Advice

On new drugs and an old hippie

My uncle was a member of the original free-loving, Vietnam War-protesting, acid-taking hippie movement. Though he used to be an avid drug user, he told me he would never take the drugs being sold now because of how synthetic they are and all of the extra ingredients in them, making them more dangerous. I thought this was an interesting point, but at the same time our food has evolved in the same way, carrying many more insecticides and other chemicals than are on the labe

So Coquette, what is your opinion on the evolution of drugs and their safety now?

Oh, please. Drugs have always been dangerous. There have always been adulterants. There have always been impurities. LSD isn’t any more synthetic now than it was in the 60s, and I’ll take the Pepsi challenge with your uncle’s Woodstock biker crank and Mexican ditch weed any day of the fucking week. Those filthy hippies should have been so lucky as to have readily available ecstasy and today’s refined strains of pharmaceutical grade marijuana.

Every generation has its drug warriors, and as with every subculture, the old-school old-timers will always have shit to talk about the new kids on the block. Your uncle might be saying that his drugs were more chemically pure, but what he’s really trying to sell you is that his drugs were somehow more ideologically pure.

He’s making an emotional argument masked as a scientific one, and it’s uncut hippie bullshit. If your uncle doesn’t want to partake in better living through chemistry, that’s his business, but unless he’s got a gas chromatograph in his tool shed, he’s just talking out of his ass.

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