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April 18, 2009
Enough, Already!
For almost four years, I’ve been using this blog to describe an ongoing study of Californians applying for “recommendations” to use marijuana as allowed by Proposition 215 in 1996. When the study began in late 2001, I was almost as clueless as everyone else then arguing over whether there was "valid' medical use, let alone how to define it. What I soon learned was a result of following a long established clinical technique of treating applicants as patients. Thus I soon discovered that the great majority had been self-medicating their emotions safely and effectively with pot for years–– which was the very reason it had become so popular with baby boomers in the Sixties. That part was relatively easy to understand and paved the way for many additional, and equally unexpected, insights.What soon became much more difficult for me to grasp was why my attempts at relaying that information to colleagues in the medical marijuana "movement” were almost immediately and uniformly rebuffed without explanation. I would only later discover that most people, (I have to include myself in the indictment), would rather shrink from “inconvenient” facts than deal with intense disagreement. There is also a smaller minority who apparently can't bring themselves to admit ever being wrong.
A related reason was that the earliest "pot docs," had entered the federally contested pot recommendation arena long before I had. As heads themselves, they were largely unaware that they had been suggesting the conditions I would find in vogue as acceptable excuses for pot use when I started. My sin had been the (largely unconscious) invasion of an alien culture. That I was also unschooled in that culture didn't help my credibility.
A variety of denial devices are illustrated by the “good" Germans of the Thirties most of whom eventually discovered during the war, but others were never able to admit, that all Germans had become victims of Hitler’s earliest rhetoric. In other words, the transient comfort provided by denial may someday command an enormous price.
That same weakness has allowed America’s Drug War to evolve incrementally from a relatively small 1914 exercise in legislative chicanery into today's transnational disaster, one of very few laws being enforced across all political boundaries in today's divided world. Possession of pot in any International port of entry risks being identified as a “druggie” and treated as harshly as local custom allows. While we can't be certain all die-hard drug warriors believe their own dogma, we can be reasonably sure most never got high on pot, and those who did can't admit it.
I'm considering publishing a list of those I think are most culpable in America's drug war follies, along with my reasons. I have been moved to speak out this forcefully by an NPR broadcast to be described in the next entry.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at April 18, 2009 11:33 PM