Re: A request for enlightenment.

Always happy to help, old son. Stick with me and we'll lead you out of the darkness of doctrinal error and into a broad, sunlit uplands of reason and tolerance. The supplicant asks:

Aside from sharing use with young women in order to free them from their inhibitions concerning mating rituals, fogging one's brain to the point that it is virtually impossible to have a coherent thought and as a tool for joining the "in crowd", what exactly constitutes "responsible use" of marijuana?

Actually the first-named use, as a solvent for stubborn womanly virtue, is one I've had no experience with--I came of age at an odd cusp of our social history, a glorious brief period in which an unprepossessing young man (and I was certainly that) needed neither conspicuous charm, nor special comeliness, nor a predatory temperament nor strategies of stealth or substance to be assured of a reasonably steady supply of nookie. The young women of the era, at least in my neck of the woods, seemed not to require coaxing, tricking or stunning out of their knickers. I will add that some of the effects of the drug, in particular a certain introspection and passivity that settles upon one, strike me as unpromising for aphrodisiacal purposes. If you feel compelled to call upon the assistance of intoxicants to augment your native charms I think you'll have far better luck using strong drink for this purpose--it makes 'em frisky at the outset, or you can simply wait for her to pass out and then slake your goatish appetites on the young woman's recumbent form. Brainfogging could be construed as a responsible use, although "to the point that it is virtually impossible to have a coherent thought" is just as likely to be Too Much of a Good Thing with Oaxaca Wowie as with Glenlivet. A few glasses of wine at dinner--enough to make the conversation lively, and my neighborhood is well-served by public transit--is responsible use; two bottles of Night Train Express and then pissing oneself while passed out over the steam grate is not. Extrapolate. Finally, while few of us in adulthood are concerned with membership in an "in crowd," this sort of thing looms large in the adolescent mind as I recall, and if group partaking of a proscribed substance serves to cement a young person's entry and acceptance into one of these collectives I daresay the average teen would regard that function as, if not responsible, at least in some measure useful, although I would not myself encourage it for the reasons stated in an earlier post.

In short, responsible use of marijuana can be considered socially equivalent to responsible use of alcohol (and please don't try to hand us the tired old bit about the intoxicating effects of alcohol being some kind of irrelevant side effect of the product--we could see through that one in tenth grade), although the two drugs have different effects and are appropriate tools for different purposes: strong drink as a social (and occasionally sexual) lubricant, pot for internal, free-associative wanderings (I always found the experience of music immeasurably enhanced), for augmenting certain forms of sensory input (premium ice cream, for example) or, I suppose, for entertaining oneself, when nothing else is available, with archival episodes of "My Mother the Car" on midnight cable (its more ardent partisans will argue firmly that marijuana enhances perceptions, but I am obliged to say I think it just as likely that it stuns the aesthetic: I can still recall raising myself up on one elbow late of an evening in 1974, croaking at the radio "That's the most beautiful goddamn thing I ever heard," and galloping three blocks to the all-night record store in Santa Cruz, returning home in triumph with a copy of Pierre Boulez's Le marteau sans ma\ufffdtre, the magic of which, alas, I was never able thereafter quite to recapture)--a harmless if again not strictly responsible means of passing the time.

cordially,

[edit:typos]

Always happy to help, old son. Stick with me and we'll lead you ought of the darkness of doctrinal error and into a broad, sunlit uplands of reason and tolerance. The supplicant asks:

Aside from sharing use with young women in order to free them from their inhibitions concerning mating rituals, fogging one's brain to the point that it is virtually impossible to have a coherent thought and as a tool for joining the "in crowd", what exactly constitutes "responsible use" of marijuana?

Actually the first-named use, as a solvent for stubborn womanly virtue, is one I've had no experience with--I came of age at an odd cusp of our social history, a glorious brief period in which an unprepossessing young man (and I was certainly that) needed neither conspicuous charm, nor special comeliness, nor a predatory temperament nor strategies of stealth or substance to be assured of a reasonably steady supply of nookie. The young women of the era, at least in my neck of the woods, seemed not to require coaxing, tricking or stunning out of their knickers. I will add that some of the effects of the drug, in particular a certain introspection and passivity that settles upon one, strike me as unpromising for aphrodisiacal purposes. If you feel compelled to call upon the assistance of intoxicants to augment your native charms I think you'll have far better luck using strong drink for this purpose--it makes 'em frisky at the outset, or you can simply wait for her to pass out and then slake your goatish appetites on the young woman's recumbent form. Brainfogging could be construed as a responsible use, although "to the point that it is virtually impossible to have a coherent thought" is just as likely to be Too Much of a Good Thing with Oaxaca Wowie as with Glenlivet. A few glasses of wine at dinner--enough to make the conversation lively, and my neighborhood is well-served by public transit--is responsible use; two bottles of Night Train Express and then pissing oneself while passed out over the steam grate is not. Extrapolate. Finally, while few of us in adulthood are concerned with membership in an "in crowd," this sort of thing looms large in the adolescent mind as I recall, and if group partaking of a proscribed substance serves to cement a young person's entry and acceptance into one of these collectives I daresay the average teen would regard that function as, if not responsible, at least in some measure useful, although I would not myself encourage it for the reasons stated in an earlier post.

In short, responsible use of marijuana can be considered socially equivalent to responsible use of alcohol (and please don't try to hand us the tired old bit about the intoxicating effects of alcohol being some kind of irrelevant side effect of the product--we could see through that one in tenth grade), although the two drugs have different effects and are appropriate tools for different purposes: strong drink as a social (and occasionally sexual) lubricant, pot for internal, free-associative wanderings (I always found the experience of music immeasurably enhanced), for augmenting certain forms of sensory input (premium ice cream, for example) or, I suppose, for entertaining oneself, when nothing else is available, with archival episodes of "My Mother the Car" on midnight cable (its more ardent partisans will argue firmly that marijuana enhances perceptions, but I am obliged to say I think it just as likely that it stuns the aesthetic: I can still recall raising myself up on one elbow late of an evening in 1974, croaking at the radio "That's the most beautiful goddamn thing I ever heard," and galloping three blocks to the all-night record store in Santa Cruz, returning home in triumph with a copy of Pierre Boulez's Le marteau sans maître, the magic of which, alas, I was never able thereafter quite to recapture)--a harmless if again not strictly responsible means of passing the time.

cordially,

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