Pusha Tea (Part III): If Matcha Is The New Cocaine, Is It Also The Old Cocaine?

This is (still) culturally inappropriate.

“Remember those who lost their mothers and fathers

And make sure that every single moment that you have with them

You show them love

You show them love

You'll see”

At this point in our drug saga, it’s time to get clean. Allow me to offer an explanation for this silly snorty series. I present to you, without further delay, with a twinkle of Stevie Wonder’s keys and wise words in your ears, my drug confession.

While my father was alive, I cannot think of a single occasion where I showed him love and respect. In 30 years of regular, near-daily interaction, I did not spare not even a fraction of the dignity I now show even the most disgruntled stranger I pass on my street. A soul who suffered from addiction for most of his life, Dad eventually succumbed to his sickness six years ago at age 64. I could not see him while he was alive in the wholeness with which I see him now.

I could see only his parts. Divide him into eras. Parse his components. Litigate his lacks. Skewer his shortcomings. Picture him as the Bubbles that’s sick and needs medicine from “Chains & Whips.” Here was a man I roasted at every opportunity from the dinner table to the halfway house to the Southern California sidewalk where he collapsed somewhere between his first and last overdoses. Yes, my father’s official cause of death was caused by the same substances some of my favorite artists—favorite writers—flipped into rap careers.

Like a jagged ribbon of lipstick smear on an otherwise smooth slab of concrete kissed by an earthquake, I saw his very existence as a fracture across the otherwise intactness of my life. I withheld my love from him. Kicked away the ropes that might have pulled him to safety and watched him drown. I saw him go to pieces, as Gil Scott-Heron has written and so heartbreakingly sung. And when it was all over, my only consolation prize was an episode of shared lament about lost fathers with Gil’s own son.

Where did I discover this tragically late but potently cathartic reservoir of compassion I’ve now found for my Dad? How have I tiptoed across my limited understanding of his life and avoided the pitfall of complex grief baked into his death? What made me snap out it? When did this miracle—this impossibility—begin?

It all started with matcha. A reason to rise early. A way to stand being alone. An invitation to flip a script. An opening line of a plotless story. A badly needed darkener of the mind and long overdue radiator of the heart. A cause for hope, a way to cope, an alternative to dope.

Here it is—🍵—the one gateway drug to end them all.

Lambast the poetic names if you must. Scoff at the clichéd and abstract use of the term ‘ceremonial’ and you’ll be justified. Squirm at the word ‘spiritual’ and you won’t be alone. But be warned my matcha sisters and brothers and twisters and lovers: the analytical mind—the one that separates things into parts so it can name and understand and make use of them, the one that I’ve used all of my years to try to fix the man who gave me life—is not the only mind available.

Call the alternative ‘beginners mind’ or ‘original mind’ or even ‘heart-mind.’ Call it whatever gets you across the river. On that side, you’ll hear a seemingly culturally inappropriate album by a pair of cocaine slinging brothers. On this side, you’ll appreciate the gift No Malice and Pusha T have served. The masterpiece. These two aren’t exchanging rap lines but cocaine koans:

Open the sunroof, wave to my father

Remembering the shipments at the Portsmouth Harbor

Something for the face-numbers and the nodders

Grew up playing real life Contra

"Never give up," that's the mantra

Behold E.B.I.T.D.A.! Hear them string! Snap! Feel fully the sting of the keisaku stick against the chawan rim of our emptied mind. Watch the line separating dealer and addict, host and guest, profound and profane, get blown away like a J.Deppy performance.

Before I had a mantra of my own. Before I had my senseis. Before I had a hold on myself. I had my matcha.

Good is the new cool. Sincerity the new sarcasm. Long winded, flailing embarrassing truth telling the new well-ironed think pieces. Paradox the new parody.

And paradox is the currency of all great poetry. The multitude of things being true at once. Off you go. Swapping “I can’t feel my face” for “I can feel every single twitch of sensation on my face and actually how it bleeds into the face of the universe and experience that it’s not just me breathing out but the world breathing in.”

Absorbed to the point where a piece of toast is enlightenment. Astonished by the way your shadow moves as you tie the recycling bag in the morning. All of it making you tingle. Magic, everywhere. Drenched in it. Wet. Random Tuesdays become the best days of your life. Morning routine > birthday bash.

And I’m the one laughing harder than anyone else can at that joke, which is no joke at all. Giggles at a first sleepover. All the new horizons of your first trip abroad. The thrill of losing your V card. Getting why those who freak it another way call talk about being born again.

Hit by confetti cannons of gratitude humility and compassion like summer cool down nozzles in a theme park line. Getting it more and more by the day how a warrior could leave the world of dust and have a bowl and meet their death - even by their own sword - with a smile.

And you’ll say it proudly: I’ll have what he’s having.

You too will come out of the foggy white haze and start to see Clipse verses in a new light. A green light. These old cocaine koans will become the perfect firestarter for a musket of shine muscat bubbling new cocaine.

And you’ll rejoice because, matcha shouldn’t exist but it very much does, and we’ve arrived here at last, at the gateless gate: the final boss of impossibility.

