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March 28, 2009
Ever More Confused than I’d Realized
Over the last 36 hours or so, I’ve devoted considerable (non-existent) spare time to tracking the recent eruption of interest in the drug war and our border with Mexico. The good news is that some rare attention is being paid to what has become a running sore on the body politic of both nations; the bad news is that most of the commentary is seriously uninformed, a handicap based almost entirely on ignorance about marijuana which, somewhat surprisingly, now dominates cross-border smuggling. Who would have thought a famously gentle drug like pot would ever inspire such murderous behavior? Is it reefer madness finally coming true?I don't thinks so; it's more likely a combination of the pot market's continuing maturation and its generally unrealized superiority as an anxiolytic agent (also our sick economy, stupid).
There’s an old adage: “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” That saying has a nice ring, but it requires am important qualifier: the one-eyed man has to be able to convince his fellow subjects that he can see. In today’s world, that qualifier is particularly apt when it comes to public “debate” over the drug war.
Two good examples are the smug editorial in today’s NYT and a recent interview of MPP’s PR specialist by liberal TV host Rachel Maddow. While I have the same problem with Obama’s backing away from his earlier position on pot Maddow gives voice to and Mirken quietly bemoans, I also know that Obama should be particularly interested in my study of pot smokers because his paternal parenting deficit is so frequently reflected in the nearly five thousand individual pot applicant histories I’ve collected to date. In that same vein, I also hear frequently about step-parent difficulties similar to those dogging the new drug czar’s adolescent stepson because they are also encountered with great frequency in those same histories.
In the aggregate, they suggest that cannabis is both the drug most frequently smuggled from Mexico into the US, and the most valuable cash crop harvested within our borders for reasons unexpectedly uncovered by a study being assiduously ignored by both the Medical Marijuana Lobby and the recently downgraded ONDCP.
Perhaps that’s what’s meant by “glacial” progress. Unfortunately, our real glaciers are melting a lot faster faster than their metaphoric drug policy homologues.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at March 28, 2009 09:23 PM