A few years ago, at work, someone incinerated a surprisingly large amount of cannabis sativa behind our building. It was early summer and we had the window to the office open. At first I didn’t know what the hell the stench was, but it wasn’t strong enough for me close the window because my office was stuffy and I really wanted some fresh air, even if it had a little nasty garbage smell laced in it. I didn’t give it any thought, really, until all of a sudden I had older coworkers visiting me and just standing in the doorway. It wasn’t too long that I put the awful smell together with these people just standing there, huffing away. Then as more management types came filtering in it struck me – I am the successful result of the war on drugs. I had no idea what was going on, but the older folk, the ones that lived through the 60’s and 70’s, hah, they were there in force. They were just standing in a tight little group, in my doorway to my office, blocking my path to get my work done, huffing away.

I’ve never really been all that keen on changing my consciousness with drugs. Never really sought out anything beyond perhaps a wee addiction to caffeine and when I got older, an affection for alcohol. Even going through college, where drugs were in abundant supply, I simply wasn’t interested. Life was complicated enough. However this event at work did get me to thinking about what I missed out on. Was there something worth my curiosity?

I know there isn’t anything there. I can answer my own curiosity with what I know already. Nothing is free in life, if you are given something for free, then you are the product. This works for online bits (like Facebook and Twitter) as well as for the more seemly bits, like drug use. The first hit of whatever it is is free, that’s to get you used to it and to enjoy it, and eventually to crave it and become addicted to it. That’s my problem, I’ve got a good idea about what drugs would do to my brain if I let them. Whatever it is, it doesn’t really matter, eventually blows out one homeostatic chemical balance system or another, leaving you with bad skin, rotten teeth, a burnt-out libido, and at the end of everything, a shorter life. The candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long.

But this is just my part of it, what about these others? It’s truly an awkward situation when people who are supposed to be upstanding folk turn out to not be. Some people are quite cavalier about their past drug use, as if none of it was a crime. You hear them mumbling on about using cannabis, or cocaine, or heroin – whatever it is – and everyone laughs and smiles and secretly accepts it as perfectly fine. It’s truly an American thing, this duality between wanting to be seen as puritanical versus privately being just as grubby, if not more so, than everyone else in the world. I don’t get on people for what they do to their bodies as long as they keep it to themselves. As a child of the war on drugs, and I do understand about statutes of limitations, but a crime is a crime. It’s one thing to confess that you committed a crime and quite something else when you do so for applause. That gets me really bent out of shape. If abusing drugs is a criminal offense then let it be that. If someone who abused drugs uses their past as a joke to get a laugh, then the people laughing have to take a long hard look at the reasons why they are laughing. Perhaps if you clap and laugh and perhaps, just dwell in a certain doorway and huff along remembering your criminal past, perhaps it is time to decriminalize drug abuse.

This is what the war on drugs has taught me. That we really want it to be over, we all secretly want drugs to be not-illegal, and we don’t really care when someone abuses drugs. We just need to get over this whole wanting to appear pure thing that we, as a country, have this complex over. This particular thing, wanting to appear one way but secretly being something vastly (if not diametrically opposite of) to others. We want to be chaste, we want to be monogamous, we want to be drug free. What do we do? We screw around, cheat, steal, lie, and drop whatever we like whenever we like it.

I would be fine if it was one way or the other, but not both. The American mirror as one too many faces.