A few weeks ago Washington’s marijuana legalization law
permitting its “recreational” use, within limits, took effect. Not there hasn’t
been some resistance; a vocal minority have won exemptions from allowing
private marijuana cultivation in one or two communities despite the fact that a
majority of voters in them approved the legalization law. In Pierce County,
unincorporated areas were exempted from the law, probably from pressure from the
county’s sheriff’s department. Of course, “opposition” to the law can go in the
other direction; although the law prohibits toking in public, I often catch the
weed’s pungent aroma wafting in the air around the Seattle. The Seattle Times editorial page has been
bellyaching about these troublemakers like a bunch of nagging Nellies, but I’ve
mentioned what my opinion of the Times.
I predict that contrary to what opponents to legalization
declare, there will be next to no impact on civilization as we know it. There
might even be a positive one, if it persuades those prone to illegal “hard”
drugs to switch to a legal “soft” drug. Not that I’m planning to join in; the
closest thing to an “addiction” I have is to sugar, and I’m trying to detoxify
myself from it. I had never encountered marijuana (or any illegal drug) until I
joined the Army; I might have imbibed
a few times just to be sociable (I remember it being exchanged during a night
navigation course for NCOs), but if I did it didn’t do a thing for me—probably
because I didn’t “inhale.” Whenever I encounter someone who offers to sell me
pot, I tell them “I don’t do that stuff” or something like that, and it’s true.
It’s like cigarettes and alcohol; my taste buds revolt against them.
It might surprise some people to know that drug addiction
was more common over a century ago than today, largely because of the
unregulated overuse of little understood drugs and compounds. Besides
marijuana, opium (including its bi-products—morphine and heroin) and cocaine
had “feel good” characteristics that for the medical profession were convenient
“medications” for hard to diagnose or cure ailments. Such drugs were often the
“active ingredient” in many a quack doctor or medicinal salesman’s magical
elixir. While these potions seemed particularly useful for patients suffering
from fatigue or depression, mostly they just made the user feel “good” for a
while, but when once they come back “down,” nothing had changed.
Probably because marijuana doesn’t have dangerous withdrawal
symptoms and is relatively easy to regulate one’s personal use of, it is hard
to understand why it has such a bad reputation. Far worse substances that were
temporarily legal had horrific consequences. For example, Pierre and Marie
Curie’s discovery of radium—and the latter’s invention of a process to extract
the glowing substance in pure form—led to wild speculation as to the still
largely unknown element’s applications. One of them happened to be applying
radium-based paint to watches, to make their dials glow in the dark. This led
to the “Radium Girls” case, whereas many of the women employed to paint the
watches became fatally ill with various levels of bone and tissue contamination.
Despite the adverse publicity generated from this case, in
the 1920s U.S. regulators were more interested in proper labeling than testing
the safety of new drugs and chemical products. One of these was Radithor,
billed as “radioactive water” capable of curing 150 ailments and even increase
sexual potency; it was sold at the premium cost of $1 a bottle, making it largely within
the price range of the wealthy only. It was
in fact nothing more than distilled water with two microscopic isotopes of
radium mixed in. Radium, like calcium, accumulates in the bones when ingested.
While initially one would feel “invigorated,” this was due to the body’s
defenses against the intruder, which has no biological value. The increase in
blood cell count might make the user feel “potent” for a time, but eventually
the elevated level of radiation destroys bone marrow and causes bones to literally
disintegrate.
Radithor’s best known victim was wealthy
industrialist/playboy Eben Byers, who after injuring his arm was advised by his
doctor to use it. Byers reportedly drank 1400 bottles of this elixir in the
next few years—with enough radium to kill four people; long after his arm
injury cured itself with time, Byers use of the potion became more of a means
to attain a “high.” By the time he realized that something was seriously amiss
with his body, it was too late. At the time of his death, Byers was missing all
or most of both jaws, holes were appearing in his skull, and his skeletal mass
was in a general in a state of disintegration.
While radiation consumption for fun had a brief lifespan,
other drugs have been around since recorded history, and have only relatively
recently been accorded undesirable status.
