We pushed towels against a door to a student room to block fumes from seeping into the hall of our coed dormitory. Skritched matches flared against wicks on candles of varying sizes, colors and scents. Electric lights went dark. And out came our few hoarded joints: leafy “fatties,” rolled in Zig-Zag papers.
Lit by flicks of a Zippo, three “j’s” went aloft from hand-to-hand, and soon perfumed our air. At every puff, a red coal winked. Each floated onward, to wink again over the course of a dozen stops. We smoke-sippers sat bunched in a ragged circle, perched side by side on a pair of rumpled beds, tiny dorm desktops, the upper shelf of a bookcase made out of boards placed on stacked bricks.
Three spillover attendees had to sit on the floor. Dorm rooms are not large. But these guys could still relax by leaning their backs on the knees of a person behind them.
Atop a bureau sat a boxy amplifier and graphic equalizer, both with green lights aglow to indicate they already felt turned on. Between them was a turntable that seemed to be jonesin’ for some new vinyl record to spin… Since a bare and lonesome spindle jutted up at its center.
This lack would soon be filled. A demo album of The Beatles latest release, “Abbey Road”—likely one of the first such discs to reach Tallahassee—was headed our way. The final person to come into this room would be a sweet and solid bro who clerked at a record store after his classes.
VOLUNTEERS FOR AMERICA
Some us juniors and sophomores were just now meeting up due to this invitational pot-puff ‘n’ platter-spin. A fresh semester at FSU had barely begun in September of ‘69. A cluster of random signals—certain types of clothes, stylized positions or postures, underground gigs where we could be seen making that scene (or not), a casual mastery of current slang, the cultural icons we seemed to reverence or dismiss—through such means we could identify each other as braves and/or medicine women of a peculiar and particular tribe. Thus, we found ourselves invited further into an ad hoc clique in a dedicated wax fan’s dorm room.
You see, in 1969, America’s youth were avidly sorting themselves into “heads” and “straights”. Straights? Back then, that term didn’t refer to sexuality—although it might’ve. Straights were the same pallid folk Beats had pinned as “squares,” back in the ‘40s and ‘50s. A decade later, those very squares and their straight-arrow offspring (ideologic and biologic, both) essentially became the kingpins who ruled our nation. From which lofty perch they proceeded to bestow bloody marvels upon the rest of our citizenry. Such as: Chicago’s police riot, Kent State, and the War in Vietnam.
To avoid paying fealty or even much heed to such purblind idiots, our tribe flung a big cultural switch and shifted our focus over to group enjoyment of art, film, dance, crafts, poetry, marijuana, organic food, acid, gardening, and rock ’n’ roll.
Okay, sure, all o’ that, plus sex, too.
And y’know what? Squares and their fellow-travelers somehow never got invited.
THAT WAS THEN & THIS IS NOW
And today? Well. Seek to belt out any rendition of, “Seeds & Stems (Again)” by Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, and I promise you that nobody will even begin to get it. A bargain-basement bag of marijuana stuffed with chopped leaves is incomprehensible; nobody even sees that sort of thing anymore. High-potency flowers are all. Because the vastly superior shit we used to dub “Thai Stick” (even if it wasn’t from Thailand) has come to dominate.
Leaf from a modern bud-trimming op likely flows straight to a mulch and compost pile—unless someone tries to sell those fibers for use in forming paper or thick/heavy clothes. Or rope, maybe! Just don’t try to smoke it.
Once upon a time, a lid (or ounce) of leaf might set a guy back at least 20 bucks, which was when it was about the best weed one could obtain… And it’s also when a dollar was truly a dollar. (Hey, do I sound like Grandpa Simpson, yet?)
My, my, how high-falutin’ our formerly modest Maryjane has turned now! Back when “Puff the Magic Dragon” began to supplant a Blue Nun-filled bota bag as the rec accessory of choice for young folks, any consumer felt blest if the THC content of a joint attained a level near 5 percent.
Now, any potency level below 30 percent is ridiculed. Distilled substances, droplets and crystals of that stuff can approach 100 percent purity—in top dispensaries of states where shops proliferate (and compete with one another to sell the highest of highs).
