It’s Not Your Father’s Bong Water

Am I the only idiot who didn’t know you could smoke crystal meth in a bong? According to a recent Minnesota Supreme Court decision involving a woman whose bong tested positive for methamphetamine, bong water can now be considered a drug because sometimes people keep it to drink or inject later. Drink or inject bong water?!? When I was a kid we smoked pot from a bong and the only way anyone would drink the water was on a dare. Because of my needle phobia, the thought of shooting up anything never even crossed my mind.

My drug experimentation phase went pretty much from the tail end of Quaaludes to the beginning of Crack. I tried the former and missed out on the latter but at least I was familiar with how it was used. I knew I was officially old when I found out what a blunt was from the local paper. I could just picture myself as one of those adults saying, “You kids today, snorting your goddamn blunts.” I smoked marijuana off a can, through a toilet paper roll and even from a homemade chicken claw pipe but smoking it in a cigar was news to me.

And why are we coming up with new drugs to outlaw when we should be decriminalizing some of the ones we already have? Marijuana is arguably less harmful than our current legal recreational drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, but we’re still wasting billions of dollars every prosecuting “criminals” who use the same substance that the last three presidents admit experimenting with in their youth. From what I’ve seen, the biggest drug problem today is the pharmaceutical industry pushing their products on TV and in magazines. Kids don’t have to visit their local dealer anymore. They just open up their parent’s medicine cabinet. And if someone’s so hard up that they’re actually shooting bong water in their veins, I think that’s punishment enough.