Booze and Pot: The Metaphysical Distinction
Veal, E. T.
E.T. Veal Booze and Pot: All this is not to say that I think things could or should be very much better. A newspaper or news program that presented studious interpretations of world events written...
...They are, to the eye, funny creatures, more likely to raise a smile than a whiff of terror...
...You might appeal to the musical sound of slowly cracking bones or to the sense of personal fulfillment to be found in mastering another being's fate or to the need for rebellion against an Establishment that employs dogs in its military operations...
...Outside the debating room, the friends of marijuana are well enough aware that its resemblance to alcohol is remote...
...Everyday politicians and publicists seize on the farthest-fetched analogies between A and Z to prove that placing these letters at the opposite ends of the alphabet is an illiberal prejudice that society can no longer tolerate...
...No one should be surprised that western philosophy began in symposia, drinking parties, nor that the philosophy with such roots has always had as its central assumption the existence of an objective universe to which individual speculations must conform...
...Your case may not carry the day, because the common men on juries often possess a quantum sufficit of common sense, but you will surely impress the judge or the Court of Appeals (for judges are educated men after the twentieth century fashion, and therefore more impressed by Classes than by Things...
...We have good reason to fear these orators...
...It affects the mental processes...
...He, however, says frankly that his method is to blot out the dull light, not to provide a superior illumination...
...It permits men to fly from the mundaneness of their everyday senses into a realm "sensitivity...
...I can say that, because I wasn't one of the great Presidents, but I had a good time trying to be one, I can tell you that...
...They never apply to the use of pot the restraints that drinkers apply to liquor as a matter of course...
...The chasm is complete...
...it rots with delusions and devils...
...There is only one true Great American statement in our culture these days, and we all know what that is...
...A newspaper or news program that presented studious interpretations of world events written by complex and tortured characters would be wonderfully ludicrous, and would undoubtedly transmogrify into yet another form of pop culture itself...
...Its users find this trade well worth the imposts...
...The first obvious distinction it may seem superficial, but it springs from something deeper is a difference in number...
...The metaphysics fostered by marijuana cannot dispute...
...Some readers have probably already come up with an answer to my inversion of their standard debating point...
...It is the missionary of falsehood...
...What would they argue about...
...The subject of their quarrel is only the universe...
...Consciousness-changing is marijuana's only trade...
...With no reason to fear a massive backlash of civil disobedience such as Prohibition inspired, one can make a pretty good case for depriving Sonny of his quasi-martini...
...He turns your face towards the human being next to you, toward the bench you are sitting on, toward the taste and feel of the glass in your hand, in vino veritas which means, truth is found in Things, not away from them...
...The quarrel is not such as we of the West are accustomed to...
...The implication is that between alcohol and marijuana, there is merely a distinction without a difference, and that Daddy is a fascist hypocrite for supporting laws that jail Sonny's friends and suppliers...
...Look at the silly error that he's just now committed...
...Given encouragement, they will devote many unstoned hours to praisingi the pleasure, enlightenment, and insight that they find in their "new state of consciousness...
...The Metaphysical Distinction Suppose you enjoyed breaking the legs of small dogs...
...In the deepest folds of Bacchus, men see pink elephants...
...Their writings seethe with sneer at the besotted older generation, unfavorably contrasted with thenown upstanding selves...
...In various forms, this argument has been stated so often that everyone seems to have overlooked a point that at once springs to mind as soon as one steps back and looks at the implications of the equation: it tells as heavily against pot as for it...
...You assume that alcohol and marijuana have the same effects...
...No wonder there is such hot warfare oetween the followers of Bacchus and the worshippers of the hempen gods from the East...
...If they were suddenly to lose all their physiological effects, wine would still be taken with meals and beer with snacks...
...The Old Prohibitionists, after all, were not wrong when they claimed that liquor has many effects that society would be better off without...
...No one goes to a pot party simply for a sociable evening with the boys...
...Where reason is speechless, moods and emotions are powerful orators...
...There are (barring a plea that mutilation of animals is symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment) two available courses...
