IRE AND VICE: THE CUTEST LITTLE ADDICTION

Being a chronic complainer and all-around prick, I often criticize
members of the Stanford Administration for their many, many
shortcomings. But I am no misanthrope. The sun is shining. Our
basketball team just nuked the state of Washington. Jack Bauer went
fucking vampire on a terrorist. So, bright-side-of-life time. I won't
bore you with impolite chastisements of hard-working staff members
like Jane Camarillo, upon whose metaphorical shallow grave we all
shall dance the tango, and Greg Boardman, who reportedly wants to ban
drinking games in freshman dorms -- a silly rumor, since only a
complete poltroon would want to ban drinking games, and you and I
both know Greg ain't no goddamn poltroon.

None of that negative nattering, Nick. Today I'm offering hymns in
praise of the hardest-working administrator on campus, who makes life
worth living for a substantial part of the student body -- especially
on weekends and during reruns of "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." He is the
lowest-paid person on campus and receives no medical coverage. His
retirement plan involves several court dates and a haircut mandated
by his defense attorney. Yet, unlike Hennessy, trapped in his ivory
tower money bin, this administrator has the common touch -- he speaks
directly to the students, albeit through an untraceable pay phone.
I'm speaking, of course, of the CMD -- the Campus Marijuana Dealer,
or the Pot Provost.

Back in our parents' day, marijuana had a certain rebel flavor.
Lighting up was a giant middle finger to the system, to mom and dad,
to Nixon. Times have changed. I do not mean to suggest that everyone
smokes pot -- most jobs require drug tests, not to mention cognitive
ability; many people don't like paying for it (fortunately, it grows
on trees); and some kids just don't like the anxiety, the high, that
exploding feeling in your eyeballs. But I have never met anyone my
age who is truly against marijuana, on ethical, moral or even
biological grounds. When you light a cigarette, you get angry glares
and unfunny cancer jokes; friends and family disown you, shocked, as
if you'd suddenly admitted a lifetime membership in the Hitler Youth.
When you smoke a joint, people giggle and ask for a puff, just a
little one, man, just enough to make the colors smell good.

That's where the Pot Provost comes in. Let's call him Roland, a
composite of several helpful young men (and the occasional woman)
I've had the pleasure to meet here at the Farm (only for research,
officer, I swears it). If Roland were lazy, which comes with the
territory, then he'd have been kicked out of several dorms for stupid
mistakes ("That? That's just a lamp."), whipslashed from Roble to
Cedro to Manzanita, perhaps even expelled for a year. If Roland were
greedy, he'd have moved from semi-legal drugs to quite illegal drugs
(the kind that gives you nosebleeds and supplements anorexia),
smoked-snorted-ingested his own stash, become paranoid that the cops
are onto him -- which they are. But Roland is smart, kind, quick to
grin. He only sells to his friends, and you are his friend, because
to know Roland is to love him. Calling him a drug dealer seems so
drab; calling him a criminal is simply bad manners. For a
hyperactive, heavily-caffeinated, type-A culture like ours, Ro! land
is Doctor Feelgood, giving you a mandatory dosage of
Chill-The-Fuck-Out. Unlike Santa Claus (that fascist), Roland doesn't
care if you've been naughty or nice. Roland, like anyone with half a
brain, knows that the good things in life come in shades of gray.

Because I am a skeptic, blessed with Catholic guilt and cursed with
mournful conscience, I cannot find it in myself to embrace marijuana
the way some of my friends can. I am suspicious of its powers of
supposed mind expansion, frightened by its addictive power, paranoid
that even when you turn off the smoke detector the tiny camera inside
the ceiling light is still feeding images directly to the police
headquarters. I am not quite convinced that marijuana should be
legalized; partially because that means all the lame people could get
it, but also because I have seen what smoking too much can do to you.
I have a close friend who has already squandered several of his
opportunities. I do not think that marijuana was the cause; but
certainly, the wake-and-bakes at lunchtime, the 4:20 bowl and the
late nights watching Cartoon Network were not helping matters.

