I walked into a brightly lit, neon-drenched liquor emporium yesterday and bought enough bottom-shelf tequila to strip the paint off a Buick. The cashier didn’t flinch. He didn’t scan my retinas, he didn’t check my name against a federal database, and he certainly didn’t hand me my poisonous bounty in an opaque, child-proof, nuclear-blast-resistant Mylar vault. He just smiled, handed me my receipt, and wished me luck on the impending chemical warfare I was about to wage on my own internal organs.
If I wanted to, I could have walked out, drank the entire bottle in a Denny’s parking lot, and proceeded to fistfight a stop sign. Society expects this. We have built entire weekend economies around this specific brand of temporary madness.
But twenty minutes later, I tried to buy a mint-flavored gummy bear imbued with enough THC to make me want to sit on my couch and watch a three-hour documentary about deep-sea squids.
Suddenly, I was treated like I was trying to smuggle weapons-grade plutonium across an international border.
I had to show my ID to an armed guard at the door. I had to wait in a sterile holding pen. I had to show my ID again to a “budtender” who looked like they were operating a high-security pharmaceutical exchange. And because the federal government still treats this plant like a civilization-ending pathogen, I had to pay in exact cash because banks are too terrified to touch the money.
Riddle me this? How did we end up in a timeline where the substance that actively fuels bar brawls, domestic disputes, and Sunday morning pavement-puking is sold at the corner gas station, while the substance that makes you aggressively crave Funyuns is regulated tighter than enriched uranium?
Alcohol is a cultural darling. It gets multimillion-dollar Super Bowl commercials featuring majestic horses and attractive young people laughing on yachts. It sponsor our sports leagues and our family holidays. Meanwhile, if you ingest too much of it, your body literally shuts down, your liver packs its bags, and you wake up with a headache that feels like a tiny lumberjack is clear-cutting your frontal lobe.
Marijuana, on the other hand, has zero recorded fatal overdoses in the history of human existence. If you consume too much weed, the worst-case scenario is that you fall asleep with your hand inside a box of Cheez-Its and wake up completely fine, albeit slightly groggy and deeply ashamed of your snack-related lack of discipline.
Yet, the bureaucrats in their infinite wisdom have decided that the true danger to the American public is the giggling guy on his sofa, not the guy doing tequila shots until he thinks he can fly.
We are living in an era of spectacular hypocrisy. The regulators look at a bottle of liquid depressant that causes massive societal wreckage and say, “Put it on sale next to the candy aisle.” But they look at a flower that helps people sleep, eases chronic pain, and makes bad movies enjoyable, and they scream, “Lock it in a vault and make sure the bag requires a blowtorch to open!”
It’s enough to drive a sane person to drink. But considering the paperwork involved in buying a joint, hitting the bottle is just easier.
Dabbin-Dad Newsroom
