ONCE A DRAG, IT'S TIME TO CLEAR THE AIR

The one and only time I smoked reefer was in the front seat of a college
sweetheart's Thunderbird. Michael had been growing his own private product
in his parents' backyard and rolled, as best I could determine, a joint or
two or three every day.

He said reefer made him feel. Not a particular feeling, not euphoric or
hyperattuned to what surrounded him, sad, calm or any other sensibility
that he could name. It just made him feel. He said that word - feel -
stretching the vowel and grinning. As high-strung as I was in his eyes, he
figured a little reefer would take the edge off, make my already big laugh
even bigger, my goofy self that much goofier. He liked my silliness, so
what finer theater was there than my performing, if you will, for him, a
beloved audience of one? Him smoking weed and feeling it, and watching me
take my very first toke?

Certain characteristics of the toke-taking community already held my
attention. Some of my most colorful high school friends lit up with
regularity and often in public. It expanded their horn-playing and
guitar-strumming, they said, or raised their acting to Oscar-winning
worthiness. If they obsessed less than I about the effects of weed-smoking
on their brain cells and report cards, they seemed still so much more
concerned and worldly, sputtering on about art, politics and sundry stuff
with their reefer-influenced, teenage expertise. Probably some of the less
cool kids were lighting up as well but keeping it undercover.

That amalgam of thoughts and images did not cross my mind in the moment of
Michael's invitation in the Thunderbird. He pushed a hand-rolled doobie in
my direction. In an experimental mood, I queried him on the fine points of
drawing on a doobie, how to keep the smoke out of my eyes and what to do if
the drawing made me cough. Even seasoned reefer-heads coughed and choked up
as they smoked, their throats constricted, one eye bucked open, the other
quivering and all but closed, them sucking ferociously on a doobie and
sometimes standing on tip-toe - like a musician playing a horn - to hit the
doobie just right. It was as if they had no control over these outward,
physical manifestations of taking a toke.

Michael gave fast, brief instructions. I began the experiment, drawing into
myself and down on the burning reefer. I tried to ignore Michael's fixation
on me and prepare myself for that hyped high. I waited for my
transcendence, a crossing over into that place of high-flying, floating and
feeling. I waited some more. I never got high, if, indeed, I even figured
out how a high should make me feel. I did, however, get one fat headache,
which Michael attributed to that being my first time.

Once was enough. As I tend toward overzealousness in some areas, my failing
at that one and only test was probably a good thing. The most addictive of
ultra-addictive personalities, perhaps, are the very persons who graduated
from a nickel bag of reefer to cocaine to crack and other recreational
mixes abiding in a vast wasteland of drugs.

That is not to say there are no suitable uses for marijuana. When my mother
was dying from ovarian cancer, unable to cut her pain with any of the
prescribed pharmaceuticals for any reasonable period of time, a
reefer-smoking sibling suggested marijuana as a palliative for her. On what
was one in a series of my extended stays with my mother during her
sickness, I transported the plastic bag of grass by airplane, never giving
a thought to whether an airport cop would randomly single me out for a search.

Mama refused our offering. Marijuana is illegal, she said. With a kid of
hers already clouded in all that smoke, she had no desire to be counted
among those outlaws. Seeing that she was in so much pain, that placed her
oddly on the wrong side of the issue.

Her response was rooted in the same illogic that had former President Bill
Clinton insisting he didn't inhale. It has New York City Mayor Michael
Bloomberg - his first 100 days in office passing without a major snafu -
squandering his time as a public servant defending and placing in new
context his pronouncing that he, in fact, used to take pleasure in taking a
toke.

NORML, the group that resurrected something Bloomberg said on the campaign
trail and made him its current poster child, finds itself groping for
ammunition. NORML, which stands for the National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws Foundations, wants to make the trade and
consumption of reefer legal. Which does not sound unreasonable. Marijuana
springs from the earth and has been assigned some benefits - medicinal
ones, for sure - by the same society that allows the legal sale of wine,
beer, whiskey, vodka, Cognac, double-malt Scotch or other spirits the
culture ingests in excess.

I tried reefer once. I didn't like it. I don't do it. But I'm not overly
concerned that other people do. Perhaps we should get it over with,
legalize the stuff and get on with matters that are far more important.