CONFESSIONS OF A RETIRED POT HEAD

To the Editor:

I see that the pot debate is raging again in the letters pages. (NDN,
Thursday, August 21), a tempest in a tea pot so to speak.

As usual the debate is highly polarized between those who love the
sacred weed and those who see it as precursor to hard drugs, crime
and even schizophrenia. Perhaps as someone of experience and a
seeker of the Middle Way, I can inject a little realism into the discussion.

Back in my hippie days on Fourth Avenue I sometimes saw the dealer
pull up in his long yellow car but I was never tempted because I used
my weed to generate paintings and poems and I thought that hard drug
addicts seldom produced either.

Like many lonely writers I found pot amenable to my practice for
three reasons: first it overcame performance anxiety: the fear of the
blank page and the rational mind's aversion to wasting yet another
evening in useless scribbling. When I was high the page became a
glowing portal to infinite possibilities. Secondly it enabled me to
focus so intently on the immediate sequence of words that I no longer
cared where they might lead and that meant I was in for an intricate
journey of discovery through a labyrinth of memory and
imagination. In short it made writing fun.

Subsequently I read a medical brochure on the dangers of pot which
warned against this "rigidity" of attention and I came to see that it
does have a downside. While I was raptly following the unpredictable
course of consecutive words I would often fail to notice that the
stew pot had boiled dry and the dishes heaped in the sink were
starting to become colonized by mold.

Because the combination of pot and language was such an effective
alternative to the existential conditions of solitude and poverty it
reinforced those conditions. Over the years I became an adept
wielder of words but also a bitter critic of the society that failed
to reward my self-perceived talent, forcing me to rely on a
miscellany of odd jobs and handouts to keep a roof over my typewriter
and subsequent computers.

I know that many famous works were written stoned, ranging from
Kublai Khan to Beautiful Losers but when I attempted to write longer
fiction and nonfiction I discovered that writing stoned made it
impossible to give the work a sense of seemly proportion. The
branches became too wordy and the tree of imagination failed to
develop strong, earth-deep roots. In short I discovered that, if I
were ever to find an audience for my words and give birth to whole
and shapely works of literature, I would have to give up the sacred weed.

I won't refuse a toke on the rare occasions that one comes my way but
generally I'm too busy writing and reading to smoke and when I walk
through the gratuitous beauty of a Kootenay summer I can see each
flower, stone, child and crow as it is, in a world much less obscured
by thought balloons of compulsive ideation.

D.B. Wilton Nelson, B.C.