Sweet Music
The music group “Boiled in Lead” created a song with the lyric “caffeine, sugar and THC are all the doctor’s are gonna find in me, when they do the autopsy.” God and I were listening to this fine music the other day and it lead to a discussion of various drugs.
One of the unstated points of that lyric is that sugar is as much of a drug as either caffeine or cannabinoids, I think they would have tossed in alcohol as well, if it wouldn’t have messed up the scansion, but far be it from me to put words in other people’s mouths. The thing that God found interesting in this is that, with the exception of dealing with hyperactive kids, we don’t treat sugar the same way that we treat other drugs.
With most drugs it’s all about the dosage. The amount of caffeine in cup of coffee, a cup of tea, or a glass of soda is pretty similar. That’s part of why the average soda is twice or more the size of the average coffee drink. Now I know some of you will point out that Starbuck’s has managed to notably increase the size of what an average person considers a coffee drink, but I’ll counter that convenience stores and fast food outlets were way ahead of them with the size of soft drinks, so really Starbuck’s was just playing catch up. So moving on, I’ll also point out that the amount of alcohol in a glass of beer, a glass of wine, or a shot of spirits is also pretty consistent, and the amount of THC in a joint, a pipe bowl or a brownie works out to a pretty standard dosage.
So the thing about our social drug use is that our cultures worked it out, worked out how to standardize doses, even before we could measure the active ingredients. We didn’t work out which were the better drugs to keep legal, very well, but that just goes to show that we’ve always been better at the quantitative side than the qualitative side. I think we’ll get there though. I have faith. I asked God if he liked that I had faith about something. He just shrugged. He’s like that.
I still don’t know why we’re so laissez-faire about sugar though.
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