[CTRL] Reefer Madness
-Caveat Lector- http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/30/opinion/30KELL.html November 30, 2002 Reefer Madness By BILL KELLER e interrupt our coverage of the war on terrorism to check in with that other permanent conflict against a stateless enemy, the war on drugs. To judge by the glee at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the drug warriors have just accomplished the moral equivalent of routing the Taliban helping to halt a relentless jihad against the nation's drug laws. Ballot initiatives in Ohio (treatment rather than prison for nonviolent drug offenders), Arizona (the same, plus making marijuana possession the equivalent of a traffic ticket, and providing free pot for medical use) and Nevada (full legalization of marijuana) lost decisively this month. Liberalization measures in Florida and Michigan never even made it to the ballot. Some of this was due to the Republican election tide. Some was generational boomer parents like me, fearful of seeing our teenagers become drug-addled slackers. (John Walters, the White House drug czar, shrewdly played on this anxiety by hyping the higher potency of today's pot with the line, This is not your father's marijuana.) Some may have been a reluctance to loosen any social safety belts when the nation is under threat. Certainly a major factor was that proponents of change, who had been winning carefully poll-tested ballot measures, state by state, since California in 1996, found themselves facing a serious and well-financed opposition, cheered on by Mr. Walters. The truly amazing thing is that 30 years into the modern war on drugs, the discourse is still focused disproportionately on marijuana rather than more important and excruciatingly hard problems like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines. The drug liberalizers an alliance of legal reformers, liberals, libertarians and potheads dwell on marijuana in part because a lot of the energy and money in their campaign comes from people who like to smoke pot and want the government off their backs. Also, marijuana has provided them with their most marketable wedge issue, the use of pot to relieve the suffering of AIDS and cancer patients. Never mind that the medical benefits of smoking marijuana are still mostly unproven (in part because the F.D.A. almost never approves the research and the pharmaceuticals industry sees no money in it). The issue may be peripheral, but it appeals to our compassion, especially when the administration plays the heartless heavy by sending SWAT teams to arrest people in wheelchairs. Thus a movement that started, at least in the minds of reform sponsors like the billionaire George Soros, as an effort to reduce the ravages of both drugs and the war on drugs, has become mostly about pot smoking. The more interesting question is why the White House is so obsessed with marijuana. The memorable achievements of Mr. Walters's brief tenure have been things like cutting off student loans for kids with pot convictions, threatening doctors who recommend pot to cancer patients and introducing TV commercials that have the tone and credibility of wartime propaganda. One commercial tells pot smokers that they are subsidizing terrorists. Another shows a stoned teenager discovering a handgun in Dad's desk drawer and dreamily shooting a friend. (You'll find it at www.mediacampaign.org. Watch it with the sound off and you'd swear it was an ad for gun control.) Drug czars used to draw a distinction between casual-use drugs like marijuana and the hard drugs whose craving breeds crime and community desolation. But this is not your father's drug czar. Mr. Walters insists marijuana is inseparable from heroin or cocaine. He offers two arguments, both of which sound as if they came from the same people who manufacture the Bush administration's flimsy economic logic. One is that marijuana is a gateway to hard-drug use. Actually Mr. Walters, who is a political scientist but likes to sound like an epidemiologist, prefers to say that pot use is an increased risk factor for other drugs. The point in our conversation when my nonsense- alarm went off was when he likened the relationship between pot and hard drugs to that between cholesterol and heart disease. In fact, the claim that marijuana leads to the use of other drugs appears to be unfounded. On the contrary, an interesting new study by Andrew Morral of RAND, out in the December issue of the British journal Addiction, shows that the correlation between pot and hard drugs can be fully explained by the fact that some people, by virtue of genetics or circumstances, have a predisposition to use drugs. Mr. Walters's other justification for turning his office into the War on Pot is the dramatic increase in the number of marijuana smokers seeking professional help. This, he claims, reflects an alarming rise in the number of people hooked on cannabis. But common sense and the government's own statistics suggest an
[CTRL] Reefer Madness
Title: Reefer Madness -Caveat Lector- Reefer Madness By BILL KELLER We interrupt our coverage of the war on terrorism to check in with that other permanent conflict against a stateless enemy, the war on drugs. To judge by the glee at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the drug warriors have just accomplished the moral equivalent of routing the Taliban helping to halt a relentless jihad against the nation's drug laws. Ballot initiatives in Ohio (treatment rather than prison for nonviolent drug offenders), Arizona (the same, plus making marijuana possession the equivalent of a traffic ticket, and providing free pot for medical use) and Nevada (full legalization of marijuana) lost decisively this month. Liberalization measures in Florida and Michigan never even made it to the ballot. Some of this was due to the Republican election tide. Some was generational boomer parents like me, fearful of seeing our teenagers become drug-addled slackers. (John Walters, the White House drug czar, shrewdly played on this anxiety by hyping the higher potency of today's pot with the line, This is not your father's marijuana.) Some may have been a reluctance to loosen any social safety belts when the nation is under threat. Certainly a major factor was that proponents of change, who had been winning carefully poll-tested ballot measures, state by state, since California in 1996, found themselves facing a serious and well-financed opposition, cheered on by Mr. Walters. The truly amazing thing is that 30 years into the modern war on drugs, the discourse is still focused disproportionately on marijuana rather than more important and excruciatingly hard problems like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines. The drug liberalizers an alliance of legal reformers, liberals, libertarians and potheads