The Fritz Letter: December 08, 2024

A critique of weed culture

I’ve had marijuana on my mind for quite a while.

I love it. It’s so much fun. One of my best memories is of getting high on a mountain peak in North Carolina. The euphoria took the experience to an entirely new level and I’ll cherish the memory forever.

However, I also stopped smoking weed several years ago and have no intention to ever start again.

Weed saps my energy, creativity, and ambition and puts me to sleep when I could otherwise be doing something, or at the very least, enjoying something. It hits me so hard that, when I’m on it, I can’t do anything — not even play a video game or watch TV. All I can do is eat junk food and sleep.

In 2020, I realized that just wasn’t something I need in my life. So I quit, and then changed my whole philosophy on weed.

I don’t think weed is as innocent as its advocates like to pretend it is.

Unregulated weed is so much worse for the culture than both cigarettes and alcohol combined.

Plenty of cigarette smokers have thriving family lives and careers. They can hold down jobs, pay their bills, take care of their property, and contribute to society.

Not many compulsive weed smokers can say the same.

Now, I’m not talking about a few hits here and there, even on a daily basis; I mean the folks who can’t face life without a buzz.

Contrary to popular belief, weed is absolutely addictive, because even if it doesn’t create a chemical dependence, it does create a barrier between people and their emotions, which prevents them from maturing and building behavioral frameworks to cope with the unavoidable stress and obstacles of life.

Weed abuse kills ambition and agency and turns brilliant, talented people into passive hedonists by giving them an escape from emotions they feel too weak to bear.

Cigarettes, as bad as they are, don’t do this. But because they are bad for physical health, they get demonized, while weed is elevated as morally superior.

This is foolish. Mental health matters, too, and weed abuse is destroying it.

Also, the culture that has emerged around weed is completely ridiculous. People combine it with everyday activities and just end up doing poor work and becoming a public nuisance.

• People will show up to work almost too high to function

• People will step away from their jobs to smoke weed during their shifts

• People will take edibles then wander around public places barely coherent

• People will smoke weed in parking lots and on downtown sidewalks all over town

• People will get obnoxiously high in front of children and then be disrespectful and make total fools of themselves

• People — especially poor people — will waste the little free time they have drifting off into canna-bliss instead of putting in the slightest amount of effort to educate themselves, learn new skills, or improve their lives

When people do these things while drinking alcohol, we call them addicts and degenerates.

But somehow, when people do these things while smoking weed, we just call them free spirits or some other psuedospiritual bullshit term that absolves them of any responsibilities they have as members of the human race.

As someone who has spent much of my adult life working in restaurants and playing music in bars, I’ve seen so much of this stupidity first hand.

The irony, though, is that people who have accomplished nothing, can’t show up to commitments on time, and have virtually zero grip over their emotions will insist that alcohol is a repulsive habit and that they are much more sophisticated for eating Sour Patch Kids full of THC instead of drinking a glass of Chianti.

Totally stupid.

Now, it’s important to lay out some valid defenses for marijuana — particularly in comparison to alcohol and cigarettes, which are legal, while marijuana is not.

• Weed is physically healthier than either cigarettes and alcohol

• If prepared as edibles, weed produces less waste

• Weed can improve sleep and reduce pain, anxiety, nausea, and seizures

• Weed can be used to improve the quality of life for people facing conditions like Parkinson’s and cancer

Weed has significant utility as medicine, and the actual hemp plant has so much to offer as an industrial material. (I dream of launching a denim company that uses US-grown and -processed hemp instead of cotton!)

Also, I have no particular moral qualm against recreational weed use in moderation. But this idea that weed is more sophisticated than alcohol or cigarettes — and that the people who use it shouldn’t have to observe the same boundaries as drinkers and cigarette smokers — is stupid, obnoxious, and harmful.

So what’s the solution?

We need a similar movement of moderation like what has emerged with alcohol to emerge with weed.

Also, we should probably make it legal, tax it, and set legal restrictions on sale and consumption — and allow people to grow it on their private land.

This helps us maximize the upside, minimize the downside, and break the allure of taboo weed currently has on our culture — especially on young people.

Also, as a side note, can we stop pretending vaping is cool? James Bond would never rip a pen at the casino table and blow out a cloud of strawberry-flavored vapor.

