Rolling Stone Blows Smoke

As firmly perched as ever on popular culture’s cutting edge, I recently started subscribing to Rolling Stone magazine—45 years after its electrifying debut and at a time in history when print magazines are well into their death throes and Rolling Stone itself fights a mostly losing battle for relevance.

Like all magazines that have been around for a while, Rolling Stone is smaller and far thinner than it used to be, and its once-heralded long-form articles on political, environmental and social-justice issues have been abbreviated to better reflect the shorter attention spans of 21st-century readers. Still, I’d been finding that I often would pick up a newsstand copy, attracted by a cover article about some iconic musical artist who was big in my youth, or an intriguing profile of a newer artist about whom I felt I should be conversant, or a well-researched piece on something topical about which I could stand to be better informed. (Also, frankly, I’m of an age and disposition that I simply like the idea of buying something from a “newsstand” while such old-school purveyors of periodicals still exist.)

So, I decided it was cheaper to subscribe than to keep buying individual copies by the issue. This being the age of multimedia added value, however, becoming a subscriber also meant that I began receiving daily e-mail news roundups from my friends at Rolling Stone. Most of the linked pieces concern musical artists, but others reflect the magazine’s standard left-of-center political and social interests. It was by this means that one recent afternoon, my work day was enlivened by an intriguing teaser in the form the headline “Pot Legalization is Coming.”

I immediately clicked on the link—not because I long for the ability to toke openly, or even because I’ll seize any excuse to screw off on the job, although the latter certainly is true enough. No, I immediately clicked on it for two reasons—the first being that it struck me as being the kind of headline the once-young  hippies who still run Rolling Stone probably have been hopefully writing every five years since 1972, and the second being that the magazine’s proclamation seemed on its face so wildly improbable that I wanted to see whether this bold prediction was based in hard data, selective trend analysis, the writer having hit he keyboard while stoned on killer weed, or what.

Well, no big surprise, the lengthy article by Julian Brookes, the magazine’s online political editor, was enveloped in a haze of caveats. As it happens, voters in three states—Colorado, Washington and Oregon—will vote in November on whether to approve legalization of marijuana sales for recreational use. Those ballot initiatives may or may not pass. And even if they are approved, there’s still the not-insignificant matter of whether, or to what extent, the federal government will crack down on states that have elected to ignore the federal ban on marijuana sales. This all seems a rather far cry from the certainty suggested by “Pot Legalization is Coming.” (Although I guess a strict reading of the headline affords plenty of wiggle room. I mean, the gay-rights organization the Human Rights Campaign might similarly have forecast in its initial newsletter 32 years ago, “Right of Gays to Serve Openly in the Military is Coming.” That statement proved accurate—eventually.)

Proponents of marijuana legalization pose provocative arguments for their stance; Brookes’ piece hit many of them in a single paragraph:

"The prohibition on marijuana—a relatively benign drug when used responsibly by adults, and a teddy bear compared to alcohol and tobacco—has done an impressive job of racking up racially-biased arrests; throwing people in jail; burning up police time and money; propping up a $30 billion illegal market; and enriching psychotic Mexican drug lords.”

It’s no secret that the so-called War on Drugs has been about as successful—and bloody, and expensive—as has been the War in Afghanistan, or was the War in Iraq before that. Much firepower and piles and piles of cash have been expended, with the lasting results (beyond the requisite death and destruction) being that corrupt Afghani and Iraqi politicians, iron-fisted warlords and brutal cartel leaders seem as solidly in control as ever. So, why not, in historical effect, repeal Prohibition and let market forces do with marijuana what law enforcement has been unable to do: control it? Flood the market with product, set prices, and affix taxes to transform a big net drain on the federal treasury into a big net gain. That’s the argument behind a federal marijuana legalization bill introduced last year by congressmen Barney Frank (D-MA) and Ron Paul (R-TX). It makes a certain amount of sense.

I come back, however, to Rolling Stone’s description of marijuana as “a relatively benign drug when used responsibly by adults.” First of all, even Rolling Stone concedes by its wording that pot use by non-adults tends to be neither responsible nor benign, and that use surely would  increase dramatically in a landscape in which marijuana is legal for adults and thus is ubiquitous—easier to obtain, even, than raiding the old man’s liquor cabinet. (Indeed, picture a world in which mom and dad regularly are getting high and it’s no stretch to envision open bags of weed tumbling out onto kitchen counters and family-room sofa cushions, where Mr and Mrs Stonington somehow forgot they’d left them.)

