I’ve often mentioned how an early understanding that all
candidates for a pot recommendation were already chronic users led me
to screen them with a standardized interview specifically
designed to explore not only whatever medical benefits they were
deriving from their pot use, but also to identify and sort out whatever
common factors might have induced them to become chronic users in the
first place.
It’s now been over four years since that project began and enough of
the data accumulated from interviews has been entered into a modern
relational database to establish that not only have virtually all of
them experienced substantial benefits from their prolonged
illegal self-medication, but also to develop a tentative user ‘profile’
explaining how the current illegal commodity market for
‘marijuana’ has grown steadily to its present dimensions over the past
four decades despite unparalleled police efforts to ‘control’ it.
Beyond that; the unexpectedly complex and changing initiation patterns
exhibited by the study population for a menu of other drugs, including
alcohol and tobacco, also allows a tentative understanding that all repetitive
use of any psychotropic agent may be rooted in a common need to self medicate.
Although beyond the scope of the current data to establish with certainty, that
possibility offers a more coherent explanation of the government’s own
annual surveys than ‘gateway,’ and also establishes how the gateway
hypothesis was arrived at.
Which brings me to the next point: aside from chronic pot use, another
behavioral phenomenon I’ve had to explain was the irrational, yet
amazingly uniform, rejection by 'reformers' of a study I thought
they would have both understood and supported. Unfortunately, the best
explanation of that particular phenomenon seems to be that— just like
pot smoking itself— denial of unpleasant reality is yet another
form of human behavior which is both more common and more
characteristic of our species than most of us seem either able to
realize or willing to admit.
It further appears that the need to deny unpleasant (‘inconvenient’)
reality may well be our species’ most pervasive and dangerous weakness;
one which most accurately reflects not only why American (and
global) illegal drug markets have grown to their current
dimensions, but also why so many of the political problems of our
increasingly crowded and interdependent planet seem further beyond
solution than ever.
In other words, the implications of ‘inconvenient truth’ may be
far more profound than the producers of Al Gore’s movie realize.
An amazing thing just happened in real time: as I was doing the final
checks on the entry, I checked my email (it’s Sunday morning) and
immediately encountered a
fascinating article in today’s NYT Magazine; one I’ve only had a
chance to skim, but already know I’ll be parsing in detail for quite
some time...
