The one on my site contains a point-by-point rebuttal.
And, if you would have checked further, you would have found that they wrote it because I wrote a manual for the reform side which basically enabled people to kick their butts around the block. The original title of their booklet was “How to Hold Your Own in a Drug Legalization Debate”. They changed the name after we pointed out that the title pretty well assumed that the best they could do was to hold their own. Publishing this booklet didn’t change much for them – they still lose the debate wherever they go and have adopted a policy of just not showing up for debates. That’s fine with us, of course, because every time a debate is scheduled, they wind up just leaving the audience to us.
Marijuana was originally outlawed because “All Mexicans are crazy and marijuana is what makes them crazy” and because of the fear that heroin addiction would lead to the use of marijuana. (Read that again to make sure you got it right.)
The people who wrote the Federal drug prohibition laws recognized that it would be unconstitutional for the Federal Government to try to prohibit people from putting something into their own bodies on at least two grounds. The first was basically a constitutional privacy issue which you may have already heard. The second was an issue of states rights – that is, if anyone had the constitutional ability to prohibit drugs, it would be the states, not the Feds.
Therefore, technically, they didn’t prohibit these drugs at all. They simply placed a prohibitive tax on them. That is, they placed a tax on each non-medical transfer (sale), and required a license to deal in the drugs. Of course, no one would pay the tax because it was so high as to be prohibitive and, thus, the trade was effectively prohibited. When people were arrested, they were not charged with possession of the drug but with a tax violation. By this means, they were able to do an end-run around the constitutional restrictions. There was no law against using the stuff, but you couldn’t acquire it without breaking the law.
No, the symptoms do not return. Flashbacks are a myth.
Most teachers are misinformed on the subject. In fact, for most of the American public, most of what they think they know about the subject is probably wrong. That’s the result of a decades long dedicated disinformation campaign by the Federal Government.
The reason it doesn’t cause a lot of accidents is because it doesn’t have any great effect on coordination like alcohol does. Road and Track did an article titled “Puff, the Dangerous Driver” in 1980 in which they tried to demonstrate the deleterious effects of alcohol and pot on driving. The trouble was that, while alcohol drinkers got steadily worse at the course the more they consumed, the pot smokers just got slightly better.
One of the common things you will hear about drugs is that their effects are a result of Set and Setting. In other words, one of the main things determining their effects is the mindset of the person taking it. The Government has done its best to scare people off of marijuana (read the story of the marijuana laws, above, and how the US Official Expert on Marihuana testified that it had turned him into a bat). As a result, some new users genuinely do believe that stuff and therefore have panic reactions when they experience feelings they are not really familiar wit.
No, but that is quite far removed from the kind of propaganda put out about marijuana. Read the story of the marijuana laws above, for some good examples.
No, it wasn’t stereotypical at all. It was completely factual. Read the history of the marijuana laws for some good examples of the kind of propaganda put out by the Feds over the years.
Just a hint – you will do well to read the references I cite before you respond. If you had, you would better understand the difference between the mj propaganda and the kind of stuff you mentioned above.
Now, if you would have been paying attention, you would have found that I have a number of their documents online, and I had them online before they did. If you will take note, they do research on crime, but they don’t do research on drug policy.
If you will follow the links to the drug policy section, what you will find is the ONDCP’s (Office of National Drug Control Policy) Drug Strategy papers. That is, it is an outline of what they intend to do about drugs, not an analysis of policy. It does not discuss little things like whether what they plan to do is even a good idea.
Francis X. (Pancho) Kinney, currently Director of Strategy at ONDCP sent me those documents unsolicited and asked me to put them on my site. (I confess I haven’t gotten around to it, but I will.) Then he graciously offered to answer any question I might have about US drug policy. I wrote back with one simple question:
Can you name any significant study of drug policy in the last 100 years which supports our current policy on marijuana?
I haven’t heard from him since, even though I have written several times. William Bennett, Bob Martinez, and Lee Brown-- the three previous Drug Czars – all admitted that they didn’t know of any research to support the current policy. The current Drug Czar just pretends he didn’t hear the question.
Ok, I get what your saying, I for some reason thought you meant that people who hear anti-drug prop. have more panic attacks than people who smoke MJ(It’s been a long day). Just excuse the stupidity and continue on.
No problem. To explain better, there are all kinds of wild tales about what mj does. The story below has some, but that certainly isn’t the end of them. In reality, it is a mild tranquilizer. The first time people encounter it their hearts are usually pumping anyway because they are doing something “criminal” – they are crossing a psychological line – and then they take a few hits and feel the room start to spin and it all comes together – the wild stories, the pounding heart, and new feelings they really can’t get a handle on. They get all worked up and the treatment is to calm them down and let it wear off.
