Sorry for the delay my peeps. I took my van on tour following The String Cheese Incident and Phish around the West and then I had to come back to dive into my big important professor of biopsychology job.
Speaking of, my first real job was working for an herbal supplement company after school at 14. At first I just stuffed envelopes in order to stuff people’s mailboxes with dead trees for them to throw away. Boring, but I got paid cash under the table on the daily. That meant every day I was the king of my Coca-Cola branded school’s lunchroom that slung Taco Bell and Pizza Hut alongside the federally approved nutritional lunchtrays. Honestly, considering this was the post ketchup as a vegetable era, I’ll call sixes on both options for Bad Boomer Behavior. After all, money buys burritos which buys happiness. Considering my public education included overt corporate messaging, buying has to be somewhere in the happiness equation, right?
Eventually my superiors got caught by Billing and I had to get on the Payroll. Two weeks later I cashed my first paycheck, and since I was holding more money at once than I ever had ever earned myself I did the rational thing and blew it all on a night of me and my friends getting high on meth, weed, and booze.
Over time, this job found themselves with little for me to do but they couldn’t just send me off since I was now on Payroll. So they moved me around to other busy work. For a spell my job was to go into the cobwebbed original warehouse and do inventory on abandoned bags of unused herbs and various compounds. It was mundane but there was a stereo with a CD player so I could blast my own Primus CDs while working in solitude with my clipboard and scale trying to figure out what that label said.
Then I found it, a massive clear bag of powdered caffeine. They did not really know what was in that warehouse and they didn’t really care; it was probably all going to get dumped into the local water supply eventually anyway. Gotta help the planet so I skimmed a strong third off that bag- shoving a kilo of pure, uncut socially acceptable stimulant into my backpack along with my sick 90’s CD booklet and cigarettes.
This was the days of vending machines full of Jolt! and SURGE in the halls between classes. For you kiddos, they were the predecessors of Red Bull and Monster energy drinks. Having already done meth, that was child’s play. But I had just figured out how to make the legal smiles even more powerful. I became the Scarface of spiking your energy drinks with extra caffeine. Had I the wit I do today, I would have called it Pork Soda. We even tried snorting it. Not recommended. It just made lots of boogers. Ultimately, we suburban stoner kids got bored and threw half of it away at the mall food court we knew too well.
Why tell you this? You see, while many claimed effects of plant derived supplements are dubious, some really do fucking work. THC, nicotine, caffeine, DMT.... all technically “herbal supplements” if you really think about it. Yes of course, much of the industry we think of as herbal supplements is truly fucking Whack. But next time I’m going to do a deep dive into the herbal supplement industry and there’s a twist! I have a friend in the industry whom I greatly respect so I’ve since learned a lot more about herbal supplements, giving me more nuance about how the industry is supposed to be tested these days for at least safety. Efficacy may be another story.
As for Tour, did I experience the positive effects of unregulated substances? You bet your ass I did and it was splendid. Did I have any negative effects? Not from that. It was that fucking day-old chicken burrito from the Santa Barbara Whole Foods that made me shit all over Santa Monica the next day. And food is supposed to be the thing that is fully regulated. See you next time, where we learn how the sausage is made, so to speak, with herbal supplements.
-Your favorite Whackologist