On Pot Smoking in A.A.

I know back in the Olde Days this was always a topic of fur­flying debate, per se. That’s why I was being so cautious about attempting to phrase the current situation is as much a different light as I could but hell, you know… etc.

OK, the reason I bring it up is for this reason: I am often in the very states that have made the use of pot purely recreational and legal. Washington and Oregon… it’s a shocker for me to see in Seattle how you just go in and smoke up a storm and shoot the shit, whatever.

An old AA like me, we’re dying off eventually if not sooner, and my curiosity leads me to all manner of interesting scenarios, outcomes, consequences, alley ways and byways *in my mind*.

In Seattle, you don’t have to explain away all the “medical reasons” you need to smoke pot, (in AA), you just smoke the shit out of it any time you want to. No one is reduced to the level of hauling out the old “coffee and cigarettes and orange juice” as a tool of pedantry. If that’s a word.

And that shit is STRONG. Tear your head off strong. Those chemists and agriculture people know what they’re doing. LOL.

I am almost certain that this is legal and common in just 3 states, Vermont being with WA. and OR. So maybe I’m in the minority here in this group in terms of living in a state where it’s walk­in, buy, and leave.

But I am here to tell you, it’s the most damnable thing I’ve EVER come across in the rooms. The statutes now in WA calls it driving under the influence, alcohol having nothing to do with it or should I say alcoholism, you know, us guys with 3­4­9 drunk driving lock­ups. The courts are sending an entire generation of pot­babies to AA now and they will just laugh in your face at a meeting. Not being disrespectful or mean­spirited or that, it’s just they think it’s funny as hell.

I know where I stand, so I’m not making it hard or rude with these people at all. I’ll poke around and bullshit with raving, drunken, stoned, axe­murderers out on parole and sent to AA for anger management, makes no difference to me.

But the fascination I have with the developing situation I am in, so very interesting! In a meeting over Christmas I know I was the only one there who had nothing on board. One older lady had so much whatever that her head was literally laying on her back. Had no idea what that was…I was afraid her teeth were going to fall out, her dentures, and bust on the concrete floor. The top ones finally came loose but they dropped on the lower plate and she was able to get her mouth closed before the whole shitaree came tumbling down. She’s the one who has the sore shoulders.

I can see what’s happened as a result of my initial Bradley­probe into the subject: it’s changed, (once again), it’s a nuanced one, and mostly academic to anyone who doesn’t live in Washington. In WA, I’m a bald­headed boy in a barber­shop. There’s no need to pretend anymore about one’s affiliation. AA in WA has failed 100% in its service work with the courts, so it DOES affect AA as a whole. Pandora’s box has been long­gone open on that deal.

In AZ, the gulf between the two groups is so wide that AA meetings are rapidly closing; in just the few short years I’ve been here 6 are gone that I went to all the time. But the so­called ‘Young People’s Group’, (which is how they name themselves in Intergroup) roll on.

The Western U.S. really is a no­man’s land of practically 0% regard for traditions and institutions. It just doesn’t have the East coast and Midwest value for those things, whether it be church suppers, AA meetings or Drop­Kick Murphy’s.

I’m not bitchin’. I came from a generation that has one leg in the era of party­line telephones, and the other leg getting chipped by the hospital so they can scan me as I go through the system. One era where bars were closed on Sundays to an era where you hang out in a cool place and listen to music and watch the ferry boats go by while smoking one of a thousand different kinds of product, lined up in candy jars.

Shit. Talk about reparations. Give my ass a break. Every guy who ever went to jail for possession of pot should be given a million dollars for every hour he spent in the can. Tax­free.

AA doesn’t say anything that an old­fashioned house of worship doesn’t say; the main difference is the room is full of alcoholics who are on the same page. The BB instead of the Torah or whatever.

So, in my musing here, I think I’ve come to think, (think being the operative word, like crystal­ball gazing), that as recreational pot is legal in every state in the Union, which will be so in the blink of an eye, it can only be a good thing for AA. A re­birth, so to speak, instead of this odd­man out deal that’s currently going on.

Even the most ancient of mind­sets in traffic court will stop sending people to AA for driving punishment. The judges will send them to Uber School and make them wear an Uber­button like those old people who fall and can’t get up.

We’ll be dead or too old to care anymore and won’t go to AA because the generations really do split apart, and one day, a drunken bum will find the BB in the gutter, all torn­up and soaking wet, and somehow it will be like one of those science fiction movies, “To Serve Man” thing. Or “A Canticle for Leibowitz”. heh.

I’m starting to not go to AA meetings. I’m sick of the whole deal because I’m starting to not care. I don’t give a shit if you have a rig in your arm while you pour coffee because I’m already in a daze from the moron next to me who is telling the room about himself while he looks at his iPhone and the old fucks around the back are so full of oxycodone for their various Medicare aches and pains they can hardly keep their eyes focused and a lot don’t. They’re old­school AA people, but today is today and what my Grandma bless her would take for her “neuritis and neuralgia” was 2 Bayer aspirin, these guys are taking cancer­pain meds that are mainstream now.

I will never forget what Nick said at the Magnolia Speaker’s meeting one night about 20 years ago: “AA. It’s God and Booze”.

“Outside issues” in A.A. to me are religion and politics and if you’re a transgender / intergendered gender / cross­dressing / dick cut off and tits put on / dick sewn on and tits cut off / human. Drugs are not an outside issue. They are front and center.