TESTING POSITIVE WITH THE STONER DEMOGRAPHIC

Do you spend a lot of time worrying about the toxic component of your urine
or hair? The pH levels in your homegrown Big Buddha? Or the precise
location of your nearest doob-positive criminal attorney?

Or when "Stoner of the Year" Snoop Doggy Dogg urges you to "blaze up one of
them blunts," do you reach for the Big Bambus? If so, you must already be
familiar with High Times, the magazine devoted to pot and its squiffy-eyed
devotees.

For novices like me, whose behaviour, during my rare experiences with the
drug, parallels that of Magnum P. I.'s during one of his laboured Vietnam
flashbacks, the magazine was a revelation.

While High Times -- whose circulation is roughly 200,000, with a strong
Web-site constituency -- maintains the legal stance that it does not
"encourage the illegal use of any of the products within," the editors must
have a very odd definition of the word "encourage."

Between paranoid advertisements for countersurveillance equipment and
vacuum-sealed urine-substitution kits ("Let Us Pee for You!" the copy
exclaims), the pages are laden with glossy photographs of pot plants: The
centrefold this month features a Mango plant, its leaves dewy and moist,
its lavender hair shining, and prehensile.

I am sure that to the average pothead, this delectable, taboo centrefold is
encouraging, the way that triple-layer-chocolate-cake spreads stimulate the
disciples of Jenny Craig; the way that male or female pulchritude incites
the sexually bereft.

It is the illegality of the plant that gives it its cachet: High Times is
like a substance-user's porno: fetishistic, perverse and geared to that 1
per cent, like outlaw bikers, who choose to live in a haze above the law.

Yet, while reading High Times, it is difficult to recall that pot is
illegal. There are a few paragraphs of agitprop devoted to the
now-exhausted comparison between drinking and smoking, and most of the
plant growers or users photographed are wearing hoods or hiding their heads
in their crops.

I wondered, after staring at page after page of, to me, boring leaves and
twigs, what it is about pot smokers that they would be entranced by a moody
shot of, for example, seven mason jars of hydroponic grass, stacked beside
an acoustic guitar.

I cannot imagine a boozer absorbing him or herself in the likes of Rummy
Monthly, drooling over pictures of sticky glasses and bouquets of barley,
any more than I can envision a crackhead wasting valuable pipe time looking
at images of pretty white rocks.

Pot smokers are, however, by nature slow and oddly methodical people, whose
brief attention spans tend to be captivated by the principles of
organization, and visual stimulation. They are also tediously, and often
erroneously, addict-provocateurs whose logic regarding their substance of
choice is fiercely skewed.

While I do believe in the decriminalization of pot, and am, for aesthetic
reasons, less excited by its legalization (the presence of head shops alone
is a depressing enough archive of the bad old days of Styx screaming "Light
up Everybody!"), I take exception to the ways in which the pro-pot argument
is constructed.

Its medicinal uses are often evoked, as if every bong owner is a
righteously suffering glaucoma patient: I imagine Elvis used the same logic
while scarfing the Dilaudids and morphine he referred to as his "medicine."
And pot's analogous relationship to alcohol is also touted as an
indestructible argument for legalization, which is sound, on one level, and
puerile on another. If drinking is worse than pot, as the tie-dye set
maintains, then why not advocate for radical changes regarding liquor
legislation? To rest on the point of relative evils is something like
arguing, like a grounded teenager, that what Little Timmy did was way worse.

Finally, what High Times and other pot advocates fail to address is the
obvious brain damage caused by the drug. While scientists are finally
making clear connections between pot use and mental deterioration,
hemp-fomenters refuse to view their filthy addiction as of one many filthy
addictions, none of which merits praise.

It is one thing to be a willful substance user; it is quite another to
dignify one's white-horse ride around the margins of culture.

Ultimately, High Times does have a shrewd grasp of its stoned demographic,
as anyone who has ever tried to talk to a pot smoker would know. It is
precisely this person who, between the bursts of inappropriate laughter,
lip licking and heavy insights, will suddenly become absorbed in the orange
hue of a Spice Brothers bud, its dreamy fronds, like, its beauty, man.

For those of us who don't have to carry around a heated vial of a
stranger's urine, or sweat the pigs when they pass, life may be not be as
high, but swinging low is sweeter, no matter how little we walk through the
doors of perception and lie on the floor, scrounging for Doritos.