Tokin' Jew

"Inebriation is voluntary insanity." (Seneca the Younger (4BC-65AD)

Ok. I admit it. I have smoked my fair share of cannabis. Maybe not enough make me a blithering fool or a total slacker, but enough to take ‘edge’ off a long work week or an aching back. It’s not much different than drinking a few glasses of wine, which normally accompany a ‘fatty’ anyhow. I live by a “work first, play later” credo, and I never consume alcohol or marijuana if I will be working or driving. I am also very careful with WHOM I choose to partake. The company one keeps when one recreates says much about one’s tastes and determines what kind of social effects will occur. For this reason, I like to drink and smoke in the privacy of my own abode, usually while sitting right where I am now, in front of this computer, logging my random musings onto a hard drive already sick and tired of being rebooted back into consciousness every time I show the slightest bit of minor brain activity. Since I am the kind of guy who is exactly the same everywhere I go, and abide by an internalized standard of conduct, my behavior doesn’t shift much from sober to less than sober. I don’t overdo it anyway. Well, most the time anyhow.

I am a firm believer that pot-smoking would solve at least a few of the world’s problems. We send tons of weaponry and machinery all over the world in order to promote ‘democracy’ and offer peoples a better way of life, but where has that method worked? I say we drop large bales of high quality marijuana on these people. There are any number of cogitations one manifests when wasted, but marching in formation and attacking the next village ain’t one of them. Every single member of the Taliban, the KuKluxKlan, and the Bush administration should be FORCED to smoke at least two giant spliffs a day of the funkiest Canuckistani chronic available. I don’t see any problem with a government that runs the nation from a large sofa, clad in sandals and Hawaiian shirts, conducting press conferences from the Cabana Room with Jimmy Buffet crooning in the background. I’m not the least bit worried if they don’t get anything done, since it is my opinion they have done way too much of the wrong things already, and less of the wrong thing is always the right thing to do.

Personally, I like the way it feels. I don’t become a different person when smoking weed, I become a more open ME. The Talmud says “There are three ways to judge a person BEKISO, BEKASO, and BEKOSO.” They are how one handles money, how one handles anger, and how one handles inebriation. I have seen people who are normally very measured and calm come completely unglued under the influence of alcohol or marijuana. I never get high with them a second time. Bad Ju-Ju. As the adage goes “nichnas yayin yatza sod.” (Wine goes in and secrets come out.) It’s very true for marijuana also. If you want to know what is on a person’s mind when they let their guard down, fire up a joint with them. It’s a sort of truth serum. You quickly discover who your friends are, which are NOT now, and which never were.

There is nothing more irritating than an idiot with the ‘munchies.’ I learned this lesson during the few months I worked a pizza delivery job for friend of mine. People who are high will call no less than 10 times at 30 second intervals wondering why the pizza they ordered 3 minutes ago hasn’t arrived yet. Here is some professional advice. If you are planning to get high, call for the pizza FIRST, and then smoke yourself into a coma within 6 feet of your front door. Please stop calling 100 times just because you forgot that you called 10 seconds ago. At least once a night we’d have some pot-head on the phone swearing by the Mother Mary and all that is Holy that he ordered a pizza from us, only to find out he dialed the wrong number. The up side of delivering pizza to stoners is that marijuana seriously erodes one’s ability to perform algebraic functions, and this allowed me to ‘leave’ very generous tips when making change. After all, it’s hard work serving the mathematically impaired.

Most of all, I enjoy the few blissful moments when I truly don’t give a shit about anything. You’re never going to catch me ranting about Divrei Chazal contradicting each other or the lack of archeological evidence for Shlomo HaMelech, or anything else for that matter. Most likely, I will ramble on in a sing-song about how the beauty of life is that it’s meaningless, how I’ll be forgotten someday, and how I still really love life for what it is, then have a final glass of Chardonnay and shuffle off to an early bedtime. Basically, when I have a good buzz on, I am a warm, sappy, philosophical drunk who falls asleep soon thereafter. Life of the party I am not in that condition. There is another reason I don’t use marijuana more than once in great while anymore. It does nothing for my creativity. You don’t write much when you’re stoned, and if you’ve been thinking about anything productive, it will be long forgotten by the time you lift yourself off the couch at 3 am to relieve yourself and then try to quench a life-threatening case of cotton-mouth.

Half the fun of smoking weed is finding it. There is a wonderful tingly sensation that one experiences whilst imagining oneself thwarting the valiant efforts of law enforcement, God, and your parents all in the same moment. That is, in part, why drug dealers are very popular people. They offer you the opportunity to feel universally naughty. Dealers convey the impression of being the pharmacists of the Underworld, and everyone wants to shake hands with the Devil.

