Grand Theft Auto 5 Smokes Oregano

*extremely that kid voice* uh huh huh huh im so high guys, yeahhhhhhh

I have a strong dislike of Grand Theft Auto 5, the kind of dislike that once led to me tearing into someone I respect in a conversation about it, just because my roll was that in need of slowing. I was wrong and a dick in that situation, but I also want you to know right out the gate the sort of vitriol I have for a game that has just as much transphobia as the average Yakuza title, yet also as much sneering contempt for everyone else on the planet. It also happens to lack the myriad of other very genuine and decent factors in its presentation that, as is case with Yakuza, makes you wish it just get its act together so it could be the perfect game. 

But don’t think I’m here to make a checklist of GTA5’s problematic content, because the idea of creating an article of point by point factors to add to GTA5 to make it acceptable to the standards of any sort of modern social justice movement is an exercise in futility so self-evident that posing it as any sort of serious thought exercise would make you worthy of a Malcolm Tucker-esque fuckbarrage about wasting effort. It’s like trying to add spoilers to a sloth to make it faster. The way you make Grand Theft Auto PC is to not make it; the way you make a sloth faster is knock it out of its tree.

No, instead I’m going right for this game’s balls, as some sort of hybrid of Heat and Catcher in the Rye, written by three dudes who started their writing life at Palahniuk and never looked back. Or forward. They just stayed there, at Palahniuk, stagnating. “Oh, Doc,” you say, “you think the folks behind a piece of work like GTA care what you think of their writing chops?” Yeah, actually, I do. Nothing stings That Guy in Your MFA more than reminding him that he’s That Guy in Your MFA, and motherfuckers aren’t even particularly notable examples. Between them, they’ve cooked up a reality of performative phonies and screeching harridans so as to contrast the Stark Realness ™ of game’s trio of protagonists that I am legitimately shocked one of them’s not named Tyler Caulfield. Dudes can be shit hot within their industry, as professionals, but watch their heart break when you actually analyze their drivel. Watch their eyes, and you swear you can see the reflection of the bright red dodgeball arcing in from half court, about to auger in right between the eyes of that scared, inept nerd that a part of them still is, and probably always will be.

As is particularly the case with whoever was in charge of designing the Grass Roots mission chain demonstrates. I’m going to be blunt here: this was a line of missions in GTA5 about cannabis, that appears to be written by an individual that has not actually been in the same room as it. A game that’s about three Real-Ass Criminals against a Fake, Fake World, which poses the idea that you’re either a character in a Richard Stark novel or some strawman from South Park, features a depiction of breathing smoke less accurate than the one depicted in the 90s PSA mega-collaboration, Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. You’ve got me here on the line with you, trying to make me hear your parable about crime and realness, and all I can think to myself is “You’ll Cowards Don’t Even Smoke Crack.”

Maybe you witnessed it, maybe you were party to it. Hopefully, you weren’t actually That Kid Who Got Tricked Into Smoking a Roll of Dried Oregano, because that’s an experience that’s hard to live down. That sad combination of placebo effect and the desperate teenage need to fit in, collapsed by peer pressure, leading to a scene of someone who is already awkward sober, trying to mime being loaded on an herb they don’t even know the smell of, let alone the effect of. It’s the humiliation by trickery on the level of a power situp, except thankfully nobody goes face first into someone else’s ass in this trick. Except in the case of GTA5, where it pranced around in a frantic attempt at describing an experience a ton of people in the real world experience with day to day regularity, and managed to go face first up its own ass.

This is not the first draft of this essay. The first had to be put out of its misery after it developed a tumor in the form of me, talking about my credentials as an imbiber of “The Weed.” It was tedious, and could largely be summed up by saying I took Nate Dogg’s immortal advice to heart. But fuck if I’m not going to bring up the major factor of my relationship with a substance that’s both medicine and vice to me, the thing that makes me, I feel, an authority on why Grass Roots might as well be some nerd shit mumbled from behind a DM screen. Said the tabletop designer.

Namely, I know how much weed you need to do in order to start seeing and hearing freaky shit. That amount is “entirely too much,” which was gleaned from an experience that was as much mistake as it was an overall poor life choice. I once consumed an edible without thinking in three bites on an empty stomach, which after the fact I learned contained 600mg of cannabis content. The next day and change for me was a sampling of High_in_British_Columbia.txt:

• Committed multiple Kung Lao and Kenshi in combos in Mortal Kombat X to muscle memory during uptake. I have only vague memories of actually being in training mode before [SCENE MISSING].
• Became alarmed by the volume of my own heartbeat to the point that I attempted a cold shower to make it quieter. When that didn’t work, I tried turning up the heat until I wasn’t so freaked out about how loud it was.
• I don’t think that actually worked either, but by that point, I had gotten distracted by something else.
• Literally trying to walk it off. This was a poor idea, as for all the spatial distortion and time dilation I was experiencing with every step I took, the small suburban neighborhood my suite was in could have been the desert from fucking Ishtar.
• Three two three four four two three AND
• Walking further and rounding a corner, my mind was further opened to the forms perception could take, because my vision began to do things that I didn’t think was actually possible. At the very center of my field of vision, things were moving at a normal rate of speed, but wider from the center, things started to look like one of those rotating ring picture puzzles from Assassin’s Creed II, except instead of a jumbled image, it was reality, only moving at progressively lower framerates with each outward ring until it was just a dark, still blur.
• At the same time I was coming to terms with something that was actually giving me existential horror, I encountered people. Actual, real, live people, who I decided I must maintain against at all cost and walk on by without arousing suspicion. Upon realizing, though, this would entail me walking all the way to the end of the block, which may as well have been on the goddamned Moon for all the infinity between me and that stop sign, I decided against it.
• And by that, I mean my morale broke. I turned and literally fled like a deer. I only made it home by following the trail of helpful and concerned neighborhood cats.
• Attempting to bring up the remnants of the edible by using a carbonated drink. It worked, but not like I expected to, more because I was thinking that I was like Jackie Chan in Drunken Master II and I just needed to purge off a little bit of what was poisoning me in order to be “JUST PERFECT!”
• Attempting to close my eyes and lie on my bed to stop the room from spinning. It just made my bed start flipping end over end through an infinite void. That made all ambient sound in my suite seem even louder for unknown reasons.
• Watching TieTuesday’s Let’s Play of Super Godzilla. It was far from the worst choice I made in that state, but it was still entirely too much to not be terribly freaked out by in that state.
• About 28 hours later I became fully lucid in a theater showing Fury Road. Which is a great weed movie, by the way.

