Of course the prosecutors of the War on Drugs have never specified their reasons for fighting it. Here we run across another delicious paradox.: even if all the allegations against drugs are true and drugs do in fact
interfere with the consumerist model of consciousness, it is equally true
that drugs are themselves commodities that must be purchased. What one is
purchasing when one buys drugs, however, is not an object for long term
ownership or a product consumable for the sustaining of life and the
attendant assurance of further consumption. What one is purchasing is the
promise of a change in consciousness--and possibly an alternative to
Consumerism....The contention that drugs are escapist may be accurate. And
those who profit from consumer culture do not want anyone to escape it.
....the rhetoric of the industrial age still prevails, wherein a worker
using cannibis is said to be unproductive, a student incapable of learning,
a driver more prone to accidents. These conventions are relatively easy to
maintain, but they no longer serve as accurate indicators of Consumerism's
objection to the use of marijuana and related drugs. The real heterodoxy
lies in the fact that cannabis's oneiric or aesthetically disinterested
consciousness can momentarily detach the user from the consumerist matrix
on which both the postmodern economy and its social order depend. It is
for this reason that after a period of toleration that lasted through the
1970s, marijuana has been demonized anew by the law.
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