This column will be more wise and serene than usual because my iced tea has St. John's wort.

It will be more lucid and intellectually formidable because my lemonade contains ginkgo biloba. The prose will be more energetic because my cranberry juice cocktail has ginseng. My fingers are hitting the keyboard with the force of an angry teenage Clydesdale because my sports drink has creatine. And my jokes are going to be more hilarious than usual because I'm drunk.

And the first herbally fortified observation I'd like to make is that none of this stuff seems to be doing anything – except the booze, of course, which, as usual, is causing the pencils to dance around. The ginkgo makes the lemonade taste kind of mediciney. The ginseng is making the cranberry juice taste like iced tea. The St. John's wort is making the iced tea taste like something that costs about a dollar more than iced tea. And all this liquid is making me ... I'll be back in a second.

But beyond that, nothing. So why do we add all these herbs to everything?

My theory is that we're pretending to take drugs.

Officially, everyone yells that substance abuse is bad. But deep down, we still think drugs will keep us from turning into our parents. We want to feel like we're Dennis Hopper trying out hair products with Bianca Jagger, when all we're really doing is buying Snapple. Even the medical establishment is playing along, grumbling that herbal supplements ought to be regulated the way drugs are. It's ironic, but the only people who think these drugs aren't basically a scam are also the only people who want to outlaw them.

Advertisers see what's going on, and they're working the drug angle – emphasizing the biological effects of everything they sell. I didn't realize how far this had gone until I went to buy milk.

"Uh, there's no milk in the dairy case," I said to my local grocer. "There's nothing in there but shredded newspaper, and whenever I ask about it, people hand me bumper stickers that say `D.A.R.E. to stay off milk.’"

"That's because the MAN doesn't want you to HAVE milk," said my grocer, an unshaven young man in a cream colored suit, wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night. "The MAN is afraid of the milk BUZZ. But I got some behind the counter. Low fat, non-fat. Dude, I got half-and-half."

"What kind of buzz do you get from half-and-half?" I asked.

"It, like, mellows you out, especially if you mix it with pasta. Hey. You want to try something awesome?" He brought out a bag of carrots. And actually, I wanted carrots. But he wouldn't let me take them until I looked at the commercial for them. A giant TV screen nearby showed a tree. The tree melted into a glowing purple and yellow blob. Flying bugs ate the blob and formed a psychedelic face of Alexander Hamilton, then exploded like the Death Star in "Star Wars." A message popped up at the bottom of the screen:

"You should eat more carrots."

"I really," I said, "really want those carrots."

"Got a 12-pound turkey too," he said. "Contains tryptophan. Eat turkey all night and write down stuff you think about. Or here's a five-pound block of chocolate, if you just don't care what happens to you anymore."

"This is getting a little heavy. Just tell me what that is over there."

"Uh ...‚ beer."

"What's it do?"

"I saw a commercial for it once. It just said it's ..., uh, cold. It's made out of really, really cold water. And grain. Kind of like Malt-o-Meal."

"Same thing with the whiskey?"

"If I'm reading the ads right, people drink whiskey because it tastes like oak barrels."

"Hm. What do the ads say about cigarettes?"

"Apparently, those are just plain delicious."

"Well, the turkey sounds kind of hard-core. But I want the milk, and I'm wondering what the effect would be if I mixed it with the chocolate. Don't forget those carrots.

"And what the heck. Give me some cigarettes for the baby."