Marijuana- America’s new favorite drug?
Marijuana is back. Safer than alcohol it is a mild psychoactive drug used all over the world for thousands of years. Nobody has ever died from smoking it. It has been used as medicine in cultures around the world. Even that symbol of propriety England’s Queen Victoria used it to ease her menstrual cramps.
These days hundreds of studies from around the world tell of its effectiveness in helping those suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, AIDS, Glaucoma, Crone’s Disease, and a long list of ailments. 14 states have approved its use for medical purposes and the bill in the New York State legislature would make it 15.
In July the Veteran’s Administration approved its use if recommended by a VA doctor. Of special interest to them is its use in treating the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) so common among Vets. Remember… the VA is a branch of the same federal government that officially claims marijuana has no medical use.
The U.S. Patent Office opened a department specifically to trademark names of different types of marijuana. Names like Acapulco Gold, Skunk, Agent Orange, and Third Dimension, could be registered to an individual or corporation for use only by them just like “Coke” or “Marlboro”. The office was open for several months before someone realized that marijuana was, under federal law, very illegal and the federal government couldn’t be selling trademark rights to illegal products. It was closed a couple of months ago.
Now marijuana is moving beyond just medicine. California has a bill that will be voted on by the public in November calling for marijuana to be taxed and regulated… just like alcohol… legalized. The polls show it will be a very close vote… about 50% for the idea and 50% against. If it doesn’t pass this year it will probably pass next year. However, 65% believe it is at least somewhat likely marijuana will be legalized in the United States in the next 10 years. A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds that just 17% of Adults rate use of marijuana as riskier than drinking alcohol. Fifty percent (50%), about three times as many say alcohol is more dangerous.
Altering one’s consciousness is a natural human trait. Children love to spin around and get dizzy. For adults in today’s society alcohol is, for better or worse, our consciousness - altering drug of choice. The different tribes of American Indians used tobacco, peyote, coca, or psychedelic mushrooms. To the best of my knowledge the only culture not to use some form of plant to alter their consciousness are the Eskimos of the far north simply because nothing grows there.
Marijuana is certainly safer than alcohol - nobody has ever died from smoking it and you can’t say that about alcohol. It seems that America is moving away from alcohol as its favorite recreational drug . As the country makes that move it will leave behind not only the problems associated with alcohol use but the terrible costs, both in money and ruined lives, of marijuana prohibition. It’s high time.
Even Meth ????!!!
When I speak to people about drug policy and suggest that the answer to our drug problems may be legalization the most common reaction is an incredulous “Even Meth?” It’s inevitable. Whether it’s a college class or a Rotary Club that question is always asked. Why…? Why is meth perceived as significantly different from other illegal drugs? Why can’t the common sense logic that allows people to see the damage to society that prohibition causes be equally obvious when it comes to methamphetimine? The principle is the same regardless of the potential danger of whatever it is society decides to prohibit.
Obviously the information most people have about the drug is garnered from the media. The media is, of course, looking for exciting stories that will sell papers or boost viewership. What do they cover? The horrible effects of some poor unfortunate who has been doing nothing but taking meth for years and has now lost his teeth, his skin is sallow, his eyes wild. He’s been incarcerated repeatedly, is unemployed, and now lives in a doorway in a deserted neighborhood in Detroit. A true story comparable to that of a skid-row alcoholic. Excessive use is certainly not good for you. No argument there however it is not a portrait of a typical user anymore than the skid-row derelict is a typical alcohol drinker.
Did you know military aviators are often given amphetamines? “During the Falklands conflict sedatives were used by the British to regulate sleep for pilots. Amphetamines were used by the British and Germans in WWII. During Vietnam both the Air Force and Navy made amphetamines available to aviators. Intermittently since Vietnam up through Desert Storm the Air Force has used both amphetamines and sedatives in selected aircraft for specific missions” Don’t believe me? That’s a quote from a US Naval Surgeon’s Manual called “Performance Maintenance During Continuous Flight Operations,”
Country music fans may recall Dave Dudley’s big hit back in 1963 about a trucker heading home … “Six Days on the Road” which featured the line “I’m taking little white pills, And my eyes are open wide.” … those little white pills that kept him awake alert were pretty common for truck drivers throughout the 50’s and 60’s . Before the drug war I’m told ”bennies” (Benzedrine) sold in truck stops at 10 for a dollar. Pure liquid methamphetamine or Desoxin (meth tablets) could be acquired easily with a doctor’s prescription. Amphetemines were sold over-the-counter, with no prescription until the early 1950’s!
