In Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, Samuel L. Jackson
comes home to find Bridget Fonda lying on the couch, smoking dope,
and giggling at the TV. Disgusted, he tells her that marijuana will
rob her of her ambitions.
“Not if your ambition is to get high and watch TV,” she
replies.
It’s fashionable among conservative and libertarian journalists,
such as the editors of National Review and Reason
magazines, to demand the decriminalization or legalization of
drugs, especially of marijuana.
Many weighty arguments have been mobilized in support of this
cause. Yet this movement has only made fitful progress in the
quarter of a century since the first generation of American voters
to have much first-hand experience with marijuana began to have
children themselves. Parents now understand that additional
marijuana use would exacerbate many of the unhealthy and
unfulfilling trends already at work in our society.
The problem with marijuana is not that it’s some wild and crazy
thing, but that it’s middle-age-in-a-bong. Smoking dope saps the
energy from youth, turning them into sedentary couch potatoes.
The parents of America already have a hard enough time getting
their teenagers — and, increasingly, their adult children who have
come back home to live — off the TV room floor when they are
perfectly straight. Parents understand that changing laws to make
marijuana more readily available — and, let’s not kid ourselves,
that’s what these “reforms” would do — would create an even more
inert and obese generation of young people.
Smoking dope may not do all that many of the horrible things
often attributed to it, but it definitely makes people want to sit
down. And that’s something even the most clean and sober young
people of the 21st Century do way too much of already.
Whenever parents get together, the talk eventually turns to how
Kids These Days — including perfectly adjusted ones — never want
to go outside. Sunshine is their enemy. Everything they desire most
in life — 100 channels, video games, instant messaging — comes to
them on a screen, best viewed in a darkened room.
MARIJUANA ALSO MAKES PEOPLE easily amused. In an electronic age,
where an unlimited supply of entertainment is instantly available
around the clock, that’s not a good thing. It’s hard enough to for
young people to decide that they shouldn’t spend another twenty
minutes flipping through the cable TV dial once again on the
assumption that — while all the programs the last six times around
were lame — something cool has got to have come on in the
meantime. Add THC to their brain chemistry and they’re headed for
an infinite loop.
Eventually, marijuana-augmented TV addiction becomes a very real
threat to getting anything done in life. The last thing parents
want is for their children is for them to wind up like that
perpetually baked stoner The Dude (“or El Duderino if you’re not
into the whole brevity thing”) played by Jeff Bridges in The
Big Lebowski.
It’s not just technology’s fault. The way middle class parents
now raise their kids can incline them toward passivity, which the
availability of marijuana can horribly aggravate.
Another reason kids don’t go outside anymore is because leaving
the house has become an enormous production number. When I had a
baseball game as a kid, I merely grabbed my glove and walked or
biked to the park. No trouble.
My son’s adolescent teammates, in contrast, never arrive for
their league games in anything less massive than a Ford Explorer,
because the crime rate is too scary for their parents to let them
walk and the traffic too dense for them to pedal. Further, they
have to lug not only a duffel bag full of baseball impedimenta, but
at least one, and preferably, both parents, lest they grow up to
write self-pitying screenplays about how nobody ever came to watch
them play.
Not surprisingly, the concept of spontaneously heading over to
the park between scheduled games to see who wants to play some ball
seems to modern suburban boys to be as outdated and unfeasible an
idea for having fun as tipping cows.
Growing up in a world where every activity is carefully
scheduled by parents means fewer youths are self-starters. They
don’t expect to initiate activity. They take the same attitude
toward free time as do soldiers in a hurry-up-and-wait Army: unless
somebody in command is yelling at them to do something, they don’t
do anything. They just flop down and try to amuse themselves in the
mean time. More marijuana would only make this already inactive
lifestyle worse.
Not surprisingly, young Americans have gotten fatter and fatter
as the proliferation of remote controls means they don’t even have
to walk across the room anymore to turn up the stereo. Believe me:
the munchies aren’t going to make that problem any
better.
