« | Main | Politically Correct Pot »
July 27, 2006
An Impertinent Question
The first of several lessons I've learned from my immersion in the medical marijuana issue for the past four years is that American drug policy has been an even more dishonest and destructive fraud than I’d ever imagined. What allows me to say that is data I've acquired from chronic users; data medical marijuana 'activists' simply refuse to either acknowledge or discuss; with a degree of unanimity that is itself very revealing
The second is that there seem to be at least two important reasons why the drug war has become such a widely supported global policy despite its multiple obvious failures (indeed it has NO lasting ‘successes’). One is that such a policy seems ideally suited to the secret desires of most governments to snoop on their citizens while maintaining well funded police and intelligence services; the other is that the political opponents of drug prohibition are at least as clueless and ideological in their own thinking as the most doctrinaire drug warriors–– and they have a lot less money to spend.
The third–– and from an existential point of view, perhaps most important–– lesson is that the highly evolved brain which has allowed humans to establish mastery over the rest of the planet seems deeply flawed in at least one critical respect: its singular inability to study our own behavior with anything like the same objectivity that allowed our recently discovered scientific method to ‘solve’ the 'problems' once constraining human population growth. The dirty little secret, which can't even be discussed at the moment, is that our sheer numbers may have already trapped us aboard a planet which is simultaneously undergoing sudden climate change while we are forced to deal with the possibility that the international 'rule of law' that facilitated the concentration of so much wealth in the hands of so few may not be enforceable for much longer.
Once one considers the cascade of possible catastrophes that could be lurkng around the next corner and realizes how little we seem able to control the raw emotions now so evident on the nightly news, it's difficult to believe that 'business as usual' will persist for long.
Again; the obvious connection to cannabis is that it's clearly being used by a majority of its chronic users to deal with the dysphoria of everyday life. One relevant question then becomes why do the chronic cannabis users I've been questioning for the past four years seem to know so little about the organizations claiming to represent both them and 'medical' use?
Posted by tjeffo at July 27, 2006 03:04 AM