The Challenges of Marijuana
Within the culture of youth there exists a belief that marijuana is harmless, or even beneficial. The argument is straightforward: if kids are using pot, instead of alcohol or cocaine, they are less likely to become violent or to pass out in the park at night in winter. Or to drive a car into a utility pole with such speed that the car is sliced in half, and the passengers are ejected, and the best friend of the driver is killed but the driver herself, who is blind drunk and knocked senseless, survives with hardly a scratch (as happened to one of my former students, the driver). The pot smoker, so goes the argument, is almost immune to these risks, is involved in a healthy harm-reduction and stress management strategy.
Addictions counsellors, parents, and educators are, understandably, frustrated by the illusion of innocuity that surrounds marijuana use. For it is a substance like all the others: medicinal, perhaps, and with a powerful ability to reduce tension, but also possessed of a momentum, a sliding and subtle tendency to inhabit more and more of the life of the user. The management of stress, the capacity for personal insight, the imaginative faculties: all come to be subsumed by the substance, falling within its domain, so that the user grows dependent on the substance to provide fundamental personal skills. The user barters away what must not be sold.
For the users of many other substances — alcohol, in particular, but also cocaine and heroin and others of that clan — users will acknowledge the crippling effects of their addiction. They will have moments of clarity, sometimes infrequent, in which they will resolve to break the habit, or get help, or simply reduce their use. In the fortunate circumstance that a supportive person is present during such a moment, the user might decide to stop altogether. But those who use marijuana rarely experience this doubt and questioning and resolve. They are freed, somehow, from the self-reflection that other substances allow. And that freedom — or at least its illusion — is what gives marijuana its subversive power. Marijuana allows the user to slip away from the self, to surrender responsibility for managing their emotional lives, to abrogate the obligation to seek beyond the surface for meaning and purpose. Marijuana removes the capacity to nurture the imagination, replaces that capacity with a facsimile of ease, and convinces the user that they have made a sound bargain.
Many marijuana users act as though marijuana is like chocolate, or coffee: just something to take the edge off, a tincture of harmless pleasure. I'm familiar with this response. I hear it from the lobbyists trying to legalize marijuana, from adolescents who depend on the substance to get them through the day, and even from people in my own peer group who smoke up at dinner parties. Usually they do this furtively, somewhere in the back, collusive and conspiratorial. Their secrecy seems more injurious, almost, than their using. Perhaps such social uses of marijuana among adults are less harmful than what otherwise might take place: freebasing cocaine, injecting smack, sniffing gasoline. And yet the very illusion of safety that surrounds marijuana, its consistent exclusion from membership in the cadre of so-called hard drugs, is what concerns me most.
A substance that is capable of promoting dependency among its users, drawing them into its orbit, offering them states of consciousness they could achieve without chemical facilitation, convincing them of its fundamental usefulness in their daily lives: such a substance is powerful, and persuasive — like the characters in many ancient tales who whisper poisonous words into the ear of a gullible king.
The challenge for the marijuana user — especially if the use of marijuana accompanies technology addictions — is to find people who will be present, will listen, will offer a perspective of health and mentorship without demands or conditions. Those who find such care will stop using or they will not. Finally, it will be up to them. But for parents and teachers who keep the conversations open, who demonstrate empathy and clarity and neutrality — these gifts are perhaps the best chance that marijuana users will have to form a context for the questions they face.