We all know how drug dealers are portrayed in the movies and on television, and I can promise you, none of the dozen or so marijuana growers and distributors (they hate the word dealer) I know resemble Al Pacino or Pablo Escobar. They are mostly a mixed bag of old bikers, young hip hoppers, ex police officers, and really cool grandmothers who contrary to popular myth, do NOT sell to children or encourage children to get high. The main reason is simple. Kids have no money. Customers without money are bad customers, like in any other business. Lots of these people HAVE children, too, and try to keep their kids safe from the fallout by educating them honestly about drug use. That means teaching them both drug facts and more importantly, people skills. Not everyone can be trusted with a good time.

I tried my hand at selling marijuana, thinking it might be a way to raise some extra cash. (Didn’t really go as planned, I must have been high when I thought of it.)I was just a middleman though. The real money is made by those who import large quantities or the big growers and even they take some huge financial and legal risks getting into the business. If you have a bad season, you could end up with a crop that you couldn’t GIVE away, let alone sell, though it’s common to find some customers so desperate or gullible they would buy oregano if you rolled it in papers. For those low on the drug distribution chain, you won’t be living the glorious life of an oversexed rock star. Your fortune is earned piecemeal, looking pretty much like any other job (except that one doesn’t usually get sent to prison for selling sofas.) I would purchase a pound or two at a time, find a friend I could trust to split it up, package it, and slowly let select people know that I had some weed. Time, effort, and lots of waiting are involved. This was almost fun until I did a cost/benefit analysis of the process, and ended up shit-canning the whole idea permanently.

For starters, I wasn’t getting the kind of return that one should for taking such a risk. I specifically targeted those who were more educated and working in white collar jobs, because I imagined they would be less likely to try sources of lower intelligence or integrity than myself, and they would not haggle over prices. Man, was I wrong. Not only did they “Jew” me back and forth, but some expected me to deliver! Then, they would tell me how “they know a guy who will sell them such and such” for 1/3 my price. These folks thought they were dealing with an amateur, but I learned how to handle such ploys way back when I was a kid working in my mother’s furniture stores. My answer was always “For that price buy 2 and bring me 1!”, and the deal was then closed. Don’t bluff a bluffer.

Then of course one has to deal with the people who want you to ‘loan’ them some marijuana. That’s right. They want marijuana on credit, and they will run off a long list of friends and relatives they promise to bring to you if only you hand them a ‘quarter’ of your best weed, and wait until he/she gets their paycheck on Friday. I had extended credit to select individuals, but NEVER to customers who are blabbermouths. These are the same idiots who get pulled over for having a tail light out, and immediately upon surrendering their license and registration to the patrolman, begin giving up names of every shoplifter, deadbeat dad, and marijuana smoker they know. The key to safe drug dealing (sounds kinda dumb, I know) is a very quiet and somber sort of grapevine underground advertising. Loose lips sink ships and ‘no tickie, no washie.’

The biggest mistake anybody who gets into the business makes is “getting high on his own supply.” There is no profit in smoking away the store. These same idiots will exchange weed for sexual favors, which is the DUMBEST thing anyone can do. I had a woman, and an attractive one at that, try to barter sex for drugs. Now, believe it or not, I had the same experience in the furniture market and already knew how to handle this in true “Aronovitz” fashion. I calmly explained to her that I had overhead costs of gas, lighting, and heat that had to be met even before I began selling, and if I could take what she was offering me and offer it to someone at the electric company, the gas company, or the IRS and have my bills paid THAT way, I would be cutting those deals every day. Since the commodity she chose to barter with is non-transferable, there was no bargain to be struck. Simple as that.

In any case, what little money I ended up making for all my troubles was just NOT worth it, but I stayed at it for a while longer. Why? People wanted me all the time. It is a bit of a rush to be popular. This popularity, however, was soon discovered to be as fleeting and intangible as my profit margins. When people know you have weed, they act like you are their ‘best friend ever in the whole wide world’, but when your supply is gone, you don’t exist at all. If a customer calls me and I have nothing to sell, the customer doesn’t stop to ask “Say Shlomo. How are the cats? How’s your day job going? What’s the weather out there?” If the customer, even one who has purchased from you for YEARS, doesn’t get what they need, CLICK! It’s just you and the dial-tone. That’s it. It’s a very fickle and fair-weather world. I made more friends and lovers selling furniture than I ever did selling marijuana. (And more money, too.)

Some recoil in terror at the idea of someone smoking marijuana. I understand the concerns of parents, educators, and law enforcement. Nobody wants children smoking weed, or wants having adults getting behind the wheel while impaired. In an ideal world, we could endure widespread marijuana use without any catastrophic effects. Until we start giving mandatory CAT scans and psychiatric evaluations to anyone who wants to smoke up, however, we should continue to exercise an inordinate amount of caution. I don’t see myself ever advocating the widespread legalization of marijuana except for medicinal purposes, and that person better be really, really sick. As I said above, I have seen seemingly rational people go completely ape-shit under the influence, and that just means that not everyone can be trusted with a good time.

Whatever you do, do it safe and plan ahead. Above all, avoid idiots. Nothing ‘harshes’ a good buzz like stupidity.

Peace!