Articles by Mark Frauenfelder

Linkletter: “There’s a great difference between alcohol and marijuana.”

Nixon replies: “What is it?” The president wants to know!

“When people smoke marijuana,” Linkletter explains, “they smoke it to get high. In every case, when most people drink, they drink to be sociable.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” Nixon says. “A person does not drink to get drunk. . . . A person drinks to have fun.”

Then Nixon turns to the global history of drinking and using drugs. “I have seen the countries of Asia and the Middle East, portions of Latin America, and I have seen what drugs have done to those countries,” he says. ”Everybody knows what it’s done to the Chinese, the Indians are hopeless anyway, the Burmese. . . . they’ve all gone down.”

Nixon continues, “Why the hell are those Communists so hard on drugs? Well why they’re so hard on drugs is because, uh, they love to booze. I mean, the Russians, they drink pretty good. . . . but they don’t allow any drugs.”

“And look at the north countries,” Nixon continued. “The Swedes drink too much, the Finns drink too much, the British have always been heavy boozers and all the rest, but uh, and the Irish of course the most, uh, but uh, on the other hand, they survive as strong races.”

Linkletter says “That’s right.”

Nixon comes to his main point about the “drug societies:” they “inevitably come apart.”

Linkletter adds, “They lose motivation. No discipline.”

Nixon gets the last word: “At least with liquor, I don’t lose motivation.”

Jesse Thorn interviewed me on his wonderful interview program, The Sound of Young America, about my book, Made by Hand.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of the seminal zine and blog Boing Boing, the editor of Make Magazine, and the author of the new book Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, about the pleasure of making things yourself.​

In 2003, Frauenfelder, his wife and two small children moved to a remote island in the South Pacific. They hoped to escape modern life, but they found that they were instead isolated and beset by health problems. When they returned, four and a half months later, Frauenfelder considered what he really enjoyed about his trip, and realized it was working with his daughter on the laborious process of preparing coconuts to be eaten. He resolved to make more.

In Made By Hand, he writes about the movement towards "making," and about his own efforts. He got rid of his lawn to plant food, started whittling his own spoons and making cigar-box ukeleles, among other activities. He found that what he was looking for when he moved to the South Pacific was available to him right in Southern California.