A recent spate of articles has chronicled a new effort to legalize pot. A bill has been introduced in Sacramento supporting legalization, regulation and taxation, while Pennsylvania and Illinois legislatures ponder medical marijuana. But in many quarters our strange and hypocritical national dialogue on pot continues unabated.
In a column with a narrative so trite and packed with non-sequitur anecdotes that it would make Thomas Friedman nauseous (or perhaps not), New York Times education columnist Michael Winerip treats readers to a set of "you'll understand when you're older" commonsensicals:
"But the 50-something me, the parent of three boys and a girl, ages 14 to 21, is not so sure. The 50-something me -- who hasn't smoked in more than 20 years -- knows stories in our little suburb about classmates of my kids smoking pot in middle school, using heroin in college, going into rehab, relapsing, trying again."
The article is enigmatically titled "Legalization? Now for the Hard Question." What that hard question is is never articulated, but I suppose that it's left implicit in his bizarre semi-biographical defense of drug prohibition and support for the reverse-engineered "gateway drug" myth.
The piece ends with Winerip cudgeling legalization activist Ethan Nadelmann (who -- gasp -- has a PhD from Harvard!) into admitting that he still, at ripe middle age, smokes pot -- and has even done so in the presence of children... [pause for reader to make a call to protective services].
"Is legalizing marijuana next? It may make sense. It may happen. But with so many boomers, including our president, now parents raising children, I'm not so sure," he writes. Winerip does not, however, explain how pot could be made any more available to American teenagers (whom I counted myself amongst not long ago) than it already is.
Perhaps the dear columnist has simply never had the pleasure of viewing the BBC's Planet Earth? The world of well-adjusted adult people who smoke pot is one of America's best-kept secrets.
As Nadelmann notes, it is now acceptable to admit pot smoking as preterit (thanks, Barack), a big step forward from the awkward half-admissions of the 1990s. Nadelmann is right. People have to "come out" as smokers, however ridiculous that may sound, or it will never be legalized.
A big problem with drug legalization politics is that to speak or act in favor of pot legalization tends to identify one as a stoner, a patchouli-soaked hippy associated with the most pathetically single-issue of politics. I know lots of intelligent folks, from professors and lawyers to carpenters, teachers and union organizers that smoke -- but none of them wants their personality or politics to be defined by smoking pot. It's as if there's absolutely no line between discreet social smoking and donning a shirt reading "Hemp Wanted" (full disclosure: my 15-year old self owned such a shirt, and a High Times subscription to boot). One can't write or agitate around drugs -- or, for that matter, sex -- without exposing oneself to a ridiculous set of caricatures.
I don't know anyone my age who thinks it's cool to loudly associate yourself with drug use -- a predilection I tend (aside from this post) to share. Even on the left, the bacchanalian, yippie, gonzo journalism engaging musings on sex and drugs at times seem to confront a renewed Puritanism -- biographically, my writing on the subjects is mostly limited to blogs. In my social circle, such a loud embrace puts one somewhere slightly below Trekkie on the cool-o-meter. (Okay, yes, the new movie is great).
I clearly remember attending the Boston Smoke Fest at age 17, roaming the elevated multitudes as a self-appointed representative of the 2000 Nader campaign, waging an uphill and for some reason very impassioned fight against the hegemony of Libertarians at such events. I hoped against hope that because we could bond over a bong they would share my enthusiasm for fighting imperialism and backing labor rights. Some cared, many didn't; but most people were kind enough to pass me their bowl, bong, joint or blunt.
I haven't been involved in drug-related activism since I was in high school, but pot and drug decriminalization are still important, for reasons -- like the mass incarceration of people of color and the mindless, blood-soaked, hypocritical war on Latin America -- that go far beyond my personal and epicurean drive to, on occasion, get high and have a good time.
I believe it is the case that whatever happens to a person or how they come to be in the hospital, if prior cannabis use is reported or found then that is recorded as the causal agent of the event that brought them to the hospital. Perhaps hospitals have begun to test for cannabis use as a routine matter on behalf of the "War on Some Drugs". The writer could have totally made it up from thin air. Who knows?
The truth is, it takes more time to write a thoughtful piece with some considered research than to just throw out every silly, unsubstantiated, irrelevant statement that exists in prohibitionist lore. They can splash irrelevant and misleading information everywhere with no effort.
The best one can hope for is that people gradually begin to think for themselves and see cannabis prohibition for the excuse to disenfranchise, terrorize and jail people that it is.
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/78886/?page=entire
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0522/p08s01-comv.html
"Emergency-room admissions where marijuana is the primary substance involved increased by 164 percent from 1995 to 2002 – faster than for other drugs, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network. "
What? This sounds like spin of some sort. Does anyone know the facts? How would someone end up in the emergency room from marijuana alone?
Thanks in advance.
For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, a friend of mine from HuffPo and I have started up a website to distribute real legitimate information, including scientific studies, and disspell myths about the wonderful green herb we love so much, and its relationship to pharmaceuticals ie medical marijuana.
So if anyone is interested in joining our little band of merry misfits, come join us:
http://patients4medicalmarijuana.wordpress.com/
Here's some of my list:
1. Prison-Industrial Complex
2. Big Pharma
3. Big Oil
4. Right-Wing Religous Wackos aka American Taliban (or majority of Republicans now)
5. Chemical Industry
6. Big Agriculture
7. Alcohol & Tobacco Industry
We might as well make french fries illegal. There would be more public health benefit.
We have taught our teenage son that the best life to live is a clean and healthy one, without drugs of ANY kind; that tobacco is highly addictive and will kill you; that alcohol will likely not kill you unless it is mixed with automobiles; and that the most dangerous thing about marijuana is its illegality. Hopefully, he will make intelligent choices, as he has so far.
"In more prohibition-related violence at the U.S. Mexican border..."
This might actually get the millions of rational people who don't think they know any pot smokers to think about the problem in real terms...even though they don't think it affects them (they're wrong, of course, because the prison-industrial complex is bankrupting State & local governments everywhere)
Also, if you're involved in an accident and come up positive for marijuana, now "drugs were involved."
If you get busted for weed at college, you lose your student loans even thought the President of the United States (and former President of the Harvard Law Review) was a regular pot smoker. If you're a rapist, or a Klan member burning a cross, that's OK, you can keep you financial aid.
There also is the issue of what a person does after they leave the workplace is their business.
Of course there are some jobs where I myself wouldn't want the employee to be stoned on the job or even after they have left the workplace. These jobs are semi-truck driving, train engineers, heavy equipment operators, medical occupations and some jobs where hazardous chemicals are used. Office workers and retail jobs shouldn't be affected, however.
If pot is legalized, most urine and hair testing should be abolished or the tests should look for more dangerous drugs instead.
There is a principled argument for choking an unjust legal system with consciencious objectors, but you've got to have a critical mass of unusually dedicated people before you can do that. Otherwise it is suicide, and a great way to betray your own cause. When your side has been hounded into obscurity by unjust Power that has all force and no righteousness on its side, and will freely use overwhelming legal power against you, then unlawful resistance is the only sensible route.
And your argument against smoking pot/cheating on taxes argument is so illogical that it doesn't deserve attention. Have you ever heard of human rights, or are they only granted to us by our Benevolent Monarch?
Trading in marijuana is cheating on taxes, and you obviously don't understand how/why we pay taxes if you don't understand that.
End the profitable witch hunt of marijuana prohibition!
Oops, who knew? There was no weed and they were fired, the criminalization can back fire on corrupt cops trying to confiscate property they lust after. I loved it.