I don't think this is a good argument against marijuana. One mark of
a thing's greatness is how many lives it ruins. As Bill Maher says,
"Dark Side of the Moon," an album unthinkable without drugs, is good
enough to justify 100 kids dead from drug abuse. Just because
something is bad in excess doesn't mean it cannot be useful in
moderation. Potheads who claim that marijuana is not physically
addictive are making the wrong argument. Everything is addictive:
exercising (it can't be healthy to ride the stairmaster for two hours
every day, guys), eating (or not eating), the presence of another
("love" if it's emotional, "lust" if it's physical). Of course
marijuana is addictive: it ignites the pleasure centers, makes
strange things sensible and sensible things mindfuckingly vague.

Why do we like marijuana? The National Institute on Drug Abuse has
one of the most charmingly square answers to that epoch-defining
question. Young people "use marijuana because of peer pressure.
Others may think it's cool to use marijuana because they hear songs
about it and see it on TV and in movies." This is highly inaccurate:
as anyone can tell you, marijuana isn't cool; cocaine is.

What are we against, if we are anti-marijuana? Several studies (most
of them conducted by the British, those logical arseholes) indicate
that the physical and mental side effects of cigarettes and alcohol
are far more drastic. Think about it: Cigarettes make your teeth
yellow and turn your breath to charcoal; if you smoke one inside, the
smell lurks for days, and unlike marijuana, which smells of the deep
eternal wilderness and splendid days lost to history -- a caressing
odor, if you will -- cigarettes smell abrasive, like a tire fire in a
pile of fossilized Mammoth shit.

Alcohol is a trickier comparison. What worries people who hate pot --
and what frightens me most -- is the perceived loss of control. On
some basic level, you feel more in control of your faculties when
you're drinking than when you're getting high. This is an unhealthy
fallacy. Alcohol feigns control by shutting down excess pathways in
your mind -- you feel more sure of yourself, of the rightness of your
cause, which is why you get into fights and drunk-dial ex-girlfriends.

Weed, conversely, adds new layers and levels to your perception of
the world, opening up hidden back roads of the mind. It doesn't take
control; it just gives you too much. Weed makes you question reality;
alcohol makes you accept it wholesale. Pick your poison, or compound
them for the Saturday Night twofer. I maintain that high school
students would be safer if they smoked more weed; there would be no
bullying, no vomiting, no deaths from alcohol poisoning (it must
stick in the craw of anti-pot activists that you can't die from
smoking too much). Everyone is friends when you pass the peace pipe.

I am skeptical. I am an unconfident man, prone to fits of paranoia
and recrimination. I have wasted whole years of my life pondering the
long chronicle of mistakes I have made -- I shouldn't have gone to
Berlin, I shouldn't have gone to Stanford, I should write more, I
should write less, I should have chosen a major with job prospects
beyond "writing a failed novel" and "dying alone in a trashcan, my
only friend an imaginary flying pink elephant named Randy." This is
the J. Alfred Prufrock side of my personality, rhymes with "emo
bullshit." Although I try to come on like I'm Hunter S. Thompson
crossed with Teddy Roosevelt and Jesus H. Christ -- the great rebels
of history -- the sad truth is that I usually feel better about
myself when I follow the rules. Clean lungs make breathing fun; a
clear head allows you to focus. I get no thrill, only anxiety, from
breaking the law. When you get older, you start to enjoy the lamer
things in life.

But what rapture, my friends, what gorgeousness and gorgeousity that
ascends your spirit skywar toward the swoony marshmallow heavens! How
all the colors of our earth, made drab and funereal by the society of
eternal spectacle, seem to glow with freshly gilded bombast after
just the barest puff tickles your lungs! Your eyes, like windows into
the fever dreams of a fallen angel. Can this be so terrible, every
once and awhile, to take a break from reality, to hear the music of
the spheres, even if all you do is watch reruns of "Battlestar
Galactica?" Some of my favorite memories from high school involve a
bucket, a water bottle with the bottom cut off, a lighter and that
little nugget of transcendence; even though it was everything else
that got me into Stanford (editing the newspaper, speech and debate,
community service, good grades), it was those little reveries -- for
good or ill, in small ways and large -- that made me who I am.

So the next time you see Roland, whoever he or she might be, make
sure you thank him or her a little bit extra. In a world of straight
lines, the Pot Provost throws in the curves. He will never be offered
a job at Harvard -- a good thing, because without him, this campus
would be so much less interesting, man.