Opium as a “recreational” drug has been around for at least 5500 years.
The Sumerians grew and consumed what they called the “joy plant.” The ancient
Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Persians all enjoyed the wonders
of opium ingesting. By 400 A.D., opium had reached China, where in time it
practically turned the entire country in dope addicts—so much so that by the
time the Communists took control of the government, measures to stop opium use
were so draconian that whole families who refused to kick the habit were
executed.
Until the early 1900s, opium was viewed to have “medicinal”
qualities in the West. China’s attempt to regulate its opium resulted in two
so-called Opium Wars, won by Western powers who sought unrestricted access to
China’s opium trade. Two bi-products of opium—morphine and heroin—initially
enjoyed widespread acceptance in the medical field. Morphine was commonly used
as a painkiller; ironically, heroin was introduced to wean morphine addicts off
the drug; unfortunately, heroin turned out to be even more addictive, and its withdrawal
symptoms more dangerous.
Cocaine also had a similarly long acceptance status until modern times. Indigenous peoples in South America chewed on coca leaves to give themselves vitality, and the Spanish subsequently used it for its alleged medicinal qualities in the 16th Century. Sigmund
Freud believed that cocaine—besides being a painkiller and “cure” for
depression—stimulated sexual activity. During his initial practice he liberally
touted the drug, until he was embarrassed by the increasing professional
opinion that it had little real medical value; to save his reputation, Freud abandoned
his (public) support of cocaine and concentrated his practice on psychiatry;
his famous work on dreams, however, was likely the product of his drug-induced
hallucinations. The fictional character of Sherlock Holmes was also apparently
a cocaine addict. In the Seventies, it became the “Champaign” of drugs,
although another version of it—“crack”—which could be smoked, became more
widely used in the inner city.
As for marijuana, it was cultivated in China in the Third Century
B.C. for medicinal reasons, while there is evidence that it was used for recreational
reasons in India in the Second Century B.C. The hemp plant is native to Asia,
and did not find its way to the New World until the Spanish conquistadors
brought it with them. In the 17th Century many English colonial governments
required that farmers grow hemp for the production of rope and sails, and it
was a major cash crop until the introduction of cotton and tobacco
cultivation. Napoleon’s French army brought over hashish from Egypt around 1800,
and in the late 19th century a report sponsored by the British government
supported the continued production of marijuana in India, claiming that “there
is no evidence of any weight regarding the mental and moral injuries from the
moderate use of these drugs.”
The earliest efforts to stop the consumption of these drugs
in the U.S. usually targeted racial minorities. A campaign by the Hearst newspapers in the late
19th century railed against the danger of opium-fueled Chinese and Indian
immigrants defiling the sanctity of white women—who always seemed to be the
principle “victim” of “drug-crazed” minorities. Cocaine was once freely
“administered” to black laborers in the belief that it made them work harder
and longer; this was later altered to the belief that it gave them “superhuman”
strength, so much so that it allowed police to claim that they needed more
powerful weaponry to fell a black man in a cocaine-induced state. This was much
the same in the case of marijuana use by Mexican farm laborers, who brought the
“weed” with them from Mexico. Its use created fear among local whites, who
believed that it made Mexicans openly contemptuous of white “superiority,” as
well as into uncontrollable and violent criminals. “Give one of those Mexican
beet field workers a couple of puffs on a marijuana cigarette and he thinks he
is in the bullring at Barcelona,” exclaimed one state lawmaker. Nevertheless, it was for a time
regarded as “legitimate” to use these drugs if a person felt “unwell”—especially
if they were middle-class white women, who were more likely to complain of aches and pains, and thus more often the target of quacks and their potions.
In 1914, Congress passed the first federal legislation that
attempted to halt the use of certain drugs, called the Harrison Act, which
tried to skirt the unconstitutionality of laws that forbid private citizens
from ingesting whatever they pleased into their own bodies by requiring anyone
who provided drugs like heroin and cocaine to keep records of prescriptions and
sales, and to pay prohibitive taxes on those sales. Although technically the
law did not outlaw any drug, the way the law was enforced was draconian. Doctors
were regularly arrested for prescribing opium, heroin and cocaine to addicts;
although the Supreme Court ruled in 1925 that federal government had no
constitutional authority to prevent doctors from prescribing these drugs, later
rulings banned their use for non-medicinal purposes, and further when it was
determined that these drugs had no medicinal value.
