I found the song Let's Go Get Stoned, sung by Ray Charles, from 1966, and was shocked that he would record a song in the mid 60s that was so explicitly about marijuana. Then I realized that by "stoned" he meant "drunk". I know that this sense of the word stuck around for a while, like Billy Joel's Piano Man from 1973. ("The businessmen slowly get stoned")
But it seems (from my experience with pop culture) that sometime in the 80s "stoned" began to mean high on pot. e.g. this Andy Kauffman sketch from 1981. ("I can't play stoned") So, what's the deal? How'd this term get switched from booze to pot? And why not another term for "drunk"? Also, is this the right subreddit for posting this? I figured it's an American cultural history question, or would it be better in r/Asklinguists?
The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary that shows 'stoned' relating specifically to non-alcohol intoxicants is from 1953. It reads:
Stoned, under the influence of drugs.
You can't get much more straightforward, or dull, than that.
The citation is from Traffic in Narcotics, co-written by Harry Anslinger, who was head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for over thirty years. Anslinger made a personal crusade, especially in the 1930s, out of what he perceived to be the degenerating effects of marijuana; the Wikipedia page is probably the Web's most judicious overview of his career, if you can believe that. Whatever his enthusiasms, he served under every president from Hoover to Kennedy, and retired of his own volition.
The next citation is from 1956, in the much more interesting prose style of Ed McBain:
You're an H-man..and we know you copped three decks a little while back. Are you stoned now, or can you read me?
When Ray Charles recorded Let's Go Get Stoned, 'stoned' could mean whatever the listener wanted it to mean. Years later, Bob Dylan's Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 put 'everybody must get stoned' onto every transistor radio on every beach in the USA; it encountered some censorship, but not enough to keep it from sailing into the Billboard Top 10.
This might be a better question for /r/etymology.
From my understanding, the phrase "stoned" in the 60s was used in the same way as it is today.
There are the sayings like "stone-drunk or "out stone-cold" that were used to describe being extremely drunk well before the 60s, which is where the term "stoned" originally came from, but I have not heard of the phrase "stoned" itself being used to describe alcoholic intoxication.
Source: The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: J-Z
"Once or twice a few had fallen in with pot or tea as it was called then and I picked up for the first time one morning and got so stoned I was unable to move." -Jim Schock Life is a Lousy Drag in 1958 (pg 1553)
As a supplemental to this, I noticed at some point that in films made during the 70s and 80s, "Straight" tends to mean "I don't do drugs" rather than "I'm not gay". I'm pretty sure there's a joke about it in Airplane.
Do we know, was it always a dual meaning there, or did it shift?