Post #49: The Weeds along the Path

15 July 2023

As a European teenager back when, I spent far too much time surrounded by dimwits who thought it was oh-so-very cool to smoke, and I always hated it, whether tobacco (if our contemporary nicotine-delivery devices can still be included under that label) or the other kind. (Puffing in the Amazon on raw tobacco mapachos is a somewhat different story, I would say; but I only did it a few times and never inhaled.)

In Manali, at twenty, I ate a magic cookie and waited for an epiphany as I sat in the green, green hills. But nothing magical happened. In Varanasi, on the same journey of discovery, I bought a laced candy from the government vendor that sent me spinning with vertigo in my hostel room, an unforgettable cross between a cozy cave and a dungeon cell hewn from moldy concrete. In Amsterdam I opted for enriched yogurt—but in all these instances, more by way of paying respect to the setting than anything else. The same thing happened again many years later in Bhutan, when a zany American brewed me a tea from goods she had brought in flying via Moscow (!). And when on Easter Sunday she handed me a makeshift bong made from a toilet paper roll—I was already over forty by then—I thought once more that the circumstances made the offer irresistible and that I might as well relent a little and inhale for the first and last time. The effect was not very remarkable, as could perhaps have been predicted from the bumbling build-up.

Then cannabis was legalized here in Bangkok a year ago and shops have been cropping up everywhere like spring crocuses. Given my reservations about recreational drug use (I don’t even drink, though in contrast to smoking I don’t mind when others do it around me), one might expect that I would deplore this development. But I don’t; I find it more amusing than disturbing. I make a difference between what I dislike and disapprove of and what I think should be made illegal, and what bothers me a lot more than the drugs in question is the absurd principle that it should be right to protect adults from themselves on pain of throwing them in prison and ruining their lives. That is offensive, not a few garish weed shops and smokers’ dens.

The Buddhist precept against intoxicants—included among the basic five that are supposed to be binding on layfolk—mentions only alcohol and is aimed not so much at the mind-altering aspect as at the attendant irresponsibility for which booze is notorious. Where nothing foolish is done under the influence and no demonstrable harm to self or others, the precept looks inconclusive, especially in cases where there might be a spiritual benefit, or a heart-opening effect. At any rate, the precepts are training rules not categorical imperatives or divine commandments, so they don’t absolve us of the responsibility to think things through for ourselves.

I am not saying anything very original when I wonder out loud whether the line between recreation and therapy can, at any rate, be drawn very clearly—even setting aside the question why the fact that something is fun should count against it. Ecstasy, nothing if not a fun drug (or so I am told), has been credited, by some, with lifting them out of depression. Mushrooms, taken in small doses, are not hallucinogenic so much as mood-enhancing. And Ayahuasca, the king cobra of the contemporary medicinal-drug scene (along with a few other less well-known heavyweight contenders in the sacred-serpent league) has broken many a more pernicious drug habit, to say nothing of the eminently thought-provoking argument about the “doors or perception” that Aldous Huxley popularized so eloquent seventy years ago already.

Those of us who have to live—owing to the usual complicated mix of endowment, disposition, and habit—with an irritable temperament, a chronically inflamed inner mental landscape one might say, could use some help, and who is to say that it is wrong to turn to the weed for succor? A certain slackening must be expected, of course, but that is just the point, and surely well-earned with the years. How many seasons, how many decades of toil and tears must one give to the vineyards of adult responsibility before one has earned the right to loosen the reigns a little, be it by the toke or by other means? Is it a matter of having made enough money, or being able to point to a sufficient contribution? If so, by what measure of accomplishment? “Whenever you feel like it” is not my preferred answer, here or anywhere, but “never” sounds no more reasonable to me. Recreation is not everything, but it has its place, and guarding one’s brain cells, though necessary and commendable, is not everything.

Not that I am ready to buy myself a water pipe and embark on a new habit. The old commitments still loom too large for that, at least for now. Cannabidiol (CBD) looks a lot less problematic to me, and one can find some very level-headed information on it even from the Harvard Medical School these days, as I was amused to discover just now (check out Peter Grinspoon, MD). Of course I stand by my conviction that meditation is the royal road, not medication, but the links between the inner and the outer worlds, the respective domains of the mental and the physical, are complex enough to leave some room for negotiation. From what I can tell, one’s practice might well benefit from a wide range of medicines, responsibly used, and while one might consider more conventional anti-depressants especially Buddhist precisely because they hit the libido and genitalia, not all of us are comfortable with that line of reasoning, as I’ve had occasion to point out before (Post #32).