So is there a difference between the stuff pilots and truckers were taking and the stuff cooked up in meth labs today? Back then those amphetimines were produced by legitimate pharmaceutical companies and contained only what they said they contained on the label. Who knows what impurities are in the stuff cooked into homemade meth?
Today’s home meth labs create other problems as well. The chemicals used to manufacture the stuff are highly toxic. Today’s illegal makers dump the by-products in the ground or into the nearest stream or river… not good for the environment. Often the houses used are so full of spilled chemicals they become uninhabitable after the lab is busted or the makers move on.
Drug prohibition has only taken a dangerous drug and created a black market for it, making it still more dangerous. At least when you bought meth back then you knew it was meth…and only meth. Did some people get harmed by meth back then? Of course, but dangerous chemicals weren’t winding up in our water table. Families with children weren’t moving into poisonous homes recently vacated by home-style methmakers. Would people still abuse it and ruin their lives if it were legal? Of course… but, on the whole, the rest of us would be better off.
Today’s Victorians
Back in the late 1800’s in Victorian England an unwed mother was treated as a pariah. The chambermaid who was seduced by the master of the house… the shop girl seduced by the charming sailor, or the society debutant seduced by the handsome cad with a title, they were all considered vile fallen women by polite society. The wealthy in this situation might move abroad, concoct some story about being a widow and start anew in the south of France perhaps. The poor had no such options.
Of course no pregnant unmarried woman could continue to work in public. No proper home would tolerate such a moral failure as a cook or parlourmaid. No shop would allow a fallen woman to serve their decent customers and no decent customer would enter a shop that did. So what these girls do? Where did they give birth? There was no public hospital that would accept them. No emergency room to go to when labor began. They gave birth in filthy rooms in cheap tenements or even in alleyways.
There were a couple of birthing hospitals run by nuns but these were grim establishments were the pregnant women were treated like criminals, made to pray and beg forgiveness incessantly during their stay. They were told how bad they had been and forced to work until labor pains made it impossible. Such places were but marginally better than a dirty tenement room to have a baby in.
When some kind society women had the idea to open a birthing hospital for such women, a clean place, staffed by midwives and nurses, a place where unwed mothers could give birth without being judged or mistreated they met with fierce opposition from society. “You are simply encouraging this sort of immoral behavior” they were told. “If these women are offered a free place such as you propose to give birth to their bastards what’s to prevent them from repeating their vile behavior? What’s to prevent other women, seeing your helping arms awaiting, from emulating them? It will be the end of morality in England.”
It took many years for such places to put together the funding needed to operate. Unwed mothers were thought to be solely at fault for their wanton behavior. Much convincing of bankers and the wealthy that to be an unwed mother meant being shunned by polite society. It promised slim prospects for marriage in the future. Employment for a woman with a child was almost impossible. It meant a life of hardship far beyond the hardships typically endured by the working classes of the time. Providing a few days of decent treatment for a woman giving birth was hardly going to be sufficient enticement to others to get pregnant out of wedlock.
So why am I telling you about pregnant shop girls in Victorian England? A very similar battle rages today. People, dealing with the travails of life (poverty, unfaithful spouses, massive growth in the prison population, racism, and, of course, in many cases, plain old stupidity ) become addicted to heroin. Society sees to it that they have to buy their heroin from unlicensed sources on the street. That heroin is unregulated as to purity or potency and could be cut with anything from plaster dust to rat poison. Death from impurities or just excessive potency is relatively common. Clean needles are often unobtainable resulting in the spread of diseases ranging from minor skin infections to Hepatitis, to AIDS. As the dosage is unregulated consciousness is not always possible so employment is impossible. And of course there is always the threat of arrest and incarceration waiting around every corner. Not a pleasant way of life.
When some caring people come along and talk about ways to remove some of the most serious problems that plague drug addicts (and cost the rest of society a fortune to boot) they are told such measures will make drug addiction more popular. “If you remove the threat of AIDS by giving addicts clean needles you make it more acceptable to be an addict” they say. “If you provide free needles others will get them, fill them with heroin and get addicted.” Yes… the life of an impoverished heroin addict is so appealing that without the threat of contracting AIDS millions would succumb… Sure. “Providing a clean injection room where IV drug users could get clean needles and shoot up in sterile surroundings and talk to healthcare professionals about their health, perhaps even enter treatment voluntarily would remove all the stigma of drug addiction. It would become an attractive lifestyle to others” Uh huh…
Here we are one hundred plus years down the road and Victorian morality is still with us.
