13th
Deep Questions #47 Or: How to Win the Drug War
Why is the nickname for cocaine “blow?” You don’t blow it. You don’t do anything with that involves blowing or exhaling air in any way. Wouldn’t it be more proper to just call it “snort?” Hey man, I just scored some great snort from out by the railroad tracks. Ah man, who knew doing snort in the bathroom stalls could be so much fun?!
I think “snort” fits much better, and it’s more appropriate in regards the physical action required when consuming cocaine. Now I know this all sounds like nitpicking (which, BTW, is another word I’m not fond of), and perhaps some might say it’s a waste of time to even think about changing the slang for an illegal substance anyway.
But here’s my theory. You change the slang to something more realistic, and I think you’d wind up discouraging people from using the substance in the first place. Nobody wants to do a drug known as “snort” because it doesn’t sound cool. Snorting has all sorts of negative connotations anyway. We snort when we’re sick and have a runny nose. You snort when you’re trying to hold back a bloody nose (I know all about that). And if you’re really unlucky, you sleep in a bed with someone who snores, farts and SNORTS in their sleep. Yeah, “snorting” is out as a cool thing to do, which is why I think calling blow “snort” would do wonders for the failed War on Drugs. Wanna do some blow? Yeah man, that sounds cool vs. Hey man, wanna do some snort? What, are stupid? I’m gonna go over there and play in traffic instead, thank you.
Naturally, you could apply this same thinking to all kind sof other drugs and I thinkt he results would be the same. That is, people would stop using drugs if drugs didn’t sound so cool to use. Pot? That sounds cool, and who doesn’t like pots and pans? They make our dinner, and generally look sexy sitting on the stove. At least they do in those Sears comemricals. Mine look like something left over from a witches coven minus the big, black couldron. So pot sounds okay. So does grass. Yeah, I know that’s an old-fashioned term from the 70s, but still, grass is cool. It’s harmless, it holds back erosion, and if you were an especially enterprising teenager, you might have even made a few bucks off cutting it. We watch sports played in the grass. Some people like making love in the grass. So grass sounds not only cool, but something completely natural and desirable. Wanna smoke some grass? Yeah, why not, I just got laid in it! Then we come to “weed,” which is moving us closer to a term that sounds unplesant. But wait a minute. Weeds aren’t particularly evil. They’re just pesky pieces of growth that these days you clear away with a simple spray of toxic solution from Home Depot. So “weed” is hardly a negative-enough sounding term to ward off would-be felons just trying to get high on a Saturday night.
So what would be a negative-enough sounding term to dissuade potheads, grass fiends and weed smokers from sucking down the smoke? Well, there you have it. “Suck.” Bad people suck. Principals suck. Cops suck. The president sucks. More than likely having to babysit your bother and/or sister sucks in some capacity. There’s very little involved with the world “suck” that doesnt, well, suck. So you start calling weed/pot/grass “suck” and you’ll start motivating people to stop staying indoors with their lips wrapped around a pipe breathing in smoke that’ll make them temporarily forget they stay indoors all day with their lips wrapped around pipes all the time and think their lives are more interesting. Who knows, maybe they’ll even get out and cut the grass, trim the weeds, and scrub the pots and pans in the sink.
Finally, we move on to the worst drug known to man. Or at least the worst one to get addicted to because the casualty rates are so high. Heroin. But hey, heroin, like pot, like blow, sounds like a pretty cool drug to do. We call female heros “heroins,” so it can’t be all bad, right? And herons are pretty cool-looking birds if you ask me. So there’s not much bad going on with heroin. It almost sounds like a new line of make-up from Maybelline. But if we start calling heroin by something a little more grotesqe, there again, like “suck,” like “snort,” you’re gonna start seeing a huge drop in use. So let’s call it something like, I don’t know, “inject.” Inject sounds like a term you’d use around the office. Inject is what mechanics do with transmission fluid when they’re tuning up your car. That is, when they’re not injecting their hands into your wallet and pulling out a juicy wad of cash, which mine seem to be quite good at doing lately. Snobby people say things like, “May I inject something here?” when they’re trying to butt in on your conversation. When you look at it, “inject” sounds boring, trivial, technical, and borderline offensive. It’s like something a robot would say when asking a robot hooker to hook up with him. Hey babe, can I inject you for $20? Don’t ask me how I know about robot hookers, I just do.
So there you have it. Three common slang replacement words, that if applied consistently and repeatedly in to today’s vernacular, would immediatly reduce overall drug use. Because in the end, the drug culture is all about one word: “cool.” Looking cool, feeling cool, acting cool, hanging with cool friends, and injesting, injecting or inhaling chemicals that make one cooler, are cool themselves, are perhaps if you’re not cool to begin with, will make you cool in the first place. Who wants to do a drug if it doesn’t sound cool, afterall?
