Dope is the dullest, squarest drug around: of course One Direction (allegedly) smoke it
I cannot understand why there's so much fuss about two members of One Direction being captured on film apparently smoking a joint. The video exposes “the dark side” of the “squeaky clean boyband”, says one tabloid report. Are these people serious? Smoking dope doesn’t make you dark. It makes you square. There’s a reason marijuana is the most cheered and celebrated drug among liberal observers and politicians – it’s because it pacifies people, turning them from complicated humans with rough edges into doped-up dullards too spaced out to do anything more daring than eat their own body weight in Wotsits. Dope erases individual darkness. If anything, the concerned, conservative mums and dads of One Direction fans should be thanking these alleged toking pop stars, because they’ve just promoted a drug whose biggest side effect is boringness.
The video, in which Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson joke about marijuana and smoke what appears to be a joint (that’s certainly what they call it – “joint lit!”, says Louis), has caused handwringing in every corner of the globe. Mums across Christendom are “disgusted” with the band, we’re told. Reporters accuse the One Direction lads of undermining their position as “role models” and claim they owe their fans “an apology for their actions”. Leaving aside how unfair (and unhinged) it is to expect 22-year-old men always to behave in a way that 11-year-old girls could happily emulate, who seriously still thinks marijuana is an edgy, countercultural drug? Given that it's being decriminalised in jurisdictions across the Western world, and is now talked up by everyone from President Barack Obama to numerous men in white coats as a superior substance to booze on the basis that it makes us contented rather than cocky, one could argue that One Direction are actually taking their role-model status seriously: they're allegedly dabbling with a substance best known for neutering human urges and blanding out people's quirks, and isn't that what stuffy officials, and some stuffy parents, want for their kids these days?
It's remarkable how favourably dope is talked about now. It's the one drug politicians will openly admit to having experimented with. President Obama smoked it when he was young and recently said, to the whooping of dopeheads everywhere (if they're capable of whooping?), that weed is "no more dangerous than alcohol". Various American states have legalised dope-smoking and activists in Britain hope our state will soon follow suit. Even the officially least exciting political mind in Britain – Nick Clegg – has bravely (LOL) supported the partial decriminalisation of dope. Cops, too, want restrictions on cannabis eased. And it isn't hard to see why such normally fun-allergic, far-from-liberal folk have given implicit or explicit nods of approval to the freeing of the weed. It's because this drug more than any other calms people down, makes us un-social, invites us to live quietly in our own little heads – and the rulers of society love nothing more than a vision of a timid, peaceful, unquestioning populace.
This is why dope is always said to be better than booze. In the run-up to Colorado's legalisation of cannabis possession earlier this year, campaigners produced posters saying dope makes people "feel safer", Where drink can make people "aggressive or reckless", weed leaves people "in control of their feelings and behaviour". Like modern-day versions of the temperance movement, pro-dope activists march behind banners declaring: "Marijuana is safer than alcohol." Britain's Legalise Cannabis Alliance (LCA) says booze is the really "addictive drug", sounding like an authoritarian, New Labour-like bore as it moans about "drink-frenzied Britain" and says that cannabis, by contrast, "is well known for its calming effects". It's these calming effects that the great and the good are so keen on. A few years ago when the England football team were playing in Portugal, the Portuguese government launched a campaign called Here We Blow where they actually encouraged visiting English footie fans to smoke dope rather than down booze. Why? Because weed would reduce the chance of a punch-up. LCA cheered this sinister initiative, saying: "If people are drinking, they lose control; if they smoke cannabis, they don't."
Today's illiberal liberals and nanny staters hate booze because it's a social lubricant – it crashes people together in a sozzled frenzy and makes us cut loose, take risks, try our luck with people we fancy. And they instinctively like cannabis because it does the opposite – it's an isolating drug, cutting us off from one another and making us meek, mild, sappy and square. It isn't a hippyish love of liberty that makes officials and others feel favourable towards cannabis today – it's a Brave New World-style desire to promote substances that will most successfully stupefy the masses. So calm down about One Direction. They're only (allegedly) trying out a drug that every single square in politics and the media is super keen on. If you really want to rebel these days, forget dope – swig from a four-litre bottle of cider instead and watch as the political class goes into furious meltdown over your crazy, reckless antics.
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