Revolutionary State of Mind

[Kamaji]

Revolutionary State of Mind

As marijuana legalization has failed on its own terms, its proponents must be regarded as revolutionary cultists.

Peter Hitchens
Aug 4, 2023

Marijuana is the idol and emblem of a movement and a cult. It is not just a drug, and its enthusiasts, though nowadays they have a lot of money, are no mere lobby. Try to fight them, and you will see what I mean. I have been doing so for more than a decade and I have not even scratched their paintwork. It is quite obvious when you think about it.  By the time I was at college in England, more than 50 years ago, the use of dope was very nearly universal in my generation. I was almost alone among my fellow students, at the fashionable new University of York in northern England, in not being a regular user. And this was because I was that rare thing in those times, a puritan. As a serious Bolshevik revolutionary, I would do nothing to attract the attention of the police. And in any case, we believed that the proper response to an unjust world was to overthrow its institutions and replace them with our own, not to stupefy ourselves into dozy contentment.

Our planned revolution, an Edwardian-style seizure of power based upon an angry, organized working class led by a revolutionary party, would in fact flop utterly. The very idea of a proletariat became absurd. Even as we conspired and propagandized, the revolutionary movement was shifting and transforming itself into a vast all-embracing attack on the existing Christian culture of the Western nations. And as it turned out, drugs were a central part of that, alongside a complete transformation of sexual morality and family life. Their actual revolution, whose slogan was “Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll” rather than “Workers of All Lands Unite” would succeed beyond all measure. 

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I thought I had something better than this, and in a way I did. At least my revolution concerned itself with reason, history, and a thirst for justice, however twisted and misdirected. Theirs was just the ultimate expression of self-pity, the poor bruised soul soothed by the sweet fumes of tetrahydrocannabinol. And by the time I realized I did not have anything better after all, I was adult enough to be suspicious of the drug culture anyway.

It was in the course of trying to combat the campaign for marijuana legalization, over many years, that it came to me that I was not challenging reasonable opponents but fanatics and zealots. I would slog to some campus meeting, armed with carefully-researched facts, mostly about how the law against the possession of marijuana was not in fact enforced. And I would find my opponents, often obviously intelligent people, behaving as if I had never even opened my mouth. I might as well not have turned up. They simply repeated the false claim that I had rebutted, making no attempt to challenge my facts. The mythology of the persecution of drug abusers was an essential part of their lives. It was part of the case for legalization. Therefore it could not be abandoned. Therefore challenges to it must be ignored. What did it matter if it simply was not true? As for the strong circumstantial evidence, and the powerful correlations, which suggested that this might not be the moment to put such a drug on open sale, and to allow it to be advertised, this too was ignored as if it had not been said. Mental illness? There was more evidence that peanuts were dangerous to health (I have been told this in supposedly serious debates). 

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Those who take up this cause are defying the spirit of the age. And, as so often in such matters, it helps to turn to one of the smarter and more honest thinkers of the new era, Aldous Huxley, to find out what is going on.  His Brave New World, an increasingly accurate prophecy of our hedonist, deliberately irrational and ignorant civilization, absolutely requires the fictional drug Soma to make it function. In a world where humans have learned to love their own servitude, the mind must be kept from fretting, doubting, experiencing or expressing discontent. Not only is Soma used to quell a riot among the lower orders, who end up simpering and embracing each other after the police soma sprays have done their work; it silences the questing minds of the elite too. Soma, Huxley explained, had “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects…there is always delicious Soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon.”

Don’t you long for some? In Huxley’s world you could ingest it in the form of ice cream, and refusers were liable to end up in exile on the Falkland Islands. But you cannot get it. You will never be able to get it. Huxley suggested that biochemists, hugely subsidized by a drug-loving state, had somehow managed to make it harmless, but that must be a fantasy. It seems to me that the history of all mind-altering drugs suggests that they must exact a hard price for the artificial joy, and for the undeserved rewards, which they provide. But the advocates of drugs want this not to be so, and will not acknowledge that it is so.

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/revolutionary-state-of-mind/