To better understand the propaganda which produces this sort of thing, consider this excerpt from:
The final story from this period is my favorite story from this period, by far, and, again, there is simply nobody here who is really old enough to appreciate this story. You know, if you talk to your parents – that’s the generation we really need to talk to – people who were adults during the late 30’s and 40’s. And you talk to them about marijuana in particular you would be amazed at the amazing reputation that marijuana has among the generation ahead of you as to what it does to its users.
In the late 30’s and early 40’s marihuana was routinely referred to as “the killer drug”, “the assassin of youth”. You all know “reefer madness”, right? Where did these extraordinary stories that circulated in this country about what marijuana would do to its users come from?
The conventional wisdom is that Anslinger put them over on Americans in his effort to compete with Hoover for empire-building, etc. I have to say, in some fairness, that one of the things that our research did, in some sense, was to rehabilitate Commissioner Anslinger. Yes, there was some of that but, basically, it wasn’t just that Anslinger was trying to dupe people.
The terrific reputation that marijuana got in the late 30s and early 40s stemmed from something Anslinger had said. Does everybody remember what Anslinger said about the drug? “Marihuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.”
Well, this time the magic word – come along lawyers out there, where’s the magic word? – Insanity. Marihuana use, said the Government, would produce insanity.
And, sure enough, in the late 30s and early 40s, in five really flamboyant murder trials, the defendant’s sole defense was that he – or, in the most famous of them, she – was not guilty by reason of insanity for having used marijuana prior to the commission of the crime.
All right, it’s time to take you guys back to class here. If you are going to put on an insanity defense, what do you need? You need two things, don’t you? Number one, you need an Expert Witness.
Where, oh where, in this story, are we going to find an expert witness? Here it comes – sure enough – the guy from Temple University – the guy with the dogs. I promise you, you are not going to believe this.
In the most famous of these trials, what happened was two women jumped on a Newark, New Jersey bus and shot and killed and robbed the bus driver. They put on the marijuana insanity defense. The defense called the pharmacologist, and of course, you know how to do this now, you put the expert on, you say “Doctor, did you do all of this experimentation and so on?” You qualify your expert. “Did you write all about it?” “Yes, and I did the dogs” and now he is an expert. Now you ask him what? You ask the doctor “What have you done with the drug?” And he said, and I quote, “I’ve experimented with the dogs, I have written something about it and” – are you ready – “I have used the drug myself.”
What do you ask him next? “Doctor, when you used the drug, what happened?”
With all the press present at this flamboyant murder trial in Newark New Jersey, in 1938, the pharmacologist said, and I quote, in response to the question “When you used the drug, what happened?”, his exact response was: “After two puffs on a marijuana cigarette, I was turned into a bat.”
He wasn’t done yet. He testified that he flew around the room for fifteen minutes and then found himself at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot high ink well
Well, friends, that sells a lot of papers. What do you think the Newark Star Ledger headlines the next day, October 12, 1938? “Killer Drug Turns Doctor to Bat!”
What else do we need to put on an insanity defense? We need the defendant’s testimony – himself or herself. OK, you put defendant on the stand, what do you ask? “What happened on the night of . .”
“Oh, I used marijuana.”
“And then what happened?”
And, if the defendant wants to get off, what is he or she going to say? “It made me crazy.”
You know what the women testified? In Newark they testified, and I quote, “After two puffs on a marijuana cigarette my incisor teeth grew six inches long and dripped with blood.”
This was the craziest business you ever saw. Every one of these so-called marijuana insanity defenses were successful.
The one in New York was just outlandish. Two police officers were shot and killed in cold blood. The defendant puts on the marijuana insanity defense and, in that case, there was never even any testimony that the defendant had even used marijuana. The testimony in the New York case was that, from the time the bag of marijuana came into his room it gave off “homicidal vibrations”, so he started killing dogs, cats, and ultimately two police officers.
Commissioner Anslinger, sitting in Washington, seeing these marijuana insanity defenses, one after another successful, he writes to the pharmacologist from Temple University and says, “If you don’t stop testifying for the defense in these matters, we are going to revoke your status as the Official Expert of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.” He didn’t want to lose his status, so he stopped testifying, nobody else would testify that marijuana had turned them into a bat, and so these insanity defenses were over but not before marijuana had gotten quite a reputation, indeed.
Jello, interesting juxtaposition there. You’re a liberal and you quote the Cato Institute? Not that there’s anything wrong with it, just amusing.
I figured I’d chime in with the opinion that Derleth’s plan is the worst plan I have ever heard for how to deal with drug users. His comments of “curing” recreational drug users of their “problem” reminds me of the joke I’ve heard pilots use in regard to the FAA: “Hi, we’re from the government and we’re here to help you.” Except in Dereth’s world, the third time they “help” it’s by killing you.