...Maybe you will end up as an "historic case in the struggle for civil liberties," and be invited to address a banquet of the ACLU...
...the gendarmerie has dried up the bootleg traffic in spirits...
...Men do not draw distinctions so bitterly unless they imagine that some real distinctions exist to be drawn...
...They express pity for the rest of us...
...Instead of explaining, reclassify...
...It is not like the division between Plato or Aristotle or between Descartes and Kant or between any other schools of western thinkers...
...Generously, he will allow other persons to have other truths, all these private revelations being not so much contradictory as incommensurable...
...Putting Things into Classes is the beginning of reason...
...Have you ever heard an advocate of marijuana deplore its use by teens and sub-teens...
...One is to explain straightforwardly to the jury why you like to break dog's legs...
...If the rescue party arrives after half the passengers on the sinking ship are already drowned, it doesn't abandon the rest out of a sense of equity...
...A man who can stop an arsonist is not persuaded to refrain on the ground that the building next door has been destroyed by lightning...
...And silliness is not a rare affliction...
...It may prove that what looks pink at a distance is really not so lovely...
...But I have taken that premiss from the argument that I am inverting...
...They are muttering to themselves, "This fellow writes so glibly about logic, yet he's no master of the art...
...What defeated Prohibition was not a paucity of solid arguments against alcohol's use, nor a considered decision that the use was worth the abuse, but the fact that strong drink is too firmly rooted in the affections of western man to be abolished by legislative fiat...
...Thus, you may eventually win in the higher tribunals and be able to return to your individual pursuit of happiness...
...Harry S Truman ally different effects, then they are different Things belonging in different Classes...
...But others drink to join it more firmly...
...Broken homes, barroom brawls, DT's, and hangovers were not spawned by Carrie Nation's fancies...
...No one suggested that contradictory ideas were both entirely correct, or that there George Carey was no way for their proponents to debate...
...Confining its use to the fringes of society presents no insuperable difficulties...
...As a consumer of alcohol, I should not be gleeful to learn that junior high school students were sneaking to the lavatories for shots of brandy between classes...
...Indeed, they might haul you before a municipal court on some such unlibertarian charge as "cruelty to animals," threatening to separate you for a time from both canine and human society...
...Never do you hear of pot-and-pretzels or of a hostess searching for the right variety of cannabis to enhance her dinner nor of anyone eulogizing the flavor of vintage reefers...
...A proper drinking party with old jokes and songs and old friends (whom you may have met only an hour ago) is, as the Greeks knew, a lifeline pulling us back to the world of things and men from the realm of introspective solitude into which it is so easy to slip (into which the solitary drunk, with his eternal, egoistic reveries, has slipped...
...And what, pray, is my mistake...
...Ninety-five percent of Americans have no strong affection for pot...
...Now, marijuana may be excellent for its own peculiar use, but it has only one...
...A favorite juxtaposition of movie and television scriptwriters is the booze-squiffing parent and the pot-smoking child...
...Nor should I forget that beer and wine and brandy and whiskey can be drunk from a mere liking for their aromas and tastes...
...How would you defend your freedom...
...But today marijuana is encouraging men to release those elephants from their cages and ride them pell-mell through the world...
...It provides an irrational tug toward the abandonment of the western axiom of a real universe...
...You live in a society notorious for cynophilia, so your neighbors might object...
...The pot-smoker receives his "insights" by peering into himself, not by fixing his attention on the world, and he regards his inspirations as private truths...
...Every time one side begins an argument by pointing to the universe, the other will reply by pointing to himself, and each will be firmly convinced that his antagonist is fatuous...
...The title of a recent pro-legalization-of-pot book, Marijuana: The New Prohibition, states the argument concisely...
...Where Bacchus is not so much at home, as in the Moslem lands, governments have been able to restrict his worship and hew down his altars...
...Long before Freud, the West knew that the pit of man's soul is not a garden of delights...
...Only a mad sense of fair play would say that the existence of one evil justifies the existence of all others...
...For these disputants could dispute...
...How much happier and wiser the world would be if everyone turned on...
