Before the widespread legalization of marijuana, a common topic of discussion among weed enthusiasts everywhere seemed to be: the government can’t/won’t legalize marijuana due to the fact that people will wake up to “the system.” Bob Marley says a similar thing in an old video in which he says, "Why them say you must not use the herb? All them say is 'you mustn't use it, you mustn't use it because it make you rebel.' Against what?"
Some people might not remember this, but this seemed to be the general consensus among people in the early 2000s whenever the discussion came up: it would make people question their lives and how hard they work, people would become too happy and lazy to continue working within our capitalist system, so the people in power would never legalize it and jeopardize that. If weed was legal most people would realize the system they live in is absurd and they’d quit their jobs en masse.
I mean, after all: who would we have working as Amazon warehouse slaves for $2 an hour, pissing in bottles, etc, if everyone realized what a complete sham this system is and how hard they’re being fucked by their corporate owners? Surely something like marijuana, which can make some people think much deeper about things than they normally would otherwise, would make people wake up right? It’s too dangerous to legalize a drug that could have serious ramifications for our society. It would mean less warehouse laborers, and less food app slaves willing to work and deliver our food whenever we want.
Fast forward to right now, and it’s never been more clear just how wrong that line of thinking was. Canada legalized marijuana in 2018, and since that time I think it’s safe to say absolutely nobody has “woken up” to anything at all. There has been zero tangible threat to the system on any level by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, things have gotten completely worse. The masses of humanity are so stupid, they are still happy to work a shit job for other people way up at the hierarchy because they think there is some kind of honour in being taken advantage of by rich people for a measly paycheque. I’m not talking about people who need a way to earn grocery money and are barely surviving under the only way they probably can, I’m talking about people who have convinced themselves that being productive in this society for others is somehow good, and are happy to take jobs that demean them.
We used to be afraid people would smoke weed or take shrooms or LSD and shake things up. The sentiment was always that it made people question their lives, and change accordingly. But we were stupid to ever believe that. Because if you look around, the people in power have done a marvellous job at keeping their shit intact: the same people that used to question the world are now happy to work at marijuana dispensaries for minimum wage, the system is essentially the same, and has swallowed up part of the reason why people smoked weed in the first place. It used to be that people considered marijuana a tool of sorts, something that made you different from the norm and represented a different way of thinking about the world.
Instead, weed has become this product people kind of use to subdue themselves and deal with the difficulty of living in a world we can’t really change for the better anymore. It feels like we’ve just given up on all that idealism completely. It’s not being used to change our minds, it’s being used to cope so we can continue to participate in this chaotic system that will kill us all. That’s why the legalization of weed in Canada in 2018 felt so anti-climactic, because nothing has really changed at all. We aren’t rethinking shit, we’re just getting high and managing our behaviour under the same shit.
For example, the biggest side effect of our current system, the climate emergency, isn’t going anywhere, and the people who used to say things like, “Weed grows out of the ground, man. It’s just nature, legalize it,” are now the same people happily buying pot with wasteful packaging disproportionate to what’s actually inside (if you think the amount of extra air in chip bags are funny, the packaging of marijuana in Canada is even sillier).
Further examples of our choice to negate shaking things up in favour of keeping production going can be seen in the way people are now starting to talk about “microdosing” magic mushrooms, and the study of psilocybin. It’s now being looked at as the seriously beneficial drug it is, for a wide range of problems like depression, anxiety, promoting neurogenesis, etc. But taking a bunch of shrooms and tripping balls to the point you quit your job and drop out of a poisonous society is still frowned upon. We’re now talking about using mushrooms as “therapy,” basically another drug we will be able to use in order to make ourselves feel happy enough to perform our slave labour and exploitative tasks more effectively without actually questioning our system.
Nobody wants to rethink anything anymore. They merely want to cope with what they’ve got and make their shitty situation feel less shitty than it really is before they have to go back to work. You have to wonder: why is weed legal now? It’s because the people at the top know how profoundly dumb humanity truly is. There will be no revolution or revolt. You are not special. You will not be breaking any generational cycles. You are just going to be a new and updated version of your slave ancestors before you, except now you have access to Netflix and an iPhone built by other slaves, and you think you’re somehow making progress. There are no Che Guevaras or Fidel Castros anymore. This is a generation of consumers who are perfectly happy to take bong hits and zone out staring into their phones at big booty hoes and beautiful Swedish girls on Instagram until it’s time for their next shift at the weed store for 2 potatoes an hour and no room for growth.
And by the way, as a brief tangential example of how weed is now controlled, I haven’t even mentioned the incarceration of marijuana users in the past (mostly people of colour) and the damage done to their lives and their families under previous laws. The people in power don’t give a shit about anyone, and some of them now profit off the same things they locked others up for. This type of behaviour is almost selectively sociopathic: they’re doing this shit right in front of us and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. I recently read about a former police chief in Canada who was particularly strongly against marijuana ever being legalized. He now sells weed legally after having what he calls a “change of heart.” That’s real nice and cute for him to have such a convenient change, but the fact of the matter is quite cynical. He knew what he was doing all along; his previous job made it make sense for him to lock people up and not give a shit about the morals of it all, and his new role at a weed company now allows him to profit once again under the guise that he’s in the right (more on this phenomenon in my essay on Situational Hypocrisy). These types of people are nothing more than average grifters who happened to luck out due to the colour of their skin and job title, etc.
I know there’s a certain segment of people that will read this and think I’m demonizing marijuana itself or regular users of it. That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I’m getting at is that I think weed seems to be in this weird place in our society currently that beer used to be at in the 90s. There seems to be a push coming from a certain type of idiotic person to embrace weed for the wrong reasons, ignoring the way it’s supposed to expand your horizons, and/or make you more aware of what’s going on in a way. Instead of challenging people’s perceptions of what the world could be like, it’s being sold to us as a tool to numb ourselves to making a real difference. They want us to be Homer Simpson with Duff, docile and ineffectual. You have to wonder who is marketing it in this manner, what they have to gain, and why that is.