One Nation Under Pot

Food is going to be full of marijuana derivatives soon

In the second book of the Republic, Plato’s Socrates makes some rather striking claims about how food can serve as a means of social control, claims that are widely overlooked. The ideal harmonious republic, Socrates contends, would be one in which the workers ate only a vegetarian diet. Give the workers wheat- and barley-bread, by all means; allow them wine, olive oil, cheese, and dessert of “figs and peas and beans, and myrtle-berries and acorns to roast at the fire,” and the simple folk will “lead a peaceful and healthy life.” Timorousness will be encouraged by these foods, “and fear of poverty and war will make [the people] keep the number of their families within their means.”

Give the workers meat, however, and now, instead of a society of contented dolts, you have a society “in a fever,” where man’s acquisitive and competitive instincts—what the ancient Greeks called thymos—come right to the fore. Such a society requires greater differentiation, more territory, new classes of warriors and overseers, strict eugenic codes to ensure proper breeding—in short, a society of meat-eaters is much harder to keep in check and rule.

Like a vegetarian diet, marijuana does not encourage thymos. There’s a reason why meth, and not marijuana, was the drug of choice for the Nazi Einsatzgruppen death squads on the Eastern Front, and still is for gays in bathhouses and at so-called “chemsex” orgies. The ancient Greeks knew about marijuana from the steppe Scythians, who used it in special rituals as well as other drugs like opium, but Plato never thought that encouraging pot-smoking might be just as effective a societal soporific as a diet of myrtle-beans, acorns, and peas. Today, our rulers seem to know better, though.

In one of his last monologues while still at Fox, Tucker Carlson decried moves to ban menthol cigarettes as a “pure power play” which had nothing to do with people’s health and everything to do with controlling their behavior. He noted that gyms had been closed during the pandemic when they could have done so much good and then went on to say the following:

“[Our rulers] hate nicotine. They love THC. They’re promoting weed to your children, but they’re not letting you use tobacco, or even non-tobacco nicotine-delivery devices which don’t cause cancer. Why do they hate nicotine? Because nicotine frees your mind, and THC makes you compliant and passive—that’s why! They hate it. It’s a real threat to them.”

Tucker’s love of nicotine, and his use of everything from Zyn pouches to nicotine gum, is well known. But when he puts it like that, he has a point. Tobacco and marijuana really do have different effects, and the large-scale transition from consumption of one to the other must have implications at a societal level.

There can certainly be no doubt that tobacco’s loss in recent decades has been marijuana’s gain. More people now smoke marijuana in the U.S. than smoke conventional cigarettes, according to recent Gallup polling; although this doesn’t take into account the use of other methods of consuming either marijuana or tobacco products. Sixteen percent of Americans polled stated that they currently smoke marijuana, against just 11 percent who said they smoke conventional cigarettes. Just under half of all American adults were smokers in the mid-fifties. Almost half of adults surveyed in the recent poll said they had smoked marijuana, compared to four percent in 1969. Decades of warnings have clearly had the intended effect. Americans now overwhelmingly see cigarette smoking as “very harmful,” with 83 percent of adults choosing this response in a 2019 survey. By contrast, around half of Americans see marijuana’s effects on the individual, and on society, as positive.

While marijuana remains illegal in over half of American states and at the federal level, the trend is clearly toward further liberalization, the opposite of what’s happening with tobacco and nicotine. Cannabis is now the sixth most valuable crop in the U.S. after corn, soybeans, hay, wheat, and cotton, in that order. Across 15 legal cannabis states, 2,834 metric tons were produced in 2022, with a value of about $5 billion.

Given how much weed is now being produced in the United States, it’s not a wonder that it’s starting to turn up in all sorts of places other than bongs and rolling papers. And given that weed is a plant, it’s not a wonder that one of those places is the food supply. I’m not talking about pot brownies, which people have always been making, or things like CBD (cannabidiol) oil and other weed-based infusions, which are being added to coffee and even to fine-dining food at restaurants like Opulent Chef in San Francisco. There are new uses that don’t have anything to do with what we might consider to be marijuana’s normal effects—its psychoactive and psychotropic properties.

One such use is as a food preservative. According to a new study, for example, dipping fruits and vegetables in CBD oil could extend their shelf life for weeks. Researchers in Thailand discovered that by mixing CBD oil and sodium alginate, and then covering strawberries in the mixture, growth of bacteria and fungi could be significantly reduced. The coating appears to be invisible and tasteless.

At present, the researchers have only tested the CBD coating on strawberries, but you can bet that if it works, CBD will find use as a preservative in a much-wider range of food products. One place I fully expect it to go is into processed food. Processed food—broadly speaking, food produced in factories, wrapped in plastic and containing ingredients you wouldn’t find in a typical home kitchen, like stabilizers, preservatives, and humectants—is responsible for making Americans, and the rest of the developed world, fatter, unhealthier, and unhappier than they’ve ever been.

Processed food is now consumed in vast quantities by every demographic in society—the average American child aged between two and five gets 58 percent of their daily calories from processed food—and has been linked to more or less all of the prevailing diseases of modernity, from obesity and diabetes to cancer, depression, and even behavioral conditions like ADHD and autism. The baleful effects of eating processed food were powerfully illustrated by a BBC documentary that aired during the pandemic. In “What Are We Feeding Our Kids?,” a normal 40-year-old male doctor ate a diet of 80 percent processed food for a month—a diet one-fifth of the British population now consumes—and suffered a horrifying array of negative health consequences, from the expected weight gain to piles, insomnia, loss of libido, and crushing anxiety. Before-and-after MRI scans revealed that his brain had been reprogrammed in the manner of a drug addict. Even when the extra weight and the piles had disappeared, further scans revealed that the changes to the physical structure of his brain were still evident. He had been hardwired to want salty, sweet, crunchy, and chewy snacks.