IS POT THE NEW GAY?

Seems Like It, But, 'Weeds' And Bill Maher Aside, Marijuana Is Hardly A
Safe Gag

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but
they've always worked for me.

- -Hunter S. Thompson

After five glorious years, Queer as Folk has hung up its dancing shoes with
a dark final season that included a stampede to monogamy, a disco bomb
attack, and Jewish lesbian lawyer Melanie and her WASP girlfriend, Lindsay,
planning to escape to Canada before the Christian Right holocaust. What
rose in optimism, and the wicked novelty of an all-gay comedy/soap with
soft-porn interludes, falls in deep anxiety. A bellwether of the times? QAF
was conceived under Bill Clinton, but its five seasons aired while Karl
Rove demonized homosexuals and Rick Santorum was allowed to run loose.

The QAF time slot goes to dreary lesbian soap The L Word, but the big
promotional bucks are behind Weeds, the Showtime comedy in which
heterosexual suburbanites discover marijuana may be the cure for what ails
them. Maybe it's just an accident of programming, but this perceived shift
from queer to dope looks a lot like a deliberate switch in the risque topic
du jour, and pot is being turned into the new gay.

Just a few days ago, Craig Ferguson and Method Man spent almost an entire
segment of The Late Late Show giggling about "glaucoma prevention"; Bill
Maher, in his new HBO stand-up special, I'm Swiss, again cops to being a
chronic pothead; and even the venerable David Letterman now and again
courts the stoner demographic with invisible-joint gestures to the band.
While the continuing assault on indecency renders sex problematic, reefer
provides an acceptable substitute. The apparent attitude - with the single
exception of Maher, who is still mad as hell at the War on Drugs - has
become one of "what's the harm, pot's nearly legal anyway."

The problem is that marijuana is far from nearly legal. Hundreds of
thousands of poor bastards are doing time for owning, selling, or growing
dope. Tommy Chong was released from federal jail a little over a year ago,
after being victimized by the Ashcroft Justice Department - and that was
just for "conspiring to sell paraphernalia." Weeds, while coming up with
the gags, is highly disingenuous about the Californian legal status of its
core subject. In one episode, a lawyer explains that being busted with less
than an ounce is only an infraction, but fails to mention how, for
possession of a just a joint, you can, under the wrong circumstances, spend
72 hours in some lousy lockup, lose your driver's license, and have a
damning drug arrest on your record. In another episode, Mary-Louise
Parker's character visits a medical marijuana buyers' club where all is
sweetness and baked goods, with no mention of the DEA, jailed cancer
patients, or how the Feds are still all over states that have legalized
medicinal pot.

That the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign should mount a national
what-about-the-children? print-ad blitz in the week Weeds premiered may
also be a coincidence, but I ain't holding my breath. Parents are urged to
go to the group's website, where they can find grim pseudo-science:
"longitudinal research among young people below college age indicates
[users] have lower achievement, more delinquent behavior and aggression,
greater rebelliousness, poorer relationships with parents, and more
associations with delinquent and drug-using friends."

I agree with NYADMC that it's probably a bad idea for kids to start smoking
dope before they can read, write, and calculate poker odds, but I must
point out to these overprotected parents, who need so many laws to help
raise their wretched offspring, that it ain't just the blunt that's to
blame. Look for broader societal causation, neighbors. The Anti-Drug site
claims "research shows that kids who smoke marijuana engage in risky
behavior that can jeopardize their futures, like having sex, getting in
trouble with the law, or losing scholarship money." Hell, mom & pop, back
in the day I did all of those at least two years before my first joint, on
nothing but James Dean movies and Eddie Cochran songs.

Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com.