If we examine the history of man adequately, we know that he has been getting high, higher, and dead on fermented stuff and weird weeds for several million years. I have always thought the “War on Drugs” was started by elder members of a clan because they had experienced the hallucinatory effects of fermented corn, barley, green leaves, and red poppies and they realized how much fun it was to get bombed and binged out of their skulls. I’m sure early cave people discovered the rhapsodies of stuff once forgotten and fermented in the back of the cave.

One of my favorite writers, Lewis Lapham, who spent decades gracing and grazing the pages of Harper’s Magazine, summarized booze and drugs beautifully in his 2012 essay “Intoxication.” Fourteen centuries before Jesus Christ intoxicated a wedding crowd by turning jugs of water into wine, Hindu priests in India mumbled their incantations through lips somewhat numbed by “soma.” Soma was probably made from marijuana plants, whose magic elixir was distilled through sheep’s wool. Priests said the wise and wisdom-loving plant “makes us see far, makes us richer, better.” Greek philosophers met for discussions at “symposiums,” a word that means “drinking together.”

The Roman politician-philosopher Seneca, around the time that Jesus was doing his wedding bit, recommended that Romans endorse Bacchus, the god of wine, because wine liberated the mind “from its slavery to cares, emancipates it, invigorates, and emboldens it for all its undertakings.”

I Predict The Women’s Christian Temperance Union Will Never Put Budweiser, Jack Daniel’s, And Mexican Pot And Poppy Growers Out Of Business

I think the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau captured in one sentence the essence of man, driving the bunghole out of the whiskey, wine, and beer barrel, when he wrote, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” Not only do we want to bury our dark side, we want to burn bright in the sun, we want to accomplish Nirvana and experience earthly paradise. We want to sing. We can’t do it bolting wheels on cars, serving burgers, reconciling account ledgers, or even playing in punk rock bands. We seem to need MORE. And some of us think booze and drugs will get us over the hump.

I tended bar for two years while working on another education degree. I have always considered it a very valuable experience, worth at least a psychology degree. I served scads of people who wanted MORE. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the old dictionary guy, said he only needed wine when he was alone because he did it “To get rid of myself—to send myself away.” By the way, he often sent himself “away” when he was in the company of other drinkers. The French poet Baudelaire put it bluntly: “One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing, the only question. Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”

When Corky and I lived in Washington during my Marine days, we often visited my sister and her husband in Maryland. He worked in a top-secret job in the Pentagon, and she was a secretary on Capitol Hill. Every Saturday he got a quart of high-quality local moonshine delivered to his doorstep—just like the milk man and his white quarts—so he could sing some songs in the following week. For some reason he always wanted MORE. He committed suicide young—before any of us could discover what MORE he wanted.

Lapham: “A War On Drugs Is A War Against Human Nature”

Lapham writes that our pharmaceutical industries “produce a cornucopia of prescription drugs—eye-opening, stupefying, mood-swinging, game-changing, anxiety-alleviating, performance-enhancing—currently at a global market-value of more than $300 billion.” Along with that $300 billion, we spend more than $1.5 trillion a year on products that change us: alcohol, cocaine and other drugs, tobacco, coffee, and sugar. These sums prove that even if churches and state and national governments have declared to support the “War on Drugs,” they have already lost the war against human nature and the stuff we use to modify it.

Does chemistry always result in “Better Living”? When we tried Prohibition of alcohol, we should have known that Chicago’s Al Capone would make $100 million betting on human nature. I bet Al didn’t even have to read the diary of Frederick Marryat, an 1839 traveler in this country who wrote in his diary about the drinking of the “natives”: “If you meet, you drink. if you part, you drink; if you close a bargain, you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink. They drink because it is hot; they drink, because it is cold.” Boy, did he have us nailed.

Lapham uses Abraham Lincoln’s comments to an Illinois temperance society: “The injuries inflicted by alcohol don’t follow from the use of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very good thing. We can’t expect a reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree and never can be reversed. Addiction is part of our sentence. The victims of alcohol are to be pitied and compassionated, their failings treated as a misfortune, and not as a crime or even as a disgrace.” Doesn’t that fit anything we slop down our throats, stuff up our nose, or swallow because a doctor said it would cure our ills? It’s worth a thought.

What would happen if we spent that $1.5 trillion on the conditions of why we slop down booze and light up drugs, desperately looking for that song to sing before we die? We have known what these conditions are for centuries: poverty, lack of education and opportunity, racial discrimination, low wages, income inequality, poor housing, urban sprawl, greed, and a thousand other qualities we tend to ignore.

