I Smoke and I Worry

It’s a sunny afternoon in San Francisco and I go to the ramen place for lunch, and whenever I do I sit at the window. From the counter there a single diner has plenty to look at. Across the street now there is a tower of magnificent condos. Their windows go from floor to ceiling. A tenant there is watching football so for a while I’m watching football. Then I meet the eyes of a few strangers walking past. Once I get my soup those stranger’s eyes will betray a jealousy which is also a part of the thrill of sitting there. It’s a very good ramen place. And I am like an advertisement too when I sit in the window enjoying the noodles.

Cars can park along the curb in front of the restaurant and at midday they are lined up. One in particular, a tinted Hyundai, gets my attention because the sunroof is open and white smoke is wafting out and catching in the wind like incense. The windows are very dark but they are ajar. I can see it is two men, nearly thirty probably, my peers, passing a very smoky blown-glass pipe and hot-boxing this car.

It’s common here. When I realize what I’m seeing my reaction hits and then passes so quickly that I have to examine it in memory. What was that that just came over me? It was actually two feelings, one immediately following the other. The first was native solidarity, like a righteous smirk. Atta boys! That was the conditioned response and it dissolved quickly. What’s left in its place is a low-flame queasy trepidation.

All my life marijuana was presented to me with a comfortable mystique. I’ve never feared it. It was risky because it was illicit, but it wasn’t hard or dangerous stuff. It was rebellious but also sophisticated. Using it had ceremony and tradition. It was mind-expanding and holistic. The act of smoking felt inevitable and enlightened and along with all that, like any pastime worth cultivating, it was cool. It was democratic. Black kids did it; white kids did it. High-minded college types did it just like goofy burnouts. Rich movie stars did it in their mansions in the hills just like you might do it sitting on crates in your first apartment.

Marijuana is unifying. It ties generations of San Franciscans together and just in my lifetime it has evolved from the idiosyncratic habit of a counter-culture minority to one of the recreational features of a whole generation. Everyone here smokes weed. Everyone. It’s as common as wine.

Now that it is perfectly legal in California we celebrate that. By smoking. I smoke. Because I like the feeling of galactic empathy and the dilation of time that it causes. And I like that it shakes down the walls built up around my ego, rather it makes them porous. When I’m high it’s easy to imagine that I am anyone else in the world and my habits of thinking are free to rewrite themselves somewhat. But contrary to the popular myth, when I’m smoked out I am totally unproductive, creatively useless. I know that I can’t work behind marijuana. It is a vacuum for my talents.

Which gets to the heart of my anxiety at the ramen shop.

I have come to understand American society today as a place laid full of traps. There are different traps for the young and for the old. Traps for women. Traps for minorities. Traps for lonely people. Traps for driven people. Traps just for you, whoever you are, engineered to strip the valuable things from you. That is money, most often. Or power and agency. Increasingly it is just your time and attention. And in the Bay Area, this digital app kingdom where I live, I’ve learned how traps can be disguised as conveniences and rewards.

Marijuana has never been so available and potent so careful, comprehensive research on use is only beginning and hurdles remain. But I also don’t need any study to see some features of this new reality plainly. Whatever its medicinal properties may turn out to be marijuana is not penicillin; it’s not some miraculous societal gain. Getting high is a vice. We’ve decided to allow ourselves this vice so we can acknowledge a cultural and political identity that has tremendous power here in California. It was not a practical choice.

Still, we consider it our enlightened reward. I understand that. Prosecuting weed as a crime was hypocritical and senseless. So we’ll accept its use easily as a victory and we’ll normalize it. Powerful businesses will be eager to help us with that and profit tremendously. And then what will we have invited in? Will some amount of human potential be lost for introducing and encouraging this? Definitely. And I guess I wonder these days if we have very much to spare.

This is a delicate argument to make right now. I have to be clear. I don’t regret legalization. I can embrace marijuana use right alongside alcohol just fine. But marijuana has traded its old character for legitimate profit and I feel like my attitude about it needs to change also. It can’t be edgy anymore. It’s big business. From now on I want to talk about it using different words.

The windows on the Hyundai go up. The men get out and go away down the sidewalk. They have wide grins on their faces but otherwise they’ll pass for sober. They wear matching black polo shirts. They are going to work somewhere. That’s an uncomfortable thought, right? Even at a bad job that’s not a proud habit. And the habit isn’t just their own. From now on it reflects all of us. If I were a younger man I’d balk. Far from me to apply ethics to the question of a simple smoke. Because a great culture wants progress and can be trusted. It doesn’t wave its adherents eagerly down inauspicious paths. My own society would never sanction the tools of my collapse. Except that, of course it does. So I smoke and I worry.