Can i have some marijuana with my coffee please?

why drink and drive when you can smoke and fly. Everyone ! Get on board the Gaanja bus...!!

I watched PINAPPLE EXPRESS recently. It is what you would call the quientessential stoner movie. But what i realized was that it was more than that. It is in some ways a post-feminist, almost a masculinist film, if i can use that word. The bonding shown between the three friends is more than just friednship. The climax, or in fact the entire last part, Dale (Seth Rogen) does not even care about his girlfriend. She is not on his agenda. For life, it seems. In friendship, he forgets about the need for a woman. In the last scene, he is shown happy along with his two friends, making promises for life. 

Secondly, it got me thinking about society's reaction to marijuana/weed/pot/gaanja/skunk....or whatever you want to call it. Dale says, in one of his many conversations with a radio showhost, "I don't see the need for criminalising gaanja. It makes everything better. It makes music sound better, it makes food taste better, it makes shitty movies better. And the truth is, everybody is smoking it. So why not decriminalise it." 

Technically it makes sense. Why not? So what explains society's recalcitrance towards it? The only reason that i can think of relates to the political economy of this whole issue. Society wants its members to be productive, in the strict economic sense. It survives on that. Weed, as anybody who smokes it knows, slows you down. It makes you calm. You are tranquilized. Too stoned to work. Too happy to wory about anything. Too dead to remain involved in life. To society: UNPRODUCTIVE. So a substance that can make you unproductive, obviously does not find favour with the custodians of the society. 

Then, weed also makes you indifferent to authority. Now you do not intentionally defy authority, but you merely stop caring about it. And by that virtue, makes you defy it anyway. And so, working with the state police, powered by juridical authority, society gets it banned. Indian societies "traditionally" never had a problem with intoxicants. Ganja, hashish, alcohol, bhaang and all kinds of other psychotropic substances available in nature were also available to everybody who wanted them. 

But even here, the society devises what Max Gluckman called "ritualized rebellion." So bhaang is legitimised on special occassions like Mahashivaratri and Holi. And nobody confronts any sanctions that otherwise would be imposed in response to an intake of similar substances on any other occassion. But with modernity redefining the contours of our society, those who mattered decided to make gaanja into a strong social taboo. 

I say, why ban weed. In Amsterdam and a lot of Eastern European countries, weed is available over the counter. Its on the menu in cafes. You can order it in coffee shops, along with your coffee. That does not mean everybody there is stoned perpetually. People choose to do it, smoke. And thse who don't, don't. 

So why even decriminalise it? Just make it legal. But no. That would probably kill the whole idea behind it. It would defeat the whole resistance inspiring, subaltern spirit of gaanja advocated by a varicolored spectrum of "anti-socials": from aghori sadhus to reggae singers.