God’s Body Makes Us Do It

The recognition that all the different wars on drugs and alcohol have failed miserably—after we’ve spent $50 billion a year and $1 trillion the last four decades on interdiction and punishment—should be painfully apparent. We didn’t discover why pot is so attracted to the human body until 1988, thousands of years after boobus erectus first started to use “soma” to stay blissfully horizontal. Pay attention now. This is a science lesson on the chemistry of marijuana:

Our bodies create cannabinoids on demand if we get too stressed about stuff. Cannabinoids protect the brain’s nerve cells. Our bodies also have cannabinoid receptors, ready to accept outside cannabinoids. Pot is loaded with cannabinoids. That’s what “cannabis” is all about. When we get nervous and stressed, the body seeks out additional cannabinoids. Alcohol somewhat serves the same purpose. Nerves and stress call for “one more for the road” or “give me a double.” But cannabinoids from marijuana plants can easily be “recepted” by the human cannabinoid system. End of lesson.

The risk with most drugs (such as Oxycontin) is respiratory or cardiovascular failure. Don’t sweat pot. The lethal dose for marijuana is 40,000 times greater than the pot that makes you mildly euphoric.

The Messages In Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel “Brave New World” Reflect Reality

If interested in the history and future of humanity and the use of cannabis/pot/weed/marijuana, one would benefit greatly from reading about the use of “soma” before the discovery of the cannabinoid system 56 years later. Through quotes from the novel, Huxley reveals the value of “soma-pot”:
*** “[Pot has] all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”
*** “There is always some delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a weekend; two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three of a dark eternity on the moon...”
*** “By this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles. Even Bernard (a native) felt himself a little melted.”
*** “Soma may make you lose a few years in time, the doctor went on. But think of the immeasurable durations it can give you out of time. Every soma-holiday is a bit of what our ancestors used to call eternity.”

By the way, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that last year there were 37,000 deaths due to the use of alcohol alone. Death in accidents caused by alcohol were not counted in that total. The CDC also reported there was not one fatal death due to marijuana overdose—and they do not even keep a category of deaths in accidents where pot is present. Some tentative research indicates that pot users even leave larger intervals between autos on highways. Interesting.

A Pot Of Gold Is Still Worth More Than A Pot Of Pot

Gold is selling for $1704 a troy ounce today. Pot, depending upon THC quality, drug cartel killings in Mexico, tunnels between border cities, rain, and a hundred other factors, sells for about $200 to $800 an ounce on average. The profits in the drug business may even equal hedge fund profits on Wall Street. Producers will do anything, regardless of costs, to deliver a good product. Pot plants growing in a south side Chicago building lot were estimated to be worth $5,443,000 by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Drugs are transported to the U.S. by ship, submarine, boat, airplane, helicopter, auto, truck, rail, through tunnels, and on the backs or in the rectums of “immigrants.” Special auto transporters designed to allow autos to drive over 16-ft. border fences have been used. The latest transport device? Marijuana cannons powered by car engines and compressed air now fire shells containing up to 30 pounds of pot over 500 feet across the border. That’s up to $384,000 a shot! There’s a pile of illegal money to be made in drugs. Mexico is now in the armored car business, primarily sold to protect drug cartel executives, dealers, and the ones who have gotten rich from the drug trade. Fifty armored car companies employing over 5,000 now make 3,000 cars a year, roughly selling for a total of $135 million. It costs about $35,000 to armor an assembly-line car.

How Do You Stop People From Inhaling, Shooting Up, And Swallowing Pills, Booze, And Other Junk?

Education. Education. Education. Do you want to use meth after seeing a thousand pictures of rotting teeth, falling hair, and people who look like anorexic vampires? The arms with enough needle holes to make people believe you have the measles? The people trying to breathe after overdosing on Oxycontin? Nearly 48,000 women die each year from prescription painkillers. This country has a major drug problem because of ignorance about both legal and illegal drugs. A trillion dollars has been wasted on interdiction and punishment. Education, rehab, and patches do work. Long mandatory jail sentences for possession of grams of cocaine, pot, and other drugs have ruined millions of lives over the decades of the “War.” Half of all federal prisoners are serving time for drug offenses. We have arrested 45 million people for drug offenses in the last 40 years. That’s insane. With human nature what it is, New York City citizens spend $1.65 billion on pot alone. Those desires inspired Mexico drug cartels to kill 60,000 Mexicans over the last six years.

Pot can be useful. It is a medicine. It can replace alcohol, a much more deadly “feel good” drug. It can save a five-year-old epileptic girl from 300 seizures a week. She now has one a week. It can make life possible for a 75-year-old California woman with painful and debilitating multiple sclerosis. She legally grows her own—in an assisted living facility.