Dad sits next to me on the couch watching the evening news. He takes a final drag on another menthol and crushes the cigarette out in an ashtray. The thick glass receptacle is stuffed with dozens of twisted, spent butts, constant companions during two hours of suburban pre-bedtime television.
We suffer in silence through a weather report by a chipper guy with blow-dried hair. The news then shifts to a story about an inner-city young man who has been arrested for possessing a significant quantity of marijuana. Dad looks at me with a baffled expression and says, “Why would you ever use drugs...what’s wrong with reality?”
He lights another cigarette and settles back into the couch. I look at the disheveled, sullen guy on TV and think that there’s probably a lot wrong with his reality in this age of Ronald Reagan belittling “welfare moms in cadillacs.” It hasn’t exactly been a golden age of opportunity for the less fortunate.
In twenty years time Dad will be dead from his drug of choice. The “criminal” on the television will probably be alive and still using his, free from harm. Society will even start using his drug to treat sick people for a wide variety of ailments.
A smart and successful person telling you that something is wrong doesn’t make it so.
