On April 20, the FDA released what was clearly intended as an
authoritative 'advisory'
explaining
that ‘marijuana’ shouldn’t be taken seriously as medicine because it
must be smoked! That statement has since been parsed more exensively—
and critically— than any comparable official statement of drug war
dogma I can remember. While I still haven’t read all the critical
comments, I’m disturbed that I have yet to see one clearly stating what
seems to me its most shocking (albeit unintentional) disclosure: the
degree to which ’science’ has been distorted to defend a destructive
policy of failiure.
An inescabable collateral realization is that many of our
‘leading
scientific institutions’ have been bullied into grossly compromising
their supposedly hallowed scientific principles— without a peep of
protest.
For those still in denial, the drug war’s remote origins were a series
of judicial decisions made nearly 100 years ago when the US Supreme
Court was sufficiently persuaded by superficial and misleading analysis of
what— even then— was incomplete and biased evidence, to embrace
three
key fallacies. The first was that ‘addicition’ is the most important
risk of using ‘narcotics’ (that term then applying only to
opiates and
cocaine) the second, was that abstinence is the only acceptable goal of
addiction treatment. The third was that physicians can’t be trusted to
prevent addiction in their patients or to treat it properly when it
occurs; thus police and criminal sanctions are essential elements of
the nation’s Public Health.
The subsequent history of our drug policy is that its inflexible
nature— and the prerogatives conferred by the Court on its enforcement
bureaucracy — were protected by a single bureaucrat for over three
decades after he took over the FBN in 1930. Other than skillfully
protecting the Bureau’s intellectual turf, Harry Anslinger’s most
important contribution was the 1937 MTA, which added cannabis as a
third proscribed agent on scientifically absurd grounds.
Otherwise,
his tenure can now be seen as most noteworthy for what never happened:
any significant expansion of the three illegal markets created by the
policy.
However, his departure in 1962 was followed by three events which would
soon dramatically reshape and enlarge all illegal drug markets within a
single tumultuous decade: the introduction 'psychedelics' and several
other new psychotropic agents, the discovery of cannabis by a
significant fraction of American youth, and the 1968 election of
Richard Nixon.
Even before Nixon’s ‘drug war’ was empowered by the CSA
(1970),
reinforcd by the DEA (1973), and another agency (NIDA) created to
defend its ‘scientific’ purity in 1975, it had been on an upward
trajectory. Some momentum was lost following the Watergate disgrace;
but it was quickly recovered— and then some— after Reagan’s election in
1980. Since then, the policy has becme so dominant in Washington that
its major political risk may be that unwitting revelations like the
clueless 4/20 FDA proclamation could trigger enough public recognition
of its foolishness to bring about insight and repudiation
In that context, one wonders just when— and if— the leadership of the
drug policy reform movemment will ever ‘get it.’