dwell on marijuana in part because a lot of the energy and money in their campaign comes from people who like to smoke pot and want the government off their backs. Also, marijuana has provided them with their most marketable wedge issue, the use of pot to relieve the suffering of AIDS and cancer patients. Never mind that the medical benefits of smoking marijuana are still mostly unproven (in part because the F.D.A. almost never approves the research and the pharmaceuticals industry sees no money in it). The issue may be peripheral, but it appeals to our compassion, especially when the administration plays the heartless heavy by sending SWAT teams to arrest people in wheelchairs. Thus a movement that started, at least in the minds of reform sponsors like the billionaire George Soros, as an effort to reduce the ravages of both drugs and the war on drugs, has become mostly about pot smoking. The more interesting question is why the White House is so obsessed with marijuana. The memorable achievements of Mr. Walters's brief tenure have been things like cutting off student loans for kids with pot convictions, threatening doctors who recommend pot to cancer patients and introducing TV commercials that have the tone and credibility of wartime propaganda. One commercial tells pot smokers that they are subsidizing terrorists. Another shows a stoned teenager discovering a handgun in Dad's desk drawer and dreamily shooting a friend. (You'll find it at www.mediacampaign.org. Watch it with the sound off and you'd swear it was an ad for gun control.) Drug czars used to draw a distinction between casual-use drugs like marijuana and the hard drugs whose craving breeds crime and community desolation. But this is not your father's drug czar. Mr. Walters insists marijuana is inseparable from heroin or cocaine. He offers two arguments, both of which sound as if they came from the same people who manufacture the Bush administration's flimsy economic logic. One is that marijuana is a gateway to hard-drug use. Actually Mr. Walters, who is a political scientist but likes to sound like an epidemiologist, prefers to say that pot use is an increased risk factor for other drugs. The point in our conversation when my nonsense-alarm went off was when he likened the relationship between pot and hard drugs to that between cholesterol and heart disease. In fact, the claim that marijuana leads to the use of other drugs appears to be unfounded. On the contrary, an interesting new study by Andrew Morral of RAND, out in the December issue of the British journal Addiction, shows that the correlation between pot and hard drugs can be fully explained by the fact that some people, by virtue of genetics or circumstances, have a predisposition to use drugs. Mr. Walters's other justification for turning his office into the War on Pot is the dramatic increase in the number of marijuana smokers seeking professional help. This, he claims, reflects an alarming rise in the number of people hooked on cannabis. But common sense and the government's own statistics suggest an alternative explanation: if you're caught with pot, enrolling in a treatment
[CTRL] Reefer madness exposed: Audubon Magazine on Hemp, Nov-Dec'99
-Caveat Lector- this article fairly comprehensively shows the political and economic forces behind the demonization of marijuana, as a tool for destroying the hemp industry which was at the time threatening the financial interests of rich and powerful oil and timber exploiters. The times they are a'changin' Dave Hartley http://www.Asheville-Computer.com http://www.ioa.com/~davehart Pubdate: Nov.-Dec. 1999 Source: Audubon Magazine Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright: (c) 1999 National Audubon Society Website: http://www.audubon.com Author: Ted Williams LEGALIZE IT! Cannabis sativa is a low-maintenance crop that can be used in paper, clothing, rope-even cars. So why, when it's grown in 32 other countries, is hemp still illegal in the United States? I confess that i am a user of hemp. for example, i have just quaffed a Hempen Ale and a Hempen Gold beer, shipped to me by Frederick Brewing Company of Frederick, Maryland. Both beverages are brewed with the seeds of hemp-Cannabis sativa-a plant native to central Asia and grown all over the world as various selected strains, some of which are known as marijuana. I'm feeling a faint buzz, but only from the alcohol. Neither brew contains any of the narcotic delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which makes pot so popular. In fact, recent tests by the Pentagon invalidate what it calls the "Hempen Ale defense" by showing the ale to be THC-free. So military personnel can no longer claim it as the source of the THC that shows up in their urine. But some hemp products do contain trace amounts of THC-as intoxicating as, say, the opiates you get from a poppy-seed bagel-so to make sure it knows where the THC is coming from, the Air Force has banned all foods and beverages made with hemp. Somehow the news didn't make it to the Commander in Chief, who, less than a month later, on February 15, 1999, allowed Hempen Gold to be served on Air Force One. According to one reporter, the President "tasted but didn't swallow." After I finished ingesting hemp I slathered it on my hair-in the form of a shampoo made with hempseed oil, which, according to its producer, Alterna Applied Research Laboratories of Beverly Hills, California, restores dry and damaged (but unfortunately not missing) hair. While perky hair is not something I normally seek, the hair I have left definitely feels that way. What I have just indulged in-at least according to Glenn Levant, the nation's best-funded and most heeded marijuana educator-is an internal-external marijuana orgy. Levant is president and founder of Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), a 16-year-old program taught by local police in 75 percent of the nation's schools. "Hemp is marijuana," he informed me, ending the interview when I cited sources that prove otherwise. Last year Levant was outraged to see Alterna's hemp-leaf logo on shampoo ads at bus stops around southern California, and he mounted a successful crusade to get them removed. "My big objection is that public property was being used to promote an illegal substance," he told the Los Angeles Times. "The shampoo is a subterfuge to promote marijuana." On July 1, 1999, he paid Alterna an undisclosed sum to settle a lawsuit it had filed against him for making what it called "false and malicious public comments" about its product and motives. Hemp and marijuana can cross-pollinate, but if one is the other, then a Pekinese is a Doberman pinscher. Plant a hemp seed, and no substance or force on earth can turn it into marijuana. If you smoke hemp, it will give you only a headache. This is because it doesn't contain enