Devoured by Cannabis

Introduction

The ongoing push to legalize recreational marijuana in all fifty states is a very clever juke move on the part of the progressive left. It certainly looks like an expansion of personal liberty, but it doesn’t smell that way at all. Liberty smells like crisp mountain air, right next to a glacier-fed lake. Legalized pot smells like something sweet and sticky coming out of that particularly seedy basement apartment, with the only redeeming feature being the fact that it is strong enough to overcome the smell of urine on the landing.

Okay, I thought of another advantage. Since the demands of socialism appear to de rigueur these days, getting stoned out of your gourd will be a great advantage for those who want to be able to follow the economic arguments advanced by the socialists. So there’s also that.

I bring all this up because this week marks the release of my latest book, with the cover up there on the right. The title of the book is Devoured by Cannabis, and the subtitle is Weed, Liberty, and Legalization. To fill in the blanks for you, I am against weed, for liberty, and against legalization. I am also marking this post with the tag retractions, because there have been times in the past when I have written in a somewhat friendlier vein in favor of decriminalization, but have since changed my mind. The thing that caused me to change my mind was extended seasons of incessant prayer.

Sins and Crimes

Is it a sin to smoke pot? I argue in this book that it is, and that Christians should have nothing to do with it. But if it is a sin, should it also be a crime? There are plenty of sins that shouldn’t be crimes out there, activities that are clearly sinful, but we don’t want legislation against them with civil penalties applied. Covetousness is a sin, but who wants to establish the covetousness police? Lust is a sin, but who wants a Lust Patrol? Angry looks at the driver ahead of you is plainly sinful in the eyes of God, but no sane person wants a Department for Monitoring Deportment on the Interior of Motorized Vehicles (DMDIMV).

So even if getting stoned is a sin, does it follow that it should be against the law? The answer to that question is yes, but such a response does require an explanation., along with some qualifications.. That is what I argue for in this book, but only after establishing the biblical basis for identifying pot smoking as a sin. At the same time, the punishment should always fit the crime, and it has to be acknowledged that a good deal of our current war on drugs is frankly demented. Pot goes to some people’s heads, and power goes to other people’s. So that must be factored in as well.

So Anyways . . .

What are we to do in the meantime? It is unlikely—let us be frank—that anybody in authority is going to buy my book, and take any of my recommendations seriously. We should brace ourselves, therefore, for a continued push for the legalization of pot, and for harder drugs after that, and for everything that follows whenever an enervated people have determined that they want to live like the lotus-eaters.

So how should Christians live in the meantime?

One of the things that Christians must do is come to grips with the realization that Americans love their sin. We can see this plainly in the entirely different responses to states that have disregarded federal marijuana law, on the one hand, versus what would happen to any state that dared to disregard federal requirements with regard to abortion. On paper, it should be just as easy to do one as to do the other, right?

Right, on paper. But in our day, the police power of the civic order, whether federal, state, or municipal, is always at the ready when it comes to protecting our lusts. There is a residual federal law against marijuana, true enough, but states can disregard it with impunity. If you want to know where the real law is, then just look for where the real enforcement is. Then there is a SCOTUS-derived right to abortion, but states could not disregard that with impunity. This looks like a contradiction, and it is a contradiction on the surface, but there is also a deep consistency there.

The consistency is found in the fact that Americans love their sin, and if anything threatens their access to their lust, there is sure to be a creative legal argument that will come to the defense of that sin. That argument could be for or against enforcement of the law as written, but in our time (a time of diseased cultural disintegration), the enforcement will always be in order to protect and guard the right to the sin.

Abortion is the blood sacrament of a sinful and sinning people. Pot-smoking does not have as exalted a place in the liturgy of Chemosh, but it does have its place. It is the incense that does what incense is designed to do in every temple that offers blood sacrifice. All such temples are slaughterhouses, and so the incense is there to cover up the smell of the sacrificial victims. That, and to deaden the consciences of the priests and worshipers.

It is not possible for a nation to be as wicked as we have become without the consciences of millions being swollen, inflamed and on fire. We have people swanking around like they were paragons of vir . . . well, actually, nobody can be a paragon of virtue if there is no such thing as virtue. But they can be paragons of virtue-signaling, which has the advantage of having a lot less moral effort involved. And you do have do a lot of such signaling to keep that conscience of yours distracted.

This is what accounts for the frantic moralistic crusading of the climate johnnies. This is why we have such fierce denunciations of the slightest whiff of white supremacy—and by white supremacy, of course, I mean the continued belief that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. What color was Pythagoras, people? Do I have to spell it out? And this is why people who voted for someone who supports the dismemberment and sale of little black babies can feel morally superior to old Charleston slave traders, which is, of course, ridiculous on the face.

Like I said, anyone with a Biden sticker on their car is the moral inferior of Stonewall Jackson.

John Adams, On Point

I have quoted John Adams on this issue many times, and will no doubt have occasion to quote him again to the same effect. Our Constitution presupposes a moral and a religious people. It is wholly unfit, he said, for any other.

You cannot build a free republic out of drug addicts. You cannot maintain one with a citizenry of fornicating potheads. You cannot do it with sex slaves. You cannot march into a free and prosperous future when all you can think about is the dopamine hit from your next porn click.

Why is the state spending all this effort to forge these liberty chains for us? It is because they don’t want a free republic of free men and free women. Docile subjects in a haze are more to their liking.

My hope is that this book will do something to help clear the haze.