[NB: THC is short for “tetrahydrocannabinol,” the most psychoactive ingredient of pot. “Wild Bill” Donovan and his OSS refined and experimented with THC to use it as a truth-serum during WWII, then decided that it showed only limited efficacy.]
Trust me, I’ve done my research, nibbled at that level a time or two. Stupendous levels of THC potency are no longer inspirational. They’re stupefying.
DAWN OF ITS SIREN SONG
Where/when/why/how did marijuana come by its cachet as an herbal communion, back in the ‘60s? The phenom had multiple roots. Post-war jazz culture was one, the Beatnik literary scene another. Dylan turned on The Beatles, and they proceeded to enthusiastically goose the worldwide unhip.
Our rigidly stacked cultural apple-cart of the ‘50s had been just begging to get itself kicked over, anyhow. Maryjane seemed precisely the right girl for this job. And what had been stacked up and over-laden on that ponderous and creaky cart? Reactionary, red-scare politics, coupled with the fear-shame-guilt manipulations of traditional religions, and the monorail path laid out for every citizen’s compliance: submit to a rigid notion of acquiring an approved education, obtain your degree, get a job, marry, reproduce, then try to die in some sort of undisturbing fashion. After which, numerous bland epitaphs would be made readily available for the consolation of such all-too-briefly bereaved persons as you might leave behind.
Or if you got drafted, or enlisted, you could respectably divert yourself into a stint of slaying them godless commies.
All of which exemplify what the English poet Blake dubbed, “mind-forged manacles.”
A first-timer’s memory of smoking marijuana oft is of a surprising swan dive into seemingly endless laughter. Why? Because the stoned state both blunts your over-conditioned past while obscuring a press of demands from the future. You’re inserted into a present moment in an utterly enveloping way that you’ve not enjoyed since childhood. Your sensual body—which the dominant culture sought to sever you from—is suddenly reinvigorated to the point that it can snatch up all of your attention, then frolic with it.
Whereupon, you soon realized many of the ways you were being taught to live consisted of total, unredeemed bullshit. However, now you seem to have located an escape hatch…
THE PIPER PRESENTS HIS TAB
Yet, nothing arrives without a price tag. Using marijuana ain’t never no freebie. (Triple negative!) The freedom it confers, if unmitigated bystretches of abstinence, can be accompanied by a growing inability to focus, impaired memory, and a precipitant decay of ambition.
In retrospect, I’d say my own saving grace—as well as that of many others in our dorm room—was that, in addition to achieving our communal high, we also were determined to maintain good grades, master our classes, stay healthy, and remain fit enough to enjoy many other types of activity.
In short: While we did desire love, we never imagined that love would be all we’d need.
On the one hand, Stephen Gaskin, a “hippie guru” from San Francisco and legendary founder of The Farm commune in Tennessee, was quite correct when he said, “Pot is the antidote to civilization.” Since our civilization has been nowhere near as civilized as it’s long fancied itself to be. But on the other hand, you can only drop so far out of the general human condition without vanishing into irrelevance.
Of counter-cultural stars amid that bygone, halcyon era, my favorite has forever been Tom Hayden—that leftist radical who guided the wiser contingents at the Chicago convention (and police riot) of 1968 and subsequent periods. He went on to enter the political system as a California assemblyman and state senator. He kept his integrity intact while serving ably and working to improve everything from within.
My least favorite is Bob Dylan. He earned and was larded with immense power as an influencer, then—to my mind—he just pissed that giant opportunity away. Media hung the yoke of, “you’re the voice of a generation” around his neck. But instead of seeing its value and using that power in some clever way, he shrugged the mantle off and kicked it to the curb. He sought refuge in enigmatic, gnomic, incomprehensible utterances, and he retreated into seclusion like some kind of guitar-strumming, harp-humming Garbo.
Don’t get me wrong, Dylan had every right to make that decision, or indeed any other, in reaction to the fame being piled upon him. Even so, it was still a waste. He could have turned down a leadership role in culture or politics, while also asking his immense following to grow more engaged themselves—which they certainly would’ve done.
“Please do what I don’t find myself able to do,” he could’ve said. “I merely aim to be an entertainer, okay?” Instead, he simply let the glowing torch he’d been handed flicker out and go dark. Now, when I see any image of Dylan on stage, he seems almost a ghost—saggy, gaunt, and spent. He wears impressive Western hats, I guess to conceal his bald spot. But a jester’s cap-and-bells might be more appropriate.