Marijuana was still legal in most states in the 1920s, and
the production of hemp for “non-drug” reasons continued, particularly during
the Second World War. During the
so-called “jazz age,” marijuana was used as an alternative to alcohol while
Prohibition was in force. But during the Great Depression, resentment toward
“foreigners”—particularly those of Mexican descent—caused often violent and
unjust acts, such as the literal rounding-up of “Mexicans” regardless of their
legal status and dumping them across the border. Beside “stealing jobs,” it was
thought that it would help remove “reefer madness” from the country, as
marijuana was blamed for all kinds of societal dysfunction introduced by
“foreign”elements. By 1931, 29 states had banned marijuana use.
Meanwhile, morality crusaders and racists like Harry
Anslinger—the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics—kept up the
anti-drug faith until 1937, when FDR signed into law a tax on marijuana, the
sale of which required a “government stamp” which were never in fact
issued—thus de facto criminalizing it. This despite testimony by the American
Medical Association’s Dr. William Woodward, who pronounced that the AMA knew
of “no evidence that marijuana is a
dangerous drug,” and a 1944 scientific study commissioned by Fiorello LaGuardia,
mayor of New York, which found that marijuana use did not intensify incidences
of “sexual drive, violence, or insanity.” LaGuardia supported the legalization
of marijuana, which infuriated Anslinger and caused him to be even more
fanatical in his anti-drug campaign. Not surprisingly, his anti-drug theme had
a racial element; Anslinger apparently disliked jazz music, so much so that he
targeted its practitioners—mostly black—for special scrutiny.
During the Cold War, marijuana was accused of reducing the
vitality of Americans to ward-off the Red—and Mexican—menace; racist angles
always managed to find their way into this “terror.” Many states passed laws
making it crime punishable by a minimum of 20 years in prison for taking a
toke. In many ways the anti-drug campaign was even more fanatical before the
“official” start of the “war on drugs.” In many federal prisons in the 1940s
and 50s, up to half of all inmates were incarcerated for drug-related offenses. But then in
1973, Richard Nixon—alarmed by drug use by American soldiers in Vietnam—created
the Drug Enforcement Agency, and a new “war” was joined. A skeptical Congress
ordered Nixon to conduct a study of the practicality of the various anti-drug
laws in the country; the Shafer Commission, like the LaGuardia study, found
that marijuana was far less dangerous than the fanatics insisted it was. The
commission recommendation that personal use of marijuana be legalized was not
what Nixon wanted to hear, and he ignored the report altogether.
Although some states decriminalized marijuana in the
Seventies, when Ronald Reagan came into office the fanaticism resumed. Again,
the racial element was front and center. The “crack down” on crack cocaine,
cheaper than powder and thus more likely to be used in the inner city, was one
of the center pieces of Reagan’s domestic war on America, or at least certain groups of Americans. While white America
safely consumed powder in the privacy of their homes, black crack addicts in
the inner city made frequent appearances on television news programming. George
H.W. Bush continued to push the longest, most expensive—and most winless—“war”
in this country’s history, while George W. Bush poured money and weaponry into
a campaign whose most notable impact has been the violent deaths of 30,000 people in Mexico since
2006.
The U.S. continues to be the world’s largest market for
illicit drugs, and as long as that continues, so will the “war” without
apparent end. Arresting drug users is a popular pastime among police, since
most of the time these people are too addled or mellow (unless they
have serious psychotic personalities) to give them much trouble, and it gives
police something to do during the (long) slow periods—which is probably why
they’d prefer that marijuana continue to be illegal. But the reality will
likely be that while some people will be annoyed by the more frequent
incidences of marijuana’s pungent aroma, there will otherwise be few noticeable
side effects. Life will continue as usual now as in the past—and if it persuades people that they
don’t need to chance harder drugs, then that should be seen as a “positive”
effect of legalization.
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