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Insomniac that I am, I found myself wide awake and changing channels the other night at about 2:30AM when I stumbled across the movie The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down about a ½ an hour in.

I could tell right away that the movie was supposed to be a comedy; sort of a mock documentary like This is Spinal Tap or Fear of a Black Hat, but one thing that startled me almost immediately was when showing young people how to party, the movie’s narrators divided up the illegal drugs which can be used between the types “sketchy” and “fun”. On the “sketchy” side was anything with needles and cooked cocaine, on the “fun” side was marijuana (of course) and powder cocaine.

Granted, the cast of this movie was overwhelming white, but still I was surprised.

Now, I can’t smoke marijuana right now for a variety of reasons, but I’ve always justified my weed smoking with (among other biblical verses) Proverbs 104:14 which reads:

He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man…”

I can find, however, no corresponding biblical verse that justifies cocaine! Cocaine has always been stigmatized as the first “hard” (read: addictive) drug you get to after you’ve tired of drinking alcohol and smoking weed.

Not wishing to come across as a complete hypocrite, I’ll admit to having used cocaine myself literally a handful of times; once just to try it, the other four times with a girl-the same girl.

The very last time I used cocaine, I found myself standing on top of that girl’s countertop yelling down at her, “I’M NOT HIGH!!!”

Cigarettes are indeed one of the few (if not the only) things you can buy for internal usage that tell you on the packaging that they’re gonna kill you, but cigarettes are legal.

Folks argue all the time that “even Jesus drank wine” but I don’t think that He drank Hennessey and that’s usually what the people doing all the Jesus-arguing are holding as they make their point.

My friend, painter J Hairston notes the hypocrisy in hip hop by saying of rappers, “Everybody wants to talk about how they sell coke but nobody wants to talk about how they use it.”

Is there still that kind of a stigma, you think, in the Black community about cocaine use or is cocaine use always just flat out, straight up wrong?