Permit me one more anecdote from that era. A dozen years after graduating from FSU, I found myself driving around the Central Valley of California in a battered old Datsun while I worked on producing a video documentary about wild rivers and California’s water policies. I met a noble, tragic figure, a man who ran a small organic farm and lobbied in all his spare time against the grab of federal Bureau of Reclamation water by large agribusiness. He very much looked the part of a back-to-the-land hippy, long-haired and tan, a folded bandana tied ‘round his head.
The guy was well-educated, thoughtful and well-spoken, and he had a major beef besides that industrial water grab. “I used to enjoy more support in the Fresno area,” he said. “Now, seems like it’s just me speaking out, anymore. Sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll are all nice, dirty fun, but after a while, as a generation, we need to see that doesn’t get us anywhere. What happened? We could’ve gathered so much power in our hands to use it for good. But we allowed so much of it to simply slip away.”
A TOKE OR TWO OVER THE LINE
We’re now a half-century on from the release date of “Abbey Road.” Nobody needs to stuff any towels under any doors. A guy used to be hurled into the clink if cops found a roach clip in his car’s ash tray. Now, billionaire squares boast of their effortless access to ritzy neuro-drugs like ketamine, and brag about their microdoses of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca, or new herb concoctions such as kratom. Cocaine appears to dribble through CEO suites like a thin, inhalable avalanche.
And the drug cartels we publicly deride certainly don’t seem to be losing much dough these days. Or any sleep, either. Talk about a robust business model!
Before one notorious übermensch exec took his wrecking ball to our federal agencies, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (of HHS) estimated that about 49 million Americans suffer from a substance abuse disorder that involves drugs, alcohol, or both.
How do those users happen to vote? Or if they manage to vote, what sort of ballcaps do they wear as they head to the polls? Hey, just askin’.
In the end, substance abuse comes down to the fact that, biologically, we’re hard-wired as pleasure-seeking critters. In a raw state of nature, we crave sugar because ripe fruit is a great food, and so is honey. We crave fat because such tasty gobs of fuel can prove the asset that carries a tribe through lean times. We crave salt because it not only has essential minerals but it’s often hard to locate. Not anymore. Drive to any small town in America, and you can drive out again in a few minutes with a big bucket of sugar, grease and salt plopped right beside you on the front seat.
If we are unable to garner enough—or indeed, any—pleasure from our genuine housing situation, our real mating habits, the grub we can get, our actual social status, or a hopeful contemplation of our future fates, well… There are lots of options to administer a few potent remedies to make us feel a tad better for a short while. Even if taking that dose reduces our chance of handling our problems successfully. What next? Well, you can always just take another dose, yeah?
In such fashion, we huck ourselves right out onto a famous slippery slope.
STOICS (AND BUDDHISTS) MIGHT BE RIGHT
It’s time to regain and retain our power via non-attachment. Why not see if you can take a higher pleasure in cultivating a capability to renounce, resist, or delay pleasure? Get control, since pleasure is being used on all sides and at every angle to manipulate you. A dopamine hit from “likes” or “views” is coaxing you to dive ever deeper into a wee glass slab. The joy promised in ads and political hucksterism is luring you to buy a whole big bunch of junk nobody truly needs… And to keep on spinning along that cycle only postpones a day of wholesale buyer’s remorse.
If monied moguls now seek to keep themselves sky-high, I say, let’s do the opposite. A good rule of thumb for human life at any time, I think, is the following: Once you can perceive where the squares happen to be stampeding en masse, select a different path for yourself.
Certainty is a drug. Simplicity is a drug. Permissions to hate and rage are drugs. Hidebound affinity groups are drugs. Willed blindness to logical consequence is a drug. Resentment and grievance are drugs. And so on, and so on, ad nauseam. All are being pushed at us and upon us.
Sobriety now equals clarity. So, let’s try to make it hip to keep clear.
As a sardonic British writer, Cyril Connolly observed, “Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable.”
To which I say, if true, then the task ahead is to make reality thoroughly endurable, both by what we create inside of ourselves, and by the way we extend a willed reality out through our skins and into the world at large. It’s a superior high and a wiser choice.