THE DEVIL'S DANDRUFF

Everybody's Doing It; Nobody Wants to Talk About It

"Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? It is almost the
history of 'culture,' of our so-called higher culture." Thus spoke
Friedrich Nietzsche, everyone's favorite writer/theorist to misread and
abuse. With the last of my required reading slowly disappearing before the
fall of graduation, I find myself back where I started: Nietzsche.

Is it funny that my adolescent dabblings into philosophy and the cold, hard
world of academia parallel my meandering into the world of illicit
substances? Like that stodgy old German running to every doctor in the
Western hemisphere, begging for hashish to protect him from the elusive
monsters of hypochondria - headaches, nausea - at age 13 I was introduced
to marijuana. I discovered the ganja and the superman at the same time.

This is the quiet rush of anxiety, a psychic return to the most painful
part of life. Puberty, a time characterized by self-loathing and
insecurity, by hormones and the freshness of sex, is particularly
Wagnerian. Can you feel the swell of the crescendo? The drama? If it seems
strange that the bookends of my adolescence are a harbinger of modernity
and an ancient mystic herb, well, you are just not trying hard enough. We
fight the drama any way we can. Abolish truth, get high. Whatever.

And here I am. 4/20. The most cliched date in the world, feeling the pull
of my 13-year-old self, reading my Nietszche. He writes: "Everything
profound loves masks; the most profound things go so far as to hate images
and likeness." Staring at the pot-leaf T-shirts on the street, the tie-dyed
flags, the people stumbling into headshops for a brand new bong, I am
wondering: What is the face behind the mask?

"Weed is the new coke," somebody says, and all my stoned, silly mental
wanderings are swiped away in an instant. "Only it is not evil."

Whoa. Hold up. The new what? Evil?

"Dude, I don't put anything up my nose."

Listen, personal aesthetics are fine and dandy, but have we not learned
from Henry Anslinger's reefer-madness propaganda push of the '30s and '40s?
Anslinger, head of the newbie Federal Bureau of Narcotics, is the guy who
made the American public care about weed, who categorized it as "the most
violent drug in the history of mankind." His stories of incest, rape and
ax-murders, all chock full of racist rhetoric, created the stigma whose
influence exists to this day.

Knowing what we do now, about the ways illicit drugs have been manipulated
and plundered by bureaucrats, opportunists and everybody everywhere who has
something to gain, how can we refer to any one drug as evil?

Meanwhile, Crunchy is puffing away with a glazed look. "Dude," he says,
"cocaine's a crutch, man."

Who is propagating this bullshit? Who is spreading the gospel of stupidity
about a drug whose history is just as ancient and shrouded in culture as
hashish? It is not just Crunchy and the sheep. It is the Sniffly, his tiny
packet of devil's dandruff in hand, mumbling incoherently about how he is
going to quit skiing. The only thing cokeheads like more than talking about
how much they hate cocaine is doing fat rails. It was not always the case.

Another big daddy of modernity, everyone's favorite writer/theorist to
malign and pick apart, Sigmund Freud, recommended cocaine use for stomach
aches and melancholia. In the late 1800s, cocaine was treated as a
miraculous anesthetic. For 5,000 years, in fact, South American Indian
cultures have used the coca plant as an erotic stimulant, placing it at the
center of innumerable rituals. And here we are, in the year 2003, at NYU:
Cocaine is just as easy and quick to get as the pot, everybody is doing it
and nobody wants to talk about it.

Of course, nobody should equivocate cocaine and pot. Such irresponsibility
would be ridiculous. When speaking of effects, of the experience, of the
dangers of the two drugs, we are talking apples and oranges. But let us
not, even for a moment, mistake aesthetics for morals.

The cultural baggage associated with cocaine is just as annoying as that of
pot: cool guy, downtown trash and midtown yuppie asshole. Credit cards.
Trust funds. Lou Reed sunglasses. Greed. But all that culture floats on the
surface of a very real, solid skeleton. The drug has been manipulated since
prehistory. The histories of the human animal and its brain-fucks are
inseparable.

This is not a recommendation. This is a fact. But Crunchy's not listening -
he is all fucked up and staring vapidly. Whatever. Not like I care that
much anyway, just rambling. I can think of a hundred reasons why blow is
evil too, bad things it has done to people I know, bad situations that have
resulted from it.

But drugs clog up our history, one way or another. The intoxicant becomes
associated with arbitrary references, changes itself, swells and ebbs in
public opinion. Remember my Nietzsche. My truth is not yours. My Nietzsche
is wrapped up in pubescent pot smoking, in Syd Barrett records and teen
angst. Just be careful what ends up getting wrapped up in your life, in
your crossing circuitry, what associations you end up making. You might end
up liking Interpol.