Obsession With Pot A Bad Flashback

I’ve got something to tell you, but I’m scared to come out with it, worried what you’ll think of me afterward. Here goes: My name is Leonard and when I was in college, I didn’t experiment with pot.

Shocking, isn’t it? I’m not sure where I went wrong. Maybe it was my disinterest. My lack of hep. Or my aversion to handcuffs. All I can say is that it felt strange. The rest of my generation went floating by under a burnt sugar cloud and I lumbered along behind them, sober as a surgeon.

I didn’t and don’t attach any particular moral interpretation to my failure to go get stoned. And while I have zero regrets, I must confess this much: It was damn lonely being out of step with a whole generation.

Now I’m feeling out of step again - this time with those reporters, politicians and voters who’ve made an issue of decades-ago pot use by officials of both parties. Candidate Clinton started it back in the campaign of ‘92 with his famous disclaimer that he toked but didn’t inhale. This year has brought more of the same, with Clinton administration spokesman Mike McCurry and Republican Rep. Susan Molinari of New York winding up on the pot seat, struggling to explain past experimentation with the evil weed.

Maybe we’re finally losing interest in this non-story. The latest development (John Buckley, Bob Dole’s communications director, was recently reported by WJLA, a Washington TV station, to have smoked marijuana 20 years ago) seems to have been ignored by most media outlets. As a result, Buckley finds himself embroiled in only a micro scandal at best.

But can anyone doubt that many public officials of a certain age must be watching all this with anxious eyes, wondering when the pot police will out them because of that joint they smoked at the ABBA concert back in 1978? There’s a McCarthyesque madness to it, a witch-hunt weirdness. You half expect people to be rousted out of bed and ordered to name names: “Who toked and when?”

Let me save us all a lot of trouble. Everybody did it. Everybody except me.

But my high horse pulls up lame here. The reasons I didn’t do it are so idiosyncratic, there are no larger implications to be drawn. It just wasn’t me; I had no interest, curiosity or desire. Which is no qualification for sainthood.

Because in my experience, “good” kids did every bit as much pot as their evil counterparts. The stuff suffused our music, our movies and our popular culture.

I remember once, to make nice after standing me up for an interview, Marvin Gaye offered me a bag of weed, and it was as casual and natural as offering a stick of gum. Why not? The stuff was ubiquitous. And given that we all did it, you have to wonder at the eagerness with which some are unearthing the youthful indiscretions of others.

Are our memories that short?

Or are our hypocrisies that large?

More to the point, have we become this enslaved by the staid humorlessness of the age, this eager to please the new Puritanism? Have we become pious and self-righteous enough to string up by the thumbs people who were no better or worse than the rest of us were 20 years ago?

I offer no defense of the drug culture here. On that issue, I can sum up my feelings in two words: drugs bad. I’ve never understood the appeal of alternate realities. From where I sit, this reality is fascinating enough to last a lifetime.

But let’s be real. Let’s not drag out this misadventure of a lifetime ago and pretend it has bearing on who a person is now. Indeed, the simple fact that pot use wasn’t exactly unique back then suggests it will be a revelation of little value in deciphering a person’s character now. Might as well draw conclusions based on the fact that she once wore bell-bottom pants or danced to disco music.

Twenty years ago, we all believed and did things we’d just as soon forget. And 20 years later, we all look like dorks in our yearbook pictures. These are immutable facts of our existence. And when disciples of the new Puritanism posture otherwise, well … it makes me wonder what they’ve been smoking.

xxxx