But beyond that, is pot’s effect really so “benign” when it’s used “responsibly” by adults? I have to wonder. And, OK, a big reason I have wonder is because I lack a frame of reference. I know from experience, for example, that I can drink a beer or two and still be fine to drive—and probably even to operate heavy machinery, if that was something I regularly did. But I’ve no idea how well I’d steer a car or react to road conditions after having smoked a joint or two.

It’s not that I’ve never been offered one, or even that I’ve never sucked on one. It’s that—and I really debated whether to reveal this here, for fear of somehow becoming the laughingstock of Cheech & Chong’s Twitter feed—I’ve never inhaled.

Yeah yeah, I know: “You and Bill Clinton.” But whereas the former president almost certainly lied for political reasons about whether he ever allowed the active ingredients in cannabis to reach his lungs, I spent years lying for social reasons about my inability to internalize those same ingredients.

You see, I just never figured out the whole inhaling thing. Not with pot, nor with regular cigarettes. I still haven’t. It’s not something my throat ever has seemed to want to do. As for my brain, I’ve always preferred to think it colludes with my respiratory system to protect me from the harmful effects of internalized smoke. Because the alternative explanation is simply that I’m pretty damn stupid.

I’m serious about this. From my very earliest days as a would-be cigarette smoker, I closely observed what presumably successful smokers were doing, but was unable to emulate it. Instead, I sucked smoke into my mouth, held it there and gradually expended it after what I deemed to be an acceptable amount of time had elapsed.

The great thing about pot smokers is that they’re always too stoned to notice whether those who purport to be getting high along with them really are doing so. This made it easy for me to fake my way through pot parties in college, and later I found myself in such situations far less often. I did, however, start, in my 20s, to bemoan my total lack of a misspent youth when it came to drug use. So, I seized upon my limited opportunities to snort coke and drop acid. I did neither more than a handful of times, and I have no stories more colorful than watching a Randy Newman poster breathe one night in the early 1980s. But to this day I’m happy to have a narcotics resume of sorts to share during “Back in the Day” reveries with contemporaries—who often seem surprisingly taken with my daring, unaware that I’d gladly have exchanged a few hallucinogenic moments for the mellow, giggling fun all the pot smokers seemed to be having.

So, I can’t really say from personal experience whether being a little bit high from marijuana is any more or less a threat to personal and public safety than is being a little bit tipsy from alcohol—or even if it’s easier or more difficult, after smoking a single joint, to say no to a second joint than it is to decline that second beer or martini. Still, it strikes me as unwise for government to sanction an additional mind-altering substance, thus encouraging the potential for widespread abuse among minors and adults alike. Sure, legalization might force some of the drug lords to alter their business plan and change up their narcotics mix, and yes, this might create the most lucrative government sin tax since states approved casino gambling. But if the end result is more stoned people stumbling around on our streets, more vehicular and pedestrian accidents, and quite possibly more addiction to harder drugs by people who come to find pot boring rather than enticingly illicit, is legalization really the answer?

I concede that I’m perhaps being an alarmist. (More likely, I subliminally dread the prospect of an endless stream of strangers insistently telling me their “really funny” stories that are far less amusing than incoherent, or enthusiastically recommending to me horribly unhealthy convenience store snacks that taste like gourmet fare when you’re high, much as Pink Floyd seemed as profound and moving as Beethoven to my generation of potheads.) Regardless, legalization strikes me as altogether a bad idea.

Not that, optimistic Rolling Stone headlines aside, it appears likely to happen anytime soon. If and when it does, the magazine itself likely will be history, given the realities of modern-day publishing and the dwindling numbers of aging rock fans and lefties who’ll pay good money to read cover articles about Tom Petty and Bob Dylan, and raptly consume doomsday warnings about scenarios Americans now seem happy to ignore, such as the global warming and economic stratification.

In the meantime, though, I must say that I’m thoroughly enjoying my subscription. Sure, Rolling Stone’s cutting edge now is a rather dull blade, but I still find its content interesting and edifying. And, as a guy who, actuarily speaking, is getting closer and closer to his own death throes, and who never has had any great illusions about his own relevance, I can relate, man.