How To Roll a Joint and Other Useful Things
We Can Learn from the War on Drugs

Chris O'Carroll

The words of warning at the end of that ad were accompanied, naturally, by the image of a miniature banner of smoke unfurling itself sinuously from the tip of a lit joint. This fired-up weed footage climaxed a visual presentation that consisted mostly of step-by-step instructions on how to roll one of these babies for yourself. As the voice-over droned ominously about all the bad things that could happen to you if you made the mistake of dancing with Mary Jane, the camera supplied extensive close-ups of some dissolute youth's fingers shaping pot and paper into a plump, roughly cylindrical party favor.

For thousands of aspiring stoners all over the United States, this was a valuable tutorial. We had grown up in a post-World War II environment of packaged, machine-rolled cigarettes. Rolling your own with a pouch of tobacco and a packet of Zig-Zags had been common practice in our grandparents' time, but that skill, like the churning of butter and the hand-knotting of bowties, had all but vanished from everyday life. The powers that be, innocently eager to clue my generation in on the exact behavior they wanted us to avoid, were conducting a practical campaign of cultural preservation.

And don't think we weren't appreciative. My roommate and I, often in the company of fellow dope smokers from nearby dorm rooms, would watch this ad late at night and marvel that anyone had ever been so shortsighted as to disparage television as "a vast wasteland." Not that we needed any joint-rolling instruction ourselves, mind you. We were sophisticated college men. Even if we'd already inhaled so much THC that the words to Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" were starting to make perfect sense to us, we could still summon the dexterity to twist one up in style. In fact, we would often entertain ourselves by critiquing the finer points of the technique displayed in the ad, pointing out the many ways in which the joints we rolled were more aesthetically pleasing than the one taking shape on our TV screen. But we knew that the country was full of high school kids who had not yet advanced to our level. Since we were too busy to go from homeroom to homeroom personally dispensing drug lore to our younger brothers and sisters, it was good to see the mass media taking up the slack.

Fast forward to the era when the stupidest anti-drug ad on the nation's airwaves was that hilarious fried egg extravaganza. Say it with me: "This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?" The main question was how the Partnership for a Drug Free America, or whoever was behind the ad, could possibly have believed that their sizzlin' skillet of sin was going to deter anybody from smoking pot. This was clearly an ad that nobody had bothered to focus-group with people from the target demographic. For a few years there, every comedian in every stand-up club from coast to coast had a bit making fun of this ad. The premise was always the same: If you're high late at night and you're watching this egg cook, your fried brain is not resolving to wean itself from illegal drugs; it is merely fixating on the munchies and forming an intention to go in search of food. So the ad didn't keep anybody straight, but it did stimulate the digestive juices of the national economy by hyping midnight sales at fast food joints and neighborhood convenience stores.

The heyday of the fried egg ad coincided with regular visits by DARE officers to the public schools where my sons were enrolled. DARE (the acronym stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, and the "educators" who run the program are local cops) is a social engineering experiment characterized by hysteria and mendacity of Reefer Madness proportions. Measured by the stated goal of persuading kids to say no to drugs, DARE is clearly a failure. Studies show that schoolchildren who have been exposed to the program go on to use drugs in pretty much the same numbers as those who have not. The only difference is that when DARE kids get high they have one extra piece of adult idiocy to make fun of. On the other hand, the program does look like a winner if we evaluate it on the basis of its unstated goals - spreading disinformation, undermining critical thinking skills, and training students in submission to irrational and arbitrary authority.

The hallway bulletin boards of our local elementary school once featured a display of anti-drug posters created by students who had been subjected to DARE propaganda. One of the posters featured a hand discarding drug paraphernalia into a trashcan. In this student's illustration, the items being trashed, the symbols of drug abuse, were a syringe and a beer bottle. Evidently the DARE cop was not encouraging kids to make subtle distinctions. If you see Mom and Dad drinking beer, just think of them as heroin addicts.

An intelligent drug education program would equip students to reason about different kinds and different degrees of experience - a glass of wine with dinner vs. a whole bottle of wine just before climbing into the driver's seat, a bong in a friend's rec room vs. a crack pipe in the alley behind the whorehouse. But any hint of intellectual or moral nuance would be antithetical to DARE's simpleminded zero-tolerance orthodoxy. All drugs are bad. All use is abuse. That is all ye know on earth and all the DARE officer has determined ye need to know. Try subjecting, oh, say, handguns to that kind of broad-brush demonization, and see how quickly DARE enthusiasts notice that your thinking is shallow and willfully blind. Even the crudest, most ideologically blinkered abstinence-only sex education programs acknowledge that the threat of disease and damnation gives way to the promise of bliss and fulfillment once a couple has jumped the broom into the magic kingdom of heterosexual matrimony. But the worldview that reluctantly allows for the possibility of good sex is unwilling to admit that there could be any such thing as a positive drug experience.

If the Gospel according to DARE has to reject any suggestion that certain drugs might be harmlessly enjoyable or even beneficial in some cases, can't it at least accept that some drugs are less awful than others? Can't we all agree that marijuana, albeit the devil's potpourri, does less harm than steroids or methamphetamine, for example?

No.