All that does not make for a really interesting drug story. In fact, it’s sort of a lousy one, barely anything happened in it, aside from some idiot proving you actually can overdose on pot, then being supremely uncomfortable for a day or so. What it does, however, is paint a picture of the state of mind one can find themselves in when they go over the line of their tolerance. You know, in case you’ve never indulged. Or overindulged.

It didn’t involve fucking aliens and clowns and miniguns. It didn’t even involve the technicolour visual filter, and hell, even the soundscape is too intense for what the reality of matters is. But I guess this is supposed to be a highly paranoid strain- I sure wish Barry the Legalization Advocate actually gave a name for his bud. But then I suppose you'd have to actually know something about weed to make a joke strain name. I also wish he was called Bruce, because I keep trying to call him that. I wish he was Brucie is what I’m saying, because I mainly miss when GTA had fun characters.

BULLSHARK TESTOSTERONE. 

There, I’m good now. That felt great.

Yeah, that’s the framing device for this fuckshit- you run into a guy campaigning for weed legalization and strike up a conversation with him. Couple things here worth going into. First is the instant reaction to the hit- now, smoke doesn’t take forever to take hold, but the blood-brain barrier is a thing, and it’s more than just a bunch of dumb, weak fluid. There’s also the fact that it even hits Trevor at all- Michael, fine, he’s a booze dad, but Trevor? Motherfucker’s an end state meth user, he doesn’t have the brain chemistry to spare for weed to have much effect on him, unless he just happens to be carrying around a thermos of spare dopamine with him at all times. There’s also the fact that it doesn’t even hit Franklin at all which is just, like, really game? Really? The black guy? Not the meth cook that gets high off his own supply? You’re sure about this?

But barring any feelings about skin colour and genetics that may be implicit in the writing- three white guys wrote this game, remember -the majority of my beef there is realism, and in that sense, it’s just me nitpicking to be a dick, and because that feels just great to do sometimes. My real sticking point is the part that I kinda find unbelievable, in and of the fact that it’s taking place in a GTA game. Namely, that a character pushing for legalization of a controlled substance, particularly one that has a lot of both enthusiasm and momentum for legalization, and is enjoyed by many, not to mention beneficial to the health of many, is depicted as an out of control threat to society. Now, let’s not go into the fact that both Michael and Trevor initially recoil at the sight of a joint being thrust at them, like they forgot they both shoot people and steal shit for a living. Except let’s go into it, because seriously, that’s the sort of body language you see in bookish 14 year olds in old AD Council PSAs, not hardened crooks. Michael, you fucking wimp.

No, let’s instead say what’s being said here. That in a game where shooting anyone you want in the face is nothing more than than a Right Trigger away, the real monster, the dude that two out of the three cast members flee in terror from, is a dude talking about weed with the same destigmatizing language actual activists use. It’s casting a guy who electrocutes another man’s balls (while they’re still attached, no less!) with jumper cables as the lesser terror than the dude with some herb, by saying that whatever zombie skunk he’s growing and pushing as harmless is capable of giving folk a scopolamine-like chemical lobotomy. Stop me if this doesn’t actually sound like a joke; stop me if this actually sounds like someone trying to soapbox his bad pot experience in a game where unfettered and instantaneous indulgence of the id is all a part of the experience. Remember, in GTA5, to win at the stripper minigame, you touch the dancers, which is what gets you beaten to fuck and thrown out in the alley in real life. Which is what it should be, because the fact this game downplays nonconsensually grabbing someone that’s just there to dance is kind of alarming- how many extra punches were bouncers morally right to throw because of GTA5, strip clubs and dumbshit 20 somethings that don’t leave the house enough? With that in mind, that the game decides to overblow the consequences of a single puff of weed as “you go to a technicolour hellscape where you must battle for your life” is so bizarre and inconsistent. What is it GTA5? Is it grope the performer to make her like you more? Or is it overdose on the Demonflower and go straight to hell?

Maybe the Oregano Joint story is a little too pointed, a little too cruel. Maybe the person that gave Grass Roots its distinct, fearful and alarmist flavour really did have a truly bad experience that turned them away from cannabis, something folks like me know can be both a relief of symptoms not reached by conventional medicines and a mental vacation from a world that’s too loaded with stress and nonsense. You know, the kind of stress and nonsense GTA5 likes to lampoon. To that, I say that GTA5 is a game that’s got a whole lot of cruelty for a whole lot of people. It wants to push the envelope, and that’s a thing that you can do. But when you fuck up and expose the fact that you are, at best, completely ignorant and, at worst, utterly terrified of a very tame drug and a very entry level crime, don’t expect people not to call you on your shit. Because for all the hard Truth Talkin’ from Two Fisted Men, all I can see is some skinny nerd up on his tiptoes and flapping his hands because, yooooo, dude, the feel when that Italian Seasoning hits.