One of the kids would yell out, “Let’s get dizzy!”  We’d all spin around with our arms out until we were falling down and encountering great difficulty in getting back up again.  Fun.

Fun?  I tried it once or twice and really didn’t like it, so I stopped doing it.  My friends kept doing it though.  Adults do it too. All these years later, kids and adults still do it.

Mankind has always sought to alter consciousness in this way.  Many societies have had (and do have) religious rituals in which people achieve states of trance or rapture through dancing to exhaustion.  Drugs also have a long history of religious use.  Altered consciousness is important to human beings.

That said, states of altered consciousness can lead to all kinds of trouble for individuals and societies – like car crashes.  Alcohol and drugs do not mix well with driving.  However, because alcohol and drugs are not intrinsic to driving, the problems they cause are not driving’s to solve.  That work is best left to those who are experts in it.  What driving must do is insist that it is an activity completely separate from drugs and alcohol.  All that straighttalkondriving can do is quote, in its entirety, Chapter 18 from The Helios Institute’s driving textbook,  JOYRIDING: A Practical Manual for Learning the Fundamentals of Masterful Driving. 

The legalization of marijuana will provide a whole new set of problems for the law enforcement community to sort out.