THE RISE OF CANNABIS AND THE DECLINE IN CIVILIZATION
The Rise of Cannabis and the Decline in Civilization is less
a conventional argument than a long, intimate memoir stitched from diary
entries, street memories, travel stories, dispensary scenes, and afterthoughts
about what cannabis has meant across one man’s life. Author Mitch Rubman moves
from teenage initiation in Queens to Boston student years, New York hustles,
Los Angeles smoke sessions, legal-era dispensaries, and the oddly mournful
sociology of modern cannabis culture. The book keeps circling the same
essential question, not with a thesis so much as with a shrugging, searching
consciousness: as weed becomes normalized, commercialized, and everywhere, what
exactly have we gained, and what have we lost?
What stayed with me most was the book’s candor. It isn’t
polished into tidy self-explanation, and that turns out to be part of its
force. Rubman is often funny in a way that feels accidental and therefore real,
whether he’s rolling while driving on the Major Deegan, recalling the ashtray
full of roaches in a borrowed Beverly Hills Mercedes, or chasing cheap shake
with the desperate ingenuity of someone who knows both the ritual and the trap
of habit. There’s a restless, talky, half-stoned music to the prose that
sometimes spills over into repetition or rough phrasing, but even then I felt
the pulse of an actual life on the page. The strongest passages have that
scruffy memoirist magic where danger, absurdity, loneliness, and appetite all
occupy the same sentence. The early robbery with Snake, the eerie New York
encounter with the scar-faced dealer, and the Luxor detour into mysticism all
give the book a bruised, wandering vitality I found hard to dismiss.
Rubman’s central premise about cannabis and civilizational
decline is deliberately loose, almost provocatively so. When he lists “locked
bathrooms,” hunger, expensive eggs, and mismatched weed-container lids beside
“free joint Fridays” and planted trees, the effect is less analytical than
diaristic, less argument than worldview. On one level, I wanted a sharper line
of thought, more pressure on the title’s big claim. On another, I think the
vagueness is revealing. The book becomes a record of how a person thinks while
living inside a habit for decades, how economics, friendship, boredom, grief,
appetite, and longing all get filtered through smoke. Its most interesting idea
is not really that cannabis causes decline, but that the culture around it
exposes the texture of a society, its loneliness, its opportunism, its flashes
of tenderness, its little indignities, and its odd forms of fellowship.
I found this book oddly moving and unmistakably personal.
What remains after the last page is the feeling of having spent time with a man
who has made cannabis not just a habit but a lens, sometimes comic, sometimes
sad, sometimes almost spiritual, through which he’s watched whole decades slide
by. I’d recommend it to readers who like unruly memoirs, countercultural
diaries, and books that value lived texture over formal neatness.
No comments:
Post a Comment