13. Using Marijuana Well

I used to smoke marijuana. But I'll tell you something; I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening—or the mid-evening. Just the early evening, mid-evening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early mid-afternoon, or perhaps the late-mid-afternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning.... But never at dusk!

—Steve Martin in concert

Social Controls

To many Americans, marijuana and other recreational drugs are not just illegal, but are still, officially, unthinkable. Although some twenty to thirty million Americans use marijuana regularly, the long-standing taboos against the nonmedical use of drugs are still so strong that in the minds of most people there is no real difference between drug use and drug abuse. According to this viewpoint, the use of any illicit drug constitutes drug abuse by definition, regardless of its consequences to the user or to society at large.
    But this prejudice does not correspond to current reality. While our society continues to concern itself with the monumental (and impossible) task of eliminating drugs altogether, it is clear that the effort is in vain, that drugs are with us to stay. A more realistic and constructive project would be to provide answers to the real questions at hand: Now that many people are using drugs without significant harm to themselves or others, where should the new lines be drawn? How are drug users to distinguish between good and bad, positive and negative, models of drug use? Or, more to the point, what is the difference between using marijuana well, and using it badly?
    Until these questions are faced, and until a realistic approach to drugs comes into being, it will be difficult to establish educational guidelines that young people can take seriously. As long as drug education has existed, it has resorted to misconceptions so blatantly false that they are rarely taken seriously by students. The consequences of such a policy are obvious, as Murray recalls:

After I started smoking pot, I realized that everything I had read or been told about it was a lie. This led me to doubt anything that was presented about drugs by the government or the schools. Although the marijuana high was totally satisfying to me, I figured that all the propaganda about speed, acid, and other drugs were also lies. I had to find out for myself that some of these drugs were pretty frightening.

    Norman Zinberg is one of the few drug experts who has given some consideration to an alternative public policy toward drugs. Together with Wayne Harding, his associate at the Cambridge Hospital in Massachusetts, Zinberg has been studying the ways in which users of illicit drugs seek to minimize the drugs' negative effects while maximizing the positive ones. Zinberg and Harding maintain that this is exactly what has taken place throughout the history of alcohol use in America, and they find it useful to consider alcohol as a reference point for other drugs.[1]
    When America was still young and its citizens had no real traditions governing the use of alcohol, there were essentially only two viable options with regard to drinking: one either abstained or one drank a great deal. There was very little room between the two categories. Gradually, drinking patterns underwent various changes to the point where today, approximately 90 percent of those who drink are able to do so with relative impunity—and without being alcoholics.
    Zinberg and Harding refer to this historical development as the evolution of social controls. They observe that, consciously or not, the overwhelming majority of Americans who drink do so with a clear set of rules and rituals. Most people do not drink habitually, or to excess. For some, controlled use means having a cocktail before dinner or even three cocktails at lunch. For others, it means a Bloody Mary at Sunday brunch, but otherwise no alcohol before nightfall during the rest of the week. Social control can take the form of wine at a meal, beer at a football game, or several drinks of hard liquor at a wedding or party. It is even possible to stretch the concept of social control to include occasional drunkenness, so long as it occurs at very specific and socially sanctioned times.