TEAS OPEN DOORS

Maybe there’s a fine line between drugs and medicine. Maybe the line was white and it turned green and I’m just pointing out the obvious. Maybe there is no line and it’s a choose-your-own-adventure fork in the road between the two.

I’m not the only one linking tea and drugs. Much to the chagrin of many a two-bit coke rapper, Time Magazine just named Queen Victoria the biggest drug dealer of all time. How else do you think she got the tea from China to Europe? Her operation makes the whole of the crack epidemic look like a Hamsterdam experiment from The Wire.

I’m not even the only one directly calling tea drugs. Fellow Substacker Max over at Leafhopper put it right in his manifesto post: “Tea is very much a drug, but it makes you work to meet it halfway.”

Halfway! If the lord of the leaf dubs it so, so it must be.

So what has this matcha shortage shown us? What is the matcha industry doing wrong? Why is it important to reframe matcha as the new cocaine?

Because it exposes us honestly for what we are: a bunch of fools refusing to meet matcha halfway. Trying to get it to do what we want it to do. Be more delicious. More available. More modern. We’re trying to fix it so we can use it. Separate it out, pin it down, always in the name of more.

Will such a mind state inevitably will lead to abusing it? More on that next week’s Part IV series finale.

What we can say is that the discourse about matcha thus far has been only about half of the story. Even the vendors who insist they are trying to highlight and improve the people doing the real work here, the farmers, are missing the biggest reason why matcha is the new cocaine. The biggest reason it shouldn’t exist. The nature of its impossibility.

What if the thing being sold to you as magic powder…is actually magic powder? What if matcha is the elixir we’ve been waiting for, if only we met it halfway?

Full-fledged truth is the new fugazi. Full ass the new half-ass. Full blast as the new half-mast. It’s a mystical, mythical, magical, miracle poetical spiral all the way down, if only you dare to look up.

Much like…well…cocaine.

Cocaine started as both indigenous ritual and health panacea. Andean peoples in South America have, for thousands of years, chewed coca leaves and brewed coca-leaf tea. This is not unlike the thousands of years borderless tribes in and around Yunnan have used tea for ritual and health reasons. These are just two plants that have been honored as medicines for a long time and are only recenlty being used as drugs (cocaine as powder wasn’t even isolated until 1860, meaning in a way, matcha, which had been grown and used in a powder for hundreds of years in Japan—and since the Tang dynasty 618-907 in China, so a thousand years prior—is also the old old cocaine).

Around the same time Freud used it to explore dreams, Coca-Cola’s first few bottles appeared containing actual cocaine. Apparently, cocaine also began to appear in regular consumer products. You can almost hear the suits and the flavor engineers’ excitement from here.

Cocaine is amazing, eyes glossed, it should really be in everything. Everywhere. More. More. More.

But then the party stated to sour didn’t it? Cocaine morphed into its most sinister form during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, the art and songs that articulate the pain of that period—Clipse and much of my beloved hip-hop included—is about the only benefit that came out of it.

Until—I say, with an absurd, bold and fully owned sense of self-aggrandizement—this smash Substack series.

You say, “Dweez, you’re doing it for the clicks.” I’ll just shrug and say, “I saw my future through a crystal ball of green tea soda. The second someone mentions making a matcha farm, I say yes without a question. Having just grown my first cucumber plant, how hard could farming be?”

Because, being the most inappropriate in the room, I too suffer from the disease of more. Don’t they sell cocaine at Costco?

DRUGS KILLED MY TEEN SPIRIT, WELCOME TO NIRVANA

As Malice often surmised before his rap career break—including a lengthy interview with CNN that’s worth a watch—if you follow the old cocaine to its natural conclusion (or Coca-Cola for that matter) you’ll wind up dead or in jail or with arteries so clogged you’ll wish for the prior pair.

There was once some glory to going to living hard. To chasing death. Even to obesity. But that was the old cocaine era. Matcha is the new cocaine because if you follow it to the natural conclusion you wind up quiet, in a room, whipping a bowl, and serving it silently to a guest with your whole heart.

The tradition, in whichever school you study, is doing the serving, as much as the person that you call yourself. You are just an instrument of a long lineage of people making tea for a very long time. The farmers are the same. Why does a multi-generational farm keep churning out the powder, even at great physical and financial peril? It’s because it’s what the tea wants. No wonder the handpicking experience the Matcha Specialty cats had in Uji this spring was surprisingly jovial and calm (dare we say Zen). It’s because the farmers aren’t making a product. They are making a spiritual potion. A plant medicine. Even—or especially—if they don’t acknowledge it as such. Unawareness would only further prove the point (the opening line of my own manifesto) that tea is air. The very downplaying of its power gives it its power.

And the different between matcha and other teas is that you’re not drinking the essence of the leaf. You’re ingesting the whole shebang. You don’t drink matcha. You eat it.

Gulp.

If I’d made the wrong moves in Medellin, they may have come at me with machetes. If I do so in Japan, people will probably be too nice to tell me to knock it off with the cultural inappropriation and leave the head-lopping off to the long-gone warriors buried in cave graves surrounding my abode. If the bushi ghosts come @ me with war swords, charge it to the game.