...The news, simpleminded and transitory as it is, is probably as good as it can be...
...If society does not punish those researchers, why should it punish you...
...Yes, that is the proper reply...
...But some of my classmates were "turning on" at the same ceremony, with no visible reprobation from their pro-marijuana comrades...
...This is why marijuana has such deadly import for the survival of society...
...This sort of drinking is not confined to festive occasions...
...This is the error that permeates most present discussion of marijuana...
...I fancy that the most ardent friend of bourbon would have felt it somewhat inappropriate for me to imbibe a flask of that beverage at my Yale graduation ceremony...
...From this point of resemblance, it has become an assumption of most debate that marijuana is simply the counter-culture's version of the martini...
...One simply wishes that the news had more substance, more range, less artificial balance, and that it did not pretend so often to express the Great American Statement...
...Imagining that this process alters the Things is the beginning of silliness...
...No one puffs a non-intoxicating quantity of grass for relaxation...
...Marijuana must stand on its own, not lean on the legal priviledges of liquor...
...We do not want the truths dredged from that mire...
...Alcohol has never promised so much...
...Some men do drink to escape the world...
...There is no more reason to accord them the same treatment than there is to give medical research grants to animal torturers...
...Point out that acknowleged scientists infect small dogs with painful diseases, subject them to dubious surgeries, and even, sometimes, break their legs...
...t a distance is really not so lovely...
...Debate among the holders of private visions is not even conceivable...
...Sometimes they go further than literary attack, as when the Yale Daily News tried,, two years back, to interest the New Haven Police in closing down Mory's...
...If alcohol and marijuana have substantiGreat American Series Some of the Presidents were great and some of them weren't...
...Both marijuana and alcohol, used in sufficient quantity, cause marked changes in behavior, most strikingly a decline in what our sober selves would call "rationality...
...Similarly, on the basis of the argument we are considering, marijuana has no claim to legality just because no one has figured out an effective way to ban alcohol...
...Such arguments might save you from prison -by convincing your neighbors that you belonged in an asylum...
...He rejects any notion of objective verification...
...They all agreed that propositions about the universe are either true or false (or badly stated, but that is a different problem...
...Despite the blossoming of the counter-culture, its favored intoxicant is still no stronger here than liquor in Saudi Arabia...
...Bacchus too will rescue you from the "light of common day" if you let him...
...As the final proof, why, except because they believe that the two substances are fundamentally different, should those who favor cannabis be so outrightly hostile toward liquor...
...In vino, in rebus, non in te ipso...
...They will submit to regulation, leaving the dissenters as fish in a desert...
...It thinks a little too well of itself as a profession, but even that helps to ward off censorship which, though less infuriating than arrogance, is worse for the spirit, and makes no heroes...
...However, you might argue differently, and, I suspect, with greater prospect of success...
...If truth is an individual affair, how can anyone argue, except in the manner of people "arguing" about their favorite colors...
...This is not an axiom congenial to marijuana...
...Announce that you are engaged in "scientific research," not, admittedly, of the customary, hide-bound sort, but research nevertheless...
...If you ask him for a less drastic remedy, he points back at the world, at the very tiresomeness that you wanted to get away from...
...It is not limited to madmen who establish a common ground between torture and medical research...
...My inverted argument proceeds from a false premiss...
...The quiet beer after work, the quarter-hour that dissipates our narrow, fiendish concentration and prepares our spirits to receive what the world has next to offer us, is also a "social drink," though no one may be nearby...
...The whole West, divided on everything else, unites to shout the great axiom, that thinking does not make it so...
...Alcohol has many uses...
...Because some murderers will never be caught, we don't free the ones who are (at least we didn't used to...
...Brandy would still be just the thing to round off a banquet, and whiskey would remain a noble accompaniment to the evening...
...American oil company employees in Saudi Arabia have discovered that they must erect clandestine stills...
...But they don't, so your sophistical little inversion is irrelevant...
...But this is all...
...It gives rise to what its users call "new perceptions...
Vol. 6 • February 1973 • No. 5