One of his main points is productivity. He intends to restore the productivity lost by someone with a productive job using drugs in their spare time by forcing them into rehab. Somehow, I think a drug user with a job is a larger benefit to society than someone in rehab. And far better than someone who’s dead. And that’s assuming that there are no legal costs.
He also claims that anyone who does drugs, knowing the potential costs involved must be addicted. This is a fantastic and blatantly false leap of logic. People do things with high potential costs all the time. People who have never used drugs before, and cannot possibly be addicted, start using drugs every day.
As to the matter of allowing people to die from drug overdoses, this is against the basic principles of medical ethics. Doctors save lives without regard for anthing else. Forbidding ethical medical practices is simply absurd. What next? Should we turn drunk people on their backs when they pass out, in hopes they’ll choke on their own vomit?
To add my own two cents to the debate, my opinion is that it is immoral for society to place its needs over the right of the individual to be free of initiated force and fraud, as long as the individual is not abridging others of that right. Therefore, prohibiting the use of drugs is wrong.
I think sky-diving should be outlawed. It’s dangerous, it serves no purpose other than giving the users a momentary “thrill,” and the people who do it put a heavy emotional burden on their families because of the very real possibility that they could die while doing it.
The health risks are uncounted. People with high blood pressure or arrhythmia could DIE as a result of adrenaline driving their already-dangerous cardiac systems into overload. Extremeties can easily be broken on impact with the ground, even if the correct dosage is administ–err, even if the parachute opens properly.
It’s also very expensive…it costs over $100 for just one “fix,” and people who have gone sky-diving have a tendancy to try to convince their friends to do it with them as well. So now, not only do you have the hard-core jumpers who do it every weekend, but you have the casual users who only make one jump a month or so, because their friends got them hooked.
How long can we let this go on? The people who participate in this dangerous, expensive “hobby” should have their equipment confiscated. They should be forced to go into rehab to help them figure out why they participate in this dangerous pastime considering the great expense involved and the short duration of the “high.”
They should be forced to pay large fines, so that they won’t have the money to go on furtive jumps.
They should be jailed…preferably with mandatory minumum sentences starting at at LEAST five years, because no shorter term can possibly punish them enough for spending their money in a non-productive way on an activity which causes their friends and families emotional distress.
I can’t believe we’ve let this problem go on for as long as it has.
I long for the day a mainstream Presidential candidate has the courage to suggest that legalization of marijuana/hemp ought to at least be seriously considered. I believe such a candidate would be abundantly rewarded. I believe a huge segment of folks who might not otherwise vote would flock to the polls on that issue.
It wouldn’t surprise me to see Jesse Ventura do that very thing in 2004. (If the Reform Party still exists then.) I’m not even sure he has ruled out running this year. He may be waiting for a “draft Jesse” movement to materialize. I know he has hinted pointedly about his Presidential ambitions.
I am not a big fan of the Reform Party, but at least they might serve the useful purpose of bringing this issue to the forefront. I would prefer a Democratic candidate who had the necessary courage on this issue, but I don’t see that happening for many years.
I hadn’t heard of the Cato Institute before I saw that marijuana thing. And that’s liberal enough for me
LOL, Hamadryad. Good point.
** Spoke-: ** No mainstream people (yet), but at least one Green candidate and the main Socialist candidate (Jello Biafra and David MacReynolds, respectively) support legalization. Also, did Ventura leave the Reform Party earlier in the year or not? I’m not really sure, I saw things about his split with the Perot faction but wasn’t sure if he actually left.
MJ has different effects on different people. MJ makes me sleepy. I couldn’t do anything contructive when I was under the influence. So, I don’t smoke MJ anymore, unless I can’t sleep - otherwise I can’t get anything done.
My old roommate smoked MJ every day (several times a day). She was a straight A student in college while holding down a part-time job, and she volunteered at a nursing home.
Compared to my pot-smoking friends, I am in the minority as far as the amotivational syndrome goes. While they aren’t all straight A students, they function normally (referring to daily tasks like working and studying, running errands, etc.) under the influence, while I would have fallen asleep on the couch had I joined them in smoking that joint.
Actually h_thur, amotivation syndrome-which if I recall correctly was either never determined to exist-or was disproven some time back- refers to when you’re not under the influence…most people experience a lack in motivation when high. (well, except for the motivation for eating)
People experiencing “amotivational syndrome” would supposedly lose their motivation for a long time after being high. If this sounds like BS thats probably because it was…
The Libertarian Party supports the deregulation of all drugs and, in fact, the ceasing of all government activities which are in defiance of the Constitution. You can learn more at