And you must be some kind of stoned, radical provocateur to propose such a concept. One of the DARE program's bedrock inanities is the doctrine of "gateway drugs." Even if marijuana were comparatively benign, this doctrine maintains, it would be wrong to say so, because kids might interpret that as permission to smoke pot. And smoking pot is a gateway experience that leads to the use of really bad stuff like heroin. I am convinced that blather about gateway drugs has clouded more minds and promoted more hazy thinking than all the joints ever rolled. To shore up their spurious gateway allegation, DARE partisans habitually indulge in a bit of logical distortion that brands them as enemies of real education. They have to acknowledge that the vast majority of people who smoke marijuana do not go on to become burned-out junkies, so they dismiss that undisputed fact as an irrelevance. What really matters, they insist, is that most junkies smoked pot at some point before trading up to crack or heroin. Voila, rock-solid proof of the gateway theory.

In fact, all that argument proves is the seductive appeal of the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy. X happens, then Y happens, therefore Y was caused by X. Lee Harvey Oswald served in the Marine Corps, then he defected to the Soviet Union, therefore the Marines cause communism. Theodore Kaczynski earned a doctorate in mathematics, then he started blowing people up with letter bombs, therefore calculus causes homicide. Even a DARE officer could hardly fail to spot the logical flaw in those instances. Most Marines don't embrace Marxism-Leninism, and most mathematicians don't wage serial murder campaigns, so the claimed cause-and-effect relationship obviously doesn't exist. Since most recreational marijuana users do not become drug addicts, perhaps there's reason to hope that most DARE graduates will not grow up incapable of coherent critical thought.

To subvert the authority of the drug warriors who were wasting valuable classroom time, I used to tell my sons that DARE actually stands for "Drugs Are Really Excellent." To counter the silly propaganda with which the schools were attempting to dull their minds, my wife and I tried to talk about drugs in such a way as to transcend conventional wisdom and promote, dare I say, expanded consciousness. We wanted our children, in one friend's words, to "just say know." We wanted them to make life decisions based on factual data and thoughtful analysis rather than on unexamined culture-war slogans. We wanted them to know that the truth is a lot more complicated and interesting than many authority figures care to admit.

That meant respecting them enough to talk forthrightly about our own life experiences. Why did we view caffeine addiction as something relatively trivial, while regarding nicotine addiction as a dangerous habit that we were glad to have kicked? Why did we and many of our friends and relatives drink alcohol while others, in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous, chose not to? What appeal had marijuana and various hallucinogens held for us back in the Woodstock era? Did we still get high now that we were adults? To what extent did we believe that turning on with psychoactive chemicals was about a quest for some sort of enlightenment, and to what extent did we think it was just about having a good time? Why had we never tried heroin, cocaine, glue-sniffing? Why did we believe that drug prohibition was bad social policy - a crime against freedom and a poor substitute for personal responsibility? When I got the munchies these days, why did I try to steer clear of high-cholesterol treats like fried eggs?

Pot, as Allen Ginsberg famously put it back in the 1960s, is a reality kick. Aldous Huxley makes much the same point in his mescaline memoir The Doors of Perception. Responsible, intelligent drug use is not about escaping to some alternative reality, but rather about heightened awareness of this miraculous reality we inhabit here and now. Whatever choices our sons might make about their bodies and minds, we wanted their drug education to be a reality kick, not a farrago of politically fashionable fabrications.

Nowadays, there's a new champ in town, an anti-drug ad campaign that jacks up the stupidity to new heights of bad taste and intellectual dishonesty. These latest ads try to rehabilitate the discredited war against drugs by piggybacking it on the war against terrorism. If you buy pot, these ads warn the American fun-seeker, you might be funding terrorist activity. Apparently, SUV engines are now burning marijuana. Our freedom-loving friends in Saudi Arabia are getting rich by exporting millions of bales per day, and a few misguided marijuana zillionaires are using their wealth to bankroll a cabal of homicidal zealots. But wait a minute. The smoke I'm smelling has a harsh, grimy petro-stench, nothing like the savory herbal fragrance of good weed. Maybe the big bucks for terrorism are coming from some other source, some non-drug source, after all.

A great deal of the marijuana consumed in the United States these days is actually grown in the United States, so foreign terror sponsors are not likely to be a big factor in the economic equation. I think I understand, though, why the drug warriors are confused. Every time Uncle Sam's agents get involved in drug dealing, the proceeds end up underwriting the blood-and-fire high jinks of some pretty sinister characters. It's only natural for the minds behind these drug and terrorism ads to assume the worst.

Let's play along for a minute. Let's pretend that every penny we spend on pot rings loud in the coffers of al Qaeda. Does that mean that we should immediately give up getting high? Or does it rather mean that it's high time for the government to give up the expensive silliness of cannabis prohibition? After all, time was when you couldn't buy a fifth of whiskey without helping to finance the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Did that happen on account of some hot-lead gangsterism inherent in the nature of alcoholic beverages? Or did it happen because the law was wrong? Alcohol prohibition was a foolish, doomed attempt to shackle all citizens with the moral preferences of a zealous few. Marijuana prohibition is more of the same.

What drugs you do, like who you have sex with and where you go to church, should be your choice, not the state's. The government should not presume to interfere in something so intimate as your bloodstream and your consciousness. It took the nation little more than a decade to come to its senses and repeal the 18th Amendment. (Compare that to the century and a half that Trent Lott Republicans have been maneuvering to repeal the 13th, 14th, and 15th.) How much longer will it take to bring our drug laws into line with our professed love of freedom? Perhaps our grandchildren's grandchildren will know in the next century. Or perhaps we'll see the dawn tomorrow.

Chris O'Carroll