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...
...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...
...There are (barring a plea that mutilation of animals is symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment) two available courses...
...Men do not draw distinctions so bitterly unless they imagine that some real distinctions exist to be drawn...
...The title of a recent pro-legalization-of-pot book, Marijuana: The New Prohibition, states the argument concisely...
...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...
...This is the error that permeates most present discussion of marijuana...
...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...
...Have you ever heard an advocate of marijuana deplore its use by teens and sub-teens...
...Long before Freud, the West knew that the pit of man's soul is not a garden of delights...
...He rejects any notion of objective verification...
...Look at the silly error that he's just now committed...
...American oil company employees in Saudi Arabia have discovered that they must erect clandestine stills...
...My inverted argument proceeds from a false premiss...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...If they were suddenly to lose all their physiological effects, wine would still be taken with meals and beer with snacks...
...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...
...There is no more reason to accord them the same treatment than there is to give medical research grants to animal torturers...
...t a distance is really not so lovely...
...But they don't, so your sophistical little inversion is irrelevant...
...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...
...But today marijuana is encouraging men to release those elephants from their cages and ride them pell-mell through the world...
...The whole West, divided on everything else, unites to shout the great axiom, that thinking does not make it so...
...It provides an irrational tug toward the abandonment of the western axiom of a real universe...
...the gendarmerie has dried up the bootleg traffic in spirits...
...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...
...If society does not punish those researchers, why should it punish you...
...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...
...How would you defend your freedom...
...They are muttering to themselves, "This fellow writes so glibly about logic, yet he's no master of the art...
...Given encouragement, they will devote many unstoned hours to praisingi the pleasure, enlightenment, and insight that they find in their "new state of consciousness...
...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...
...We do not want the truths dredged from that mire...
...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...
...Its users find this trade well worth the imposts...
...The metaphysics fostered by marijuana cannot dispute...
...Ninety-five percent of Americans have no strong affection for pot...
...What would they argue about...
...But I have taken that premiss from the argument that I am inverting...
...We have good reason to fear these orators...
...However, you might argue differently, and, I suspect, with greater prospect of success...
...It permits men to fly from the mundaneness of their everyday senses into a realm "sensitivity...
...In the deepest folds of Bacchus, men see pink elephants...
...They never apply to the use of pot the restraints that drinkers apply to liquor as a matter of course...
...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...
...This sort of drinking is not confined to festive occasions...
...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...
...Yes, that is the proper reply...
...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...
...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...
...Bacchus too will rescue you from the "light of common day" if you let him...
...It is not like the division between Plato or Aristotle or between Descartes and Kant or between any other schools of western thinkers...
...Now, marijuana may be excellent for its own peculiar use, but it has only one...
...Some men do drink to escape the world...
...One is to explain straightforwardly to the jury why you like to break dog's legs...
...Outside the debating room, the friends of marijuana are well enough aware that its resemblance to alcohol is remote...
...Harry S Truman ally different effects, then they are different Things belonging in different Classes...
...Brandy would still be just the thing to round off a banquet, and whiskey would remain a noble accompaniment to the evening...
...They express pity for the rest of us...
...Putting Things into Classes is the beginning of reason...
...They all agreed that propositions about the universe are either true or false (or badly stated, but that is a different problem...
...The Metaphysical Distinction Suppose you enjoyed breaking the legs of small dogs...
...Point out that acknowleged scientists infect small dogs with painful diseases, subject them to dubious surgeries, and even, sometimes, break their legs...
...Consciousness-changing is marijuana's only trade...
...But some of my classmates were "turning on" at the same ceremony, with no visible reprobation from their pro-marijuana comrades...
...You live in a society notorious for cynophilia, so your neighbors might object...
...It affects the mental processes...
...No one goes to a pot party simply for a sociable evening with the boys...
...Because some murderers will never be caught, we don't free the ones who are (at least we didn't used to...
...Alcohol has never promised so much...
...It gives rise to what its users call "new perceptions...
...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...
...Only a mad sense of fair play would say that the existence of one evil justifies the existence of all others...
...But others drink to join it more firmly...
...Announce that you are engaged in "scientific research," not, admittedly, of the customary, hide-bound sort, but research nevertheless...
...How much happier and wiser the world would be if everyone turned on...
...Where reason is speechless, moods and emotions are powerful orators...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...But this is all...
...The Old Prohibitionists, after all, were not wrong when they claimed that liquor has many effects that society would be better off without...
...And what, pray, is my mistake...
...Debate among the holders of private visions is not even conceivable...
...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...
...Nor should I forget that beer and wine and brandy and whiskey can be drunk from a mere liking for their aromas and tastes...
...It is the missionary of falsehood...
...Some readers have probably already come up with an answer to my inversion of their standard debating point...
...The subject of their quarrel is only the universe...
...Marijuana must stand on its own, not lean on the legal priviledges of liquor...
...it rots with delusions and devils...
...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 chasm is complete...
...The quarrel is not such as we of the West are accustomed to...
...The first obvious distinction it may seem superficial, but it springs from something deeper is a difference in number...
...A favorite juxtaposition of movie and television scriptwriters is the booze-squiffing parent and the pot-smoking child...
...Thus, you may eventually win in the higher tribunals and be able to return to your individual pursuit of happiness...
...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...
...There is only one true Great American statement in our culture these days, and we all know what that is...
...This is why marijuana has such deadly import for the survival of society...
...Confining its use to the fringes of society presents no insuperable difficulties...
...If alcohol and marijuana have substantiGreat American Series Some of the Presidents were great and some of them weren't...
...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...
...He, however, says frankly that his method is to blot out the dull light, not to provide a superior illumination...
...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...
...Their writings seethe with sneer at the besotted older generation, unfavorably contrasted with thenown upstanding selves...
...Instead of explaining, reclassify...
...They will submit to regulation, leaving the dissenters as fish in a desert...
...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...
...Imagining that this process alters the Things is the beginning of silliness...
...No one puffs a non-intoxicating quantity of grass for relaxation...
...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...
...They are, to the eye, funny creatures, more likely to raise a smile than a whiff of terror...
...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...
...It is not limited to madmen who establish a common ground between torture and medical research...
...It may prove that what looks pink at a distance is really not so lovely...
...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...
...In vino, in rebus, non in te ipso...
...This is not an axiom congenial to marijuana...
...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...
...If truth is an individual affair, how can anyone argue, except in the manner of people "arguing" about their favorite colors...
...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...
...Despite the blossoming of the counter-culture, its favored intoxicant is still no stronger here than liquor in Saudi Arabia...
...Generously, he will allow other persons to have other truths, all these private revelations being not so much contradictory as incommensurable...
...For these disputants could dispute...
...Such arguments might save you from prison -by convincing your neighbors that you belonged in an asylum...
...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...
...And silliness is not a rare affliction...
...The news, simpleminded and transitory as it is, is probably as good as it can be...
...Alcohol has many uses...
Vol. 6 • February 1973 • No. 5