Yeehamaste, folks 🤠

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What I’m Working On This Week

In recent months, I’ve felt a significant shift in my focus. This aligns largely with what I’ve discovered about the true nature of power.

When I was young, I got pushed around a lot by people more powerful than I; this made me believe that seeking power was inherently evil.

As I grew older, I realized that some amount of power is necessary if you want to protect yourself and those you love from forces that would hurt them. This triggered a transformation in me as I explored the world of business and personal growth.

Recently, I have come to understand that power is the current that pulls the world forward, and that those in power right now — dominating social discourse about what is moral and what, if anything, we owe each other — are piloting society into a storm from which it might never recover.

And so I have fixed my eyes more directly on the type of society I’d like to live in, and, even more importantly, how our present situation might be improved so that future generations can live in greater peace, safety, and prosperity.

This had made me realize that I must take ownership over the way I move through the world. If I do not use my knowledge and skills in service of a brighter future, then I will be complicit in society’s downfall.

This is why my tone has recently shifted. I feel driven to create change, and not as a shouting activist in the street demanding that other, more powerful forces change their course, but as a force in and of myself.

In our digital world, it has become easier than ever both to spread propaganda and disinformation and to silence truth. It has become easier than ever to police history and control the narrative by shutting down platforms and taking foundational texts out of circulation.

I think that print media is an important part of the resistance to societal decay.

And so that will be a large part of my focus over the next several years.

Here are a few of the projects on my mind:

• I want to support a resurgence of physical books, magazines, music, films, and audio materials

• I want to start distributing things like books, articles, social media feeds, and podcasts in physical formats so that, in the event that any political party tries to block the proliferation of truth, digital censorship will not be enough to assert control

• I want to start distributing new prints of old books in their original languages, along with modern translations, so that 1) people can get ancient information straight from the source, and 2) modern phrasing can make the ideas more penetrable for people who do not have time to learn multiple languages

These initiatives will require me to get extremely organized, to acquire funding, to hire talented staff, and to rise as the lead representative of what I see as a movement to protect history and help society avoid repeating past mistakes.

Also, I want to fight the creative decay that is so obviously happening in modern minds.

As I compare the past to the present, I almost want to weep: beautiful cathedrals and temples of enduring stone have been replaced with sharp-edged buildings made of pressboard and cheap concrete; dynamic and expressive sonic journeys have been replaced by music that can be hardly called such, distributed in singles that seem to get shorter and shorter; art has been simplified and degraded from the remarkable accomplishments of Michelangelo to the “cultural critique” of a banana taped to a wall.

Despite all our “progress,” it’s becoming unavoidably obvious that we are becoming more primitive with each passing year.

I don’t know exactly how to stop the decline, but doing something is better than sitting back and watching beauty die.

And so that is my focus right now. I’m building a vision, seeking allies, and doing what I can to serve the future.

I will start by incorporating in Texas in 2025 and laying the ground work for the publishing company I’ve been dreaming of building for years.

I’ll migrate all of my existing work to sit under this publishing house, then start using the revenue to build out infrastructure to publish the great work of others. I have a few authors and aspiring authors who are interested in forming an alliance, so I’ll likely start there before expanding to music, podcasts, video channels, etc.

And of course, any and all the ways you choose to support me — buying my book, listening to my music, becoming a paid subscriber — will go towards supporting this vision.

I’m beyond grateful for your loyalty. 🙏

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A Brief Announcement

It seems like the serial fiction is not capturing much interest, so I’m thinking about sticking to nonfiction in the newsletter, then simply housing my fiction on my website.

Let me know your preference below:

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What I’m Listening To This Week

I’ve recently been diving into classical music — in particular Tchaikovsky and Vivaldi. Here’s a great performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

This musical suite demonstrates a classic style of long form sonic storytelling that has largely been lost in modern pop music.

I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.

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Buy My Book

The Testimony of Jacob Cohen is a cosmic horror story about an archeologist on an Antarctic expedition who discovers a mysterious ziggurat that hides terrifying secrets from a forgotten past.

It draws inspiration from the narrative style of Dracula, the real-life Endurance expedition led by Ernest Shackleton, and Dionysian cult mysticism, along with modern astronomy, astrobiology, and mycology.

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