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February 24, 2013
E-mail to 2 Friends (2-23-13)
Because I regard the two of you as among my most important friends and supporters in the drug policy "reform" movement, I'm taking the first opportunity I've had in a week to update you on what has happened to me over the past month- and most dramatically- in the past week.To cut to the chase, I've now been forced out of the house I've been making mortgage payments on since June 2003. The circumstances are bizarre, to say the least, but are eminently understandable in terms of the unique research I've been engaged in since I started interviewing admitted cannabis users pursuant to their requests for the meager legal protection made available to them by California's Proposition 215.
Both of you have met J, my second wife, a person I still love deeply but have just become estranged from since leaving our home under duress last Saturday afternoon following a complex series of events I won't try to describe in detail.
Suffice it to say that her son by another marriage, a boy of seven when we met, but now a malevolent angry male of 43 (as of Feb 16) was primarily responsible. He's a person I have provided total financial support for from the time J and I began living together in February 1977.
Unfortunately, he seems warped beyond salvation by a hatred for me that, in retrospect, I should not find that surprising, based on the unexpected findings revealed by my searching interviews of chronic cannabis users as (grudgingly) permitted by Proposition 215.
Mike, your analysis of the initiative's potential in the last few pages of Drug Crazy was- to use your favorite word- monumental. It was also prescient in ways neither of us could have understood when we spoke about the study in 2004 or 2005.
I knew when you used that word that you'd support my cause with R, and his funding soon produced the specialized data base C created for us. Without it as a research tool, all my applicant interviews would have been indecipherable hash. The DB has not only enabled peer-reviewed publication of a revealing study about an issue that remains inexplicably ignored; that very lack of discussion is begging critical questions which suggest that when the current denial is finally addressed, the human drug problems will can be brought closer to resolution.
Only then will we gain the required understanding of our own behavior rather than dismissing it as a set of unrelated phenomena under the rubric of "human nature."
I will end here by observing that neither Richard Nixon nor John Mitchell could possibly have imagined the misery and repression their "quick fix" for the Supreme Court's unexpected nullification of Harry Anslinger's Marijuana Tax Act would lead to.
For them, it was just a bit of clever rhetoric intended to regain the initiative from their youthful anti-war adversaries. For the rest of the world it quickly became a potentially endless war on both "drugs" and the unborn victims of careless human parenting in a world that's clearly been overpopulated by our species and can no longer afford the energy consumption it has (we have) become so accustomed to.
What is cruelly ironic is that cannabis is a drug that encourages agreement by dispelling the anxiety produced in humans by uncertainty. Had its clinical effects been addressed four decades ago, it would have mitigated our modern crisis. Instead, we rewarded the forces of repression and "control" by making cannabis categorically illegal and forbidding any honest research.
Tom
Posted by tjeffo at February 24, 2013 12:15 AM