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January 23, 2006
What would an evil Spicoli do?
James Lileks writes about a bonehead stoner who commits a terrible crime in pursuit of a stooopid dream.
[W]e had a case in a tony burb where a kid plotted to kill his parents, and succeeded in having his accomplice shoot his mother to death. The agony the father must feel is unimaginable. When the motive was finally revealed, it was unutterably banal: the conspirators intended to use the insurance money to move to Amsterdam “and open a café,” as the story put it. That’s all you needed to know. Stupid useless dopers.
Subsequent stories talked about how the kid used to be a good kid, but had trouble in college, and had been using marijuana – as though the last two items moved in a parallel track, disconnected, occasionally intersecting at finals time. Sounds like a good kid who had the usual problems, smoked some weed in his newly emancipated life, and had it derail everything. Everything. It’ll happen.
You’re unhappy, you get high, the music’s INCREDIBLE all of a sudden and pizza is AMAZING and your friends are as cool as you are, but Sunday morning lands on your head like a bell tossed off the Notre Dame carillion: this is not who you are, this is not how you meet girls – any girls around last night? No – and these are not the people you want to be like. You’re ashamed, you resolve to be better, and you can’t wait to do it again. Six hours later you’re watching an old Dragnet on TV and telling each other that Jack Webb HAD to be high when he made this.
I’m not blaming the drug. If the kid’s guilty, he’s guilty, not an herb. But just as not everyone who drinks turns into a sullen dull-eyed violent brute, not everyone who smokes grass becomes a happy mellow tallish shod Hobbit.
But I will say this: drunks kill people in the heat of the moment. Stoners come up with plots to kill people and escape to Amsterdam, where you can get high without worrying that that guy over at the next table knows your dad or something. I mean, he’s looking at you. Maybe we should like go to Turkey. They have hash and they're totally cool about it unless you smuggle. It's like a custom over there, like wine with meals
(Note: I am in favor of medicinal marijuana. Someone’s going through chemo, I don’t think society will crumble if you given them a joint, headphones and a CD of Beethoven’s 9th.)
I think Lileks is right about medicinal pot, too.
Posted by Mike Lief at January 23, 2006 06:46 AM
Comments
I found Lileks off-base on this one. Wrote about it here.
Posted by: Eric Berlin at January 23, 2006 08:08 AM