Geriatric Zombies
Here comes the latest scare tactic in the seemingly never-ending fight to extend the life of the failed policy of prohibition. Back in the 1930’s we were shown images of marijuana-crazed “addicts” restrained in straight-jackets, hair messed up, black circles around the eyes; “this could be you were you to be so foolish as to smoke so much as one marijuana cigarette” was the message.
As more and more people failed to believe that marijuana made you a raving lunatic prohibitionists pushed the “gateway theory”. This scare tactic maintained that since the majority of heroin addicts started their drug use by smoking marijuana that proved that marijuana use led almost inevitably to using like heroin. Of course the overwhelming majority of heroin addicts also drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and/or drank alcohol but these drugs are legal so they didn’t count. The real question to ask is “What percentage of marijuana smokers go on to use heroin?” That number is tiny… in the low single digits. In spite of the convoluted logic of the gateway theory it is still pulled out of the bag regularly and the public still fails to see the fundamental fallacy in its premise.
Last year we had many stories in the press reporting on a British study that purported to show a strong link between teenage marijuana use and schizophrenia. That got lots of attention until other researchers took a look overall marijuana use rates in the UK. If marijuana use causes schizophrenia then in times when smoking marijuana was popular like in the late sixties and early seventies schizophrenia diagnoses should have risen. They stayed the same however and further research showed that the correlation was due to teens self-medicating themselves in an attempt to alleviate some of the early symptoms of the illness. Of course that research didn’t get nearly the airtime that the “marijuana causes schizophrenia” story did.
Now I read that Dr. Richard Dupee, chief of geriatrics at Tufts Medical Center is painting a picture of millions of boomers turning into what I can only describe as geriatric zombies. Apparently the concern is that all these pot-smoking boomers are going to develop memory loss to the degree that it will be indistinguishable from Alzheimers.
According to a recent survey by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) roughly 5.2 percent of Americans ages 50 to 59 had used marijuana in the past year. Peter Delany, the substance abuse agency’s director of the Office of Applied Studies said “We are projecting that by the year 2020, we will probably have enough people in the 50-to-59 age group needing [substance abuse] treatment that we will probably need to double the number of treatment facilities. ”
Now most of these boomer marijuana users have been using for 30 or 40 years. Most function quite acceptably in society, hold good jobs such as teacher, factory worker, doctor, attorney, or even President of the United States. They marry and raise children, travel, go skiing, sailing, and do all the things non-marijuana smoking Americans do but suddenly they will all need drug treatment. This is just another in a long history of claims totally unsubstantiated by the facts designed to scare the public.
H.L. Mencken said “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Geriatric zombies indeed… and no, I’m not interested in buying that bridge you’ve got for sale either!
Presidential science:Marijuana is dangerous but alcohol is not.
You may remember President Obama promising to listen to science when determining policies. “I’ll change the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.” he told Computer World.
To the Washington Post he said : “Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources - it’s also about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about letting scientists like those who are here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s
inconvenient - especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda - and that we make scientific decisions based on
facts, not ideology.”
Good stuff…were it true. In reality the President’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowski pronounced marijuana “dangerous” the other day. The President invited his friend Professor Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. and the police officer that arrested him to the White House for a beer. The drug czar pronounced marijuana “dangerous” but the President thinks it’s OK to drink alcohol, a far more dangerous intoxicant.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), alcohol is the third-leading preventable cause of death in the United States, with about 35,000 deaths attributed to its use each year, including hundreds from accidental overdose. The CDC does not report any deaths attributable to the use of marijuana. So much for science.
During the hearings in Congress back in 1937 about making marijuana illegal Congress had heard quite fantastic annecdotal marijuana horror stories from Harry Anslinger and others and convened with the intent of passing a bill prohibiting the drug. The only medical testimony heard was that of a Dr. William C. Woodward. Dr. Woodward was a lawyer and a doctor and he was Chief Counsel to the American Medical Association. Dr. Woodward testified representing the American Medical Association and said: “The American Medical Association knows of no evidence that marihuana is a dangerous drug.”
The next quote in the record comes from a Congressman who said: “Doctor, if you can’t say something good about what we are trying to do, why don’t you go home?” Another Congressman said, “Doctor, if you haven’t got something better to say than that, we are sick of hearing you.”
Apparently Obama & Kerlikowski are just continuing in a long-standing tradition of ensuring that “scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda”
