6 Drugs Are Bad Mmmmk: The Satan Seller pp. 15-19

I will begin by confessing that I’ve never been a drug user. I drink alcoholic beverages; I used to smoke cigarettes/vape; but the closest experience I have to drug use was getting contact high at a party. I confess this because I don’t have the personal knowledge of what it’s like to be on “drugs” but I also have a good idea that Warnke doesn’t either. This entire next section reads like someone trying to convince us way too hard that he was on drugs.

The biggest clue is that I have plenty of alcohol experience and Warnke’s description of drinking doesn’t make sense. He knows that people who drink too much vomit, so in order to convince us that he was totally drunk all the time, we left off with him leaving class to go throw up. What Warnke doesn’t understand is that if you’re so drunk that you feel the need to throw up all the time, you also aren’t going to be able to do many other things—like walk around, attend classes, or convince someone that you aren’t drunk. I know that sometimes a very bad hangover can make you throw up as well, but Warnke is not trying to convince us that he’s hungover. That’s an important difference.

He’s on the lawn throwing up when he meets someone named Dean Anderson. Anderson stands over the puking Warnke and talks about the evils of alcohol and “pulled out a pack of unlabeled cigarettes.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Marijuana.”

Right here is how we know that Warnke is full of shit. I’ve known people who have hidden joints in cigarette packs, but you couldn’t mistake a joint for a cigarette. Maybe, if this was a time when people were hand rolling cigarettes you could make this error. Warnke is basing his claims on stereotypes that the evangelical Christian set would have of marijuana users, not actual marijuana users, “You know, back in 1965 anybody that smoked a reefer, had his hair slicked back, wore a black leather jacket with chains on it, and carried a switchblade—ugh! That kind of jazz turned me off.”

In the 1960s!? The hippie movement is going to be in full swing around this point and he thinks the only people that smoke weed look like greasers. Sure Mike.

Mike caves to peer pressure and begins smoking the ganja; and suddenly his life is improving. His stomach issues lessen and classes are getting more interesting—except for the professor because “pot logic” from stoners are some of the most annoying papers to read.

Warnke goes to the Salvation Army and buys black pants and “freaky shirts.” He also dyes his hair blond, “I was really craving attention.” So far, I think this is the most honest phrase in the book.

“You know, weird people attract chicks. That’s why you hear about more girls running away than boys.”

What? Let’s put aside that weird men only attract a certain type of weird girl; and observe how the first sentence and the second sentence are unrelated claims. He’s trying to imply that girls are running away with their boyfriends, but that still doesn’t give us a link between those two sentences. Warnke joins the stoner crowd who lay around the college lawns all day discussing stoner things and attracting other stoners who, “seemed to look to me for answers to their questions”

The story that Warnke is telling us is the story of the “gateway drug.” He started with alcohol, moved to weed, and “it was not long before someone introduced me to peyote, which had been brought up from Mexico.”

The Mexico comment is only odd because that’s where he was getting his weed too. He’s making it seem like if it weren’t for Mexico he wouldn’t have gotten all of these drugs. It’s an attempt to shift responsibility toward anyone else. He’s on Peyote all day and he thinks that he’s no longer an outsider. Again, the problem here is that the real Warnke is telling a story that the evangelical set likes to hear: drugs make you popular because of the hedonism. In the real world he’s just running with the druggie crowd. I knew these people in college, they just had their own thing but it would be incorrect to say that they were the popular crowd…mostly because that doesn’t really exist in college.

Here is the most damning claim, “When we tried peyote, we decided it was better and heavier than pot.”

An individual might like a straight hallucinogen more than weed that’s not the issue: unless he’s using “heavier” in a unique sense—this is a lie. It’s like explaining that weed is heavier than alcohol; the effects are completely different and the comparison doesn’t work.

Dean Anderson, the pot connection was giving it away for free but now he’s charging “a buck a load.” This is a mysterious price per unit that I’ve never heard of before. Marijuana was sold by weight or maybe the joint; I’m beating the dead horse here, Warnke has no idea how to buy it, “I’ll take one load of marijuana please.”

It doesn’t matter much, because his friends graduate to LSD after hearing about Timothy Leary. The chronology tracks. So does his claim that LSD research was done on human subjects. This should be about 1965, while I don’t believe that he ever used it, he would have been aware of the drug making its way through the college. He describes one of his trips but its very generic. Something I would write without ever having used the drug, he heard colors and saw music. Another he describes as just meeting people who like him. Finally, we get a bad one where his insides were floating away. That one is creative, I’ll give him that, but he doesn’t dwell on it like he should. Instead, he pivots toward discussing flashbacks and how that’s the real danger. I suppose this is a danger, but only if you are flashing back to bad trips or they are happening at inopportune times.

All of this is a gateway drug story. We started with alcohol, weed, peyote, LSD, and now speed. He’s injecting speed, which is not usually how that works, but this is a guy who described the scientists as shoving LSD into him, which is not how that works either.

Mike is in a bad spot. He’s addicted to drugs, albeit without knowing how to take them, he drops out of college, loses his job, and begins pushing weed. It’s odd that Anderson isn’t his source, but I guess Anderson is cool with Warnke bringing in some free market competition into his area. You know how drug dealers are: always allowing market forces to work. Anderson is worried about Mike. Warnke is too strung out, “I think you have a lot on the ball, but right now you’re so dependent on the speed that when you don’t get it, you’re messed up for a bad dog.”

They may be rivals in the drug dealing trade, but they look out for each other. Anderson tells Warnke that he’s got a line on some other people that can show him something much deeper than drugs, “they will turn you on to a new power without drugs, he said.”

Mike’s response, “Why not? You going to pick me up and take me where the action is?”

The entire point of this chapter has been to scare you into paranoia about the dangers of drugs and how it leads to Satanism. Drug addiction is terrible but getting evangelical Christians to care about the social problem isn’t going to work—they’d have to care about poor people. What matters is that little Mike or Sally are going to lose their faith in Jesus. This book was written in 1972 and its firmly in the exact type of story that the anti-drug people want to believe. Yet, even then, it would be a story on the dangers of addiction; a misguided story based on a myth, but still a story. It’s not enough though, Warnke has to move on to something else. Finally, we’re going to get to the reason anyone read this book to begin with.