of the white race. It is also an opportunity to practice eugenics and advance the idea of eugenics.
I think fuss about cannabis terpines has a way to go before before it is going to be a Bordeux wine or even a Cuban cigar. It looks like there is some spirited debate about whether they influence psychoactive effects at all. Some of the studies claiming pain modulation by terpines use unrealistically high doses unlikely to apply to real life. I admire some of the growers really taking a scientific approach compared to the usual pothead with a clandestine grow tent. It’s becoming like Monsanto (e.g. Roundup) very quickly, with new hybrids that don’t make seeds (so you won’t be able to propagate them by seed).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-87740-8
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2020.00359/full
“I’ve likened the feeling of marijuana intoxication to having an electric blanket flipped on inside your body on a cold and dark winter’s day.”
You’re descended from people who lived in the British Isles? So am I. Shows how diverse we can be. I woukd paraphrase what you wrote as:
“I’ve likened the feeling of being buzzed on beer to reliving how wonderful it is on a cold and dark winter’s day while I’m suffering from the effects of a hellishly hot and humid typical East Coast summer’s day.”
I smoked pot on almost a daily basis from the time I was 17 1/2 in 1973 till the time I was 25 /12 in 1981. I have never smoked it since and I don’t even know anybody who does smoke it. During my undergrad days, it seemed like everybody was smoking it. I did enjoy it and it sure made music sound better. I heard the weed they have now is much stronger. I don’t know if that is true or not.
I think it was the late, great President Nixon who said that marijuana was the drug of choice for Mexicans, hippies and n*ggers. Indeed, the entire reason marijuana has been legalized has not been for libertarian motives or a newfound devotion to personal freedom among Democrats. It’s because America’s most violent and unproductive demographic has a fanatical habit of smoking pot on street corners which leads to their constant arrest. Now, my big northeast city is engulfed in an everpresent cloud of marijuana; it’s in every playground, park and public space; it wafts through every open window and seems to infiltrate through the walls too. All this because blacks are addicted to the stuff. Indeed, the people I see smoking it- homeboys, cholos and hipsters- aren’t the type of people I would want for neighbors, friends or family. Mr. Glad says science declares it harmless. We’ll, I’ve seen science that says otherwise. In any case, from my own interactions with tokers, I’d have to agree with former AG Jeff Sessions who observed that good people don’t smoke marijuana.
Jim – I never knew this about you. This puts a new light on your work.
The Delta-8 stuff I tried makes me feel physically bad, not so with the real deal
Weed self-regulates for me. I have problems with booze, but like every other swinging dick I want to be altered. Everyone does.
My wife, of a long damn time, has very occasionally noted that I am smoking too much. I point out that I am smoking exactly the right amount of weed, but I take note. You figure stuff out if you live long enough.
I am an old hippy, I work in an abstract field, requiring intense concentration, from home, typically 70 – 80 hours a week. I know that I function at a higher level for my tasks when I have the “goldilocks” amount of buzz on.
I am somewhat agoraphobic by nature, covid – however bad, was an answer to prayer for me. I have done this for over 40 years, I know what needs to happen and the order it goes in. I don’t want the office politics and diversity training.
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