Wasted

 

I am oddly proud of the fact that I lived about a bicycle ride away from ground zero of the start of the second Drug War.

That war started in a birthday party in Decatur, Georgia. in his book about the drug wars of the Reagan era – which stretched into the Clinton era, until the pharmaceutical companies got seriously into getting Americans wasted -  Dan Baum makes the claim that it all started with  Ashley Schuchard, the thirteen year old daughter of an English prof at Emory, whose invitees to her birthday party in 1976 all got stoned, shocking her mother:: “During Ashley’s birthday party, Schuchard was amazed to see twelve and thirteen year olds stumbling around red-eyed, giggling, and obviously stoned. She saw the flicker of matches in dark corners of the back yard. She could smell burning reefer.”

Carter was elected president that year. As Baum puts it, drug enforcement was a low priority for the Carter administration. In general, the middle class, or the upper middle class that controls the discourse in the U.S., was generally unconcerned about marijuana and much more concerned about sex – watching it, getting it, reading about it, and undergoing a great long bubble of divorce that often involved it. Xavier Hollander, a D.C. madam, was the celebrity of the season.

Sex went with drugs. In 1976, for instance, when I was a freshman at Tulane, my entire dorm room floor was either stoned on weed, high on acid, or kicking back with cocaine. The speeches my roommate would make to me when he was snorting cocaine! Fortunately, I have forgotten them all.  I have a vague sense that they were about fucking while running on coke. Wasted and fucking. His suggestion for all mankind.

Schuchard went on to found a parents organization that lobbied politicians to do something about the spectacle of 12 and 13 year olds getting wasted, but for a while it looked like decriminalization of marijuana and a general relaxation about cocaine was in the works. This, as it happened, didn’t happen. Schuchard and other parents across the country began to organise against drug tolerance. This was picked up by the right – Reagan, among other things, had no tolerance for any libertarianism about marijuana or cocaine. Although, of course, once in office the country was flooded with cocaine, and a bit of the profit was siphoned off to the Contras. U.S. intelligence agencies have long carved out their own domain in the global commerce in drugs, for their own purposes.

They torture, they profit from drugsales, they overthrow governments. We don’t what they do, we don’t know what they did in Korea in 1951 or what they are doing now. American democracy, man.

In my high school, I was a pretty good buddy of the local “pusher” – although he was less of a pusher than a pothead who chose selling pot and cocaine – which was beginning to get popular, especially with the football team -  over a newspaper route, as he could never afford the amount of pot smoke he lived in  via working the latter.

The name for his usual condition, and the name for the condition every boy in my class aspired to at least on certain weekends, was wasted.

The term wasted existed long before the riotously funny ad, put out by the Just say no groups under Nancy Reagan, showed “your brain on drugs”.  It is a measure of the distance between the establishment (in its charity mood) and the rest that a play on the term wasted went right over their heads. Wasted was considered an honorable estate, an all around excuse, a modest brag. Man, I was wasted, was not the confession of a boy ashamed of the chemical injuries to which he had submitted his brain. There was no shame in wasted.

It did play the role of an excuse, though. Being too wasted meant that you could not be responsible for whatever shit you did.

I myself was never wasted. I never touched marijuana until I was almost nineteen. I went through high school a virgin.

But, as per my friendship with the school drug supplier, I was ever ready to extend my tolerance – or perhaps it was just an early display of my gift for enabling. Enabling, tolerance, two sides of the same coin? Always a big question.

Waste, etymologically, is part of a network of words having to do with devastation and spoiling. Words that have a menacingly military aspect. To lay waste. To be wasted and to kill – waste – someone track together in the common American tongue. To waste a village, such was the war in Vietnam, where being wasted and wasting were joined at the hip.

The time of “wasted” might be passed. The kids today might say trashed. Wasted has acquired a certain retro aura. At the same time, wasted is a pretty good macromood word for neolib culture, as it ends in heatwaves and fascism.

We were all wasted.