We recently went on holiday to the Pacific Island country of Fiji. Bula!!! Like all countries it has its own modern problems, but our experience there was generally really great. The local people were extremely nice and many of the women had a traditional heritage hairstyle called a "Buiniga", which, even though Fijians are not Africans, look exactly like small afros straight out of the 1970's. The country is made up of over 300 islands, over 100 of which are inhabited. Many of the smaller islands have world class reefs, which from what we saw with our own eyes looked quite healthy with not as much coral bleaching. Having been colonized by the scumbag British Empire, Fiji has only since those 1970's been back to independence. Putting on our journalistic hat and asking around, it was nice to hear that the indigenous, while always under threat, still have most of the say over the small islands and lease land to resorts for tourism. Not like in Hawaii where resorts come in buy up huge swaths of the island land, and push out the natives.
One other negative legacy of past colonial rule is that the majority of Fijian inhabitants are not their own indigenous religion anymore but mostly Christians who were obviously Christianized by imperial dickhead missionaries. So we saw a lot of churches and we also saw a couple anti-cannabis signs where alcohol was everywhere. At every store, at every resort etc... and even coming to our bungalow noon and night for champagne nightcaps. Bla... In fact cannabis is illegal there and will supposedly get you 3 months in jail. Sigh. This is not of Zion, (and Zion and Zionism are two very different things, future insight on that) but is of Babylon.
Here we step into one of those cultural mirages, where society has, throughout the world, here we go again, through a long historical accident, enthroned one molecule while demonizing another. And yet, if you step back, far back, as though you were a galactic amoeba outside of time observing this peculiar primate species, you begin to see the absurdity shimmering through the narrative.
Alcohol is a blunt instrument. It is a kind of biochemical sledgehammer. It doesn’t expand but instead contracts and degrades the fidelity of the nervous system. Language blobs out and can even collapse, motor control falters, memory dissolves into black gaps. It is, in essence, a controlled poisoning. The pleasure it offers is inseparable from its toxicity. Not even getting into the latest science of what alcohol, even in small amounts, is doing to the meat suit that is our body, one drinks ethanol, the same molecule that powers engines, and celebrates the continual impairment of one’s own organism. And this has been ritualized, sanctified even, across civilizations.
Cannabis, by contrast, is something altogether more curious, more dialogical. It does not impose itself in the same tyrannical way. Instead, it modulates perception rather than annihilating it. Sensory input becomes rich, layered, almost linguistic in its texture. Time dilates, thought becomes associative, and the boundaries between ideas soften, allowing novel connections to emerge as all 5 senses are expanded.
We're not here to canonize cannabis as some flawless sacrament, because that would be just another form of cultural blindness. It has its shadows. It can induce anxiety, introspective loops, even a kind of passivity if used without awareness, and while not addictive, it can be abused if overused which has similar traits to addiction. But comparing the direction of the experience: cannabis tends to turn one inward, toward reflection, toward pattern recognition, toward an introspective evolution. Alcohol, on the other hand, turns one outward in a devolving way. It lowers inhibition, but often at the cost of coherence. It is disinhibition without insight.
And this is where the deeper strangeness emerges: why did one become the cornerstone of social ritual, while the other was cast into the shadows? The answer has less to do with pharmacology and more to do with control. Alcohol makes people predictable in their unpredictability, it dulls, it sedates, it resolves tension through release. Cannabis, in its more reflective mode, can make people question things, and like other psychedelics, makes people more ideological - meaning concerned with ideas. Funny ideas. Good funny ideas that don't slot into consumerism, corporatism, or their daddy ideology, empire well. It mainly introduces ambiguity, and ambiguity is the enemy of those rigid systems cause those contractive systems sanction contractive substances.
So the real inquiry is not merely chemical, but philosophical: what kinds of states of consciousness does a culture choose to encourage? Ones that numb and homogenize? Or ones that potentially awaken curiosity and introspection?
We often rail against supremacy, religious, racial etc... so neither substance is “superior” in some absolute moral sense, they are tools, keys to different doors in the real mansion - the mind. But one key tends to open rooms filled with noise and forgetting… while the other, more often than not, opens onto corridors of thought where the mind begins to examine itself. And that's better.