Pubdate: Mon, 21 Apr 2003
Source: Washington Square News (NY Edu)
Copyright: 2003, Washington Square News
Contact:  http://www.nyunews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1621
Note:  also listed as a contact
Author: Al Sotak

THE DEVIL'S DANDRUFF

Everybody's Doing It; Nobody Wants to Talk About It

"Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? It is almost the 
history of 'culture,' of our so-called higher culture." Thus spoke 
Friedrich Nietzsche, everyone's favorite writer/theorist to misread and 
abuse. With the last of my required reading slowly disappearing before the 
fall of graduation, I find myself back where I started: Nietzsche.

Is it funny that my adolescent dabblings into philosophy and the cold, hard 
world of academia parallel my meandering into the world of illicit 
substances? Like that stodgy old German running to every doctor in the 
Western hemisphere, begging for hashish to protect him from the elusive 
monsters of hypochondria - headaches, nausea - at age 13 I was introduced 
to marijuana. I discovered the ganja and the superman at the same time.

This is the quiet rush of anxiety, a psychic return to the most painful 
part of life. Puberty, a time characterized by self-loathing and 
insecurity, by hormones and the freshness of sex, is particularly 
Wagnerian. Can you feel the swell of the crescendo? The drama? If it seems 
strange that the bookends of my adolescence are a harbinger of modernity 
and an ancient mystic herb, well, you are just not trying hard enough. We 
fight the drama any way we can. Abolish truth, get high. Whatever.

And here I am. 4/20. The most cliched date in the world, feeling the pull 
of my 13-year-old self, reading my Nietszche. He writes: "Everything 
profound loves masks; the most profound things go so far as to hate images 
and likeness." Staring at the pot-leaf T-shirts on the street, the tie-dyed 
flags, the people stumbling into headshops for a brand new bong, I am 
wondering: What is the face behind the mask?

"Weed is the new coke," somebody says, and all my stoned, silly mental 
wanderings are swiped away in an instant. "Only it is not evil."

Whoa. Hold up. The new what? Evil?

"Dude, I don't put anything up my nose."

Listen, personal aesthetics are fine and dandy, but have we not learned 
from Henry Anslinger's reefer-madness propaganda push of the '30s and '40s? 
Anslinger, head of the newbie Federal Bureau of Narcotics, is the guy who 
made the American public care about weed, who categorized it as "the most 
violent drug in the history of mankind." His stories of incest, rape and 
ax-murders, all chock full of racist rhetoric, created the stigma whose 
influence exists to this day.

Knowing what we do now, about the ways illicit drugs have been manipulated 
and plundered by bureaucrats, opportunists and everybody everywhere who has 
something to gain, how can we refer to any one drug as evil?

Meanwhile, Crunchy is puffing away with a glazed look. "Dude," he says, 
"cocaine's a crutch, man."

Who is propagating this bullshit? Who is spreading the gospel of stupidity 
about a drug whose history is just as ancient and shrouded in culture as 
hashish? It is not just Crunchy and the sheep. It is the Sniffly, his tiny 
packet of devil's dandruff in hand, mumbling incoherently about how he is 
going to quit skiing. The only thing cokeheads like more than talking about 
how much they hate cocaine is doing fat rails. It was not always the case.

Another big daddy of modernity, everyone's favorite writer/theorist to 
malign and pick apart, Sigmund Freud, recommended cocaine use for stomach 
aches and melancholia. In the late 1800s, cocaine was treated as a 
miraculous anesthetic. For 5,000 years, in fact, South American Indian 
cultures have used the coca plant as an erotic stimulant, placing it at the 
center of innumerable rituals. And here we are, in the year 2003, at NYU: 
Cocaine is just as easy and quick to get as the pot, everybody is doing it 
and nobody wants to talk about it.

Of course, nobody should equivocate cocaine and pot. Such irresponsibility 
would be ridiculous. When speaking of effects, of the experience, of the 
dangers of the two drugs, we are talking apples and oranges. But let us 
not, even for a moment, mistake aesthetics for morals.

The cultural baggage associated with cocaine is just as annoying as that of 
pot: cool guy, downtown trash and midtown yuppie asshole. Credit cards. 
Trust funds. Lou Reed sunglasses. Greed. But all that culture floats on the 
surface of a very real, solid skeleton. The drug has been manipulated since 
prehistory. The histories of the human animal and its brain-fucks are 
inseparable.

This is not a recommendation. This is a fact. But Crunchy's not listening - 
he is all fucked up and staring vapidly. Whatever. Not like I care that 
much anyway, just rambling. I can think of a hundred reasons why blow is 
evil too, bad things it has done to people I know, bad situations that have 
resulted from it.

But drugs clog up our history, one way or another. The intoxicant becomes 
associated with arbitrary references, changes itself, swells and ebbs in 
public opinion. Remember my Nietzsche. My truth is not yours. My Nietzsche 
is wrapped up in pubescent pot smoking, in Syd Barrett records and teen 
angst. Just be careful what ends up getting wrapped up in your life, in 
your crossing circuitry, what associations you end up making. You might end 
up liking Interpol.
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MAP posted-by: Alex