I guess this is life under the spell of the N.C.—one minute you’re having matcha ice cream, the next your learning how to arrange charcoal in a clay brazier outside for one-kettle-sized sesh by your lonely, pausing only to properly picture yourself doing pirouettes off an imaginary diving board inside of the St. Paddy’s colored indoor ski resort in your heart and Scrooge McDucking your way through a pool of split-pea pow-pow of your 10,000 things.

So, yes. Matcha was my gateway drug into meditation but also into more tea. It started this gangster shit. More on that next week.

For now, that’s enough. Here you can buy my matcha at this link.

Just kidding, you cannot. I barely have enough matcha for my own fix. Don’t click there unless you just want more Clipse. No matcha. Just that CNN video of Clipse which you really should watch.

But let’s not downplay this gang color change. Contrary to the white knuckled grip of white nationalists on their last grasp of power, white has had its run. Especially hard white. Green is the color of life. Trees. Plants. Magic—and in the USA, at least, its magic sawdust counterpart—money.

And so you’ll start to see what No Malice means when he says “the grass is greener on each side” having left rap for moral reasons and returned to it, paradoxically, for poetic ones. Your mess becoming your new message as it has mine:

Some n****s get the luck of the draw

For others, life is a dice roll

And waiting on faith ain't for us

When you young, you realize that you can't trust a mouth where the pipe go

They tried but couldn't love you enough

A new cocaine would wait for you to find your faith and your F.I.C.O. A new cocaine would allow you to forgive the person who chose drugs over you. To trust, even if you can’t trust, the mouth where the pipe goes. Especially if that person was your own father. So watch what’s in my hands as I wave my own apologies skyward.

A new cocaine would also need to have the chance to regeneratively farm and revitalize rural areas of a greying country, instead of an old cocaine that funds wars and violence and bad habits. Call it a fault line shuffle from Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck to The Non-Ironic Act of Giving All The Fucks.

Me? I’m rooting for the soft drugs. For insta-awakenings, if that’s how they come. I’ll travel the world like my Tea Bubbles Buddy On The Block Pierre and not have a single photo to prove it. Like here, take these two bowls, I don’t care who you are, and guzzle.

And you’ll be like:

“The Usucha? Wobbles down my throat like a motorbike exhaust pipe in an oil massage summer of sweat and swarth.”

“The Koicha? Love says: I am everything. Wisdom says: I am nothing. I exist between the three. Watch how it walks down your giblets. You can’t even go get it. Waiting is the new go-getting. Kyoto the new Medellín. Flowing down in slow-motion like a still-buffering tongue of a celestial serpent god livestreaming our make out session.”

Max writes that the old factory managers used sugary tea to keep their employees productive but if they are serving tea the way it wants to be served, the way slow-bar aspirants like Marcel want it to be served, then, we’ll be awash in a world of nondoing in no time at all. Slow tea is anticapilist tea. A tea business an oxymoron. Call it tea as speed versus tea as sizzurp.

It took me 3 years to finish a 2 oz bag of Sichuan Jasmine green tea. It takes me a couple weeks to blow my 40 gram baggie of T.N.C. In the course of this series, I’ll dust Sensei-On-The-Block’s first baggie of 2025 harvest hanatachibana. Better start cueing up now for the Engakuji blend whenever the reup comes.

What? I get it. More matcha isn’t going to get me to nirvana. But, here’s the catch. Neither is less.

My Dad once told me in high school that he always thought I’d get into drugs. I guess he was right after all. 🍵

In Part IV—the for-now finale—we will explore the future of the new cocaine. For today, let’s let the No Malice’s coming out of retirement verse play us out in full (songs will be sung for generations about the gall and balls it takes to deliver something this hard out the gate). A verse I’m not sure I’ve yet made it through without crying a little or a lot.

My own is not here to see it or hear it but I’m going to say it anyway. I love you Dad. I respect you. I miss you.

Your car was in the driveway, I knew you were home

By the third knock, a chill ran through my bones

The way you missed Mama, I guess I should've known

Chivalry ain't dead, you ain't let her go alone

Found you in the kitchen, scriptures in the den

Half-written texts that you never got to send

Combin' through your dresser drawer, where do I begin?

Postin' noted Bible quotes, were you preparin' then?

I can hear your voice now, I can feel your presence

Askin' "Should I rap again?", you gave me your blessing

The way you spelled it out, there's an L in every lesson

"Boy, you owe it to the world, let your mess become your message"

Shared you with my friends, the Pops they never had

You lived for our fishin' trips, damn, I had a dad

Mine taught discipline, mine taught structure

Mine didn't mind when he had to pull a double

Mine worked overtime, smiled through the struggle

'Cause mine wouldn't let us feel what he had to suffer

See, mine made sure he had every base covered

So imagine his pain findin' base in the cupboard

Birds don't sing if the words don't sting

Your last few words in my ear still ring (Oh)

You told me that you loved me, it was all in your tone (Oh-oh)

"I love my two sons" was the code to your phone, now you're gone

- No Malice’s first verse after a 16-year hiatus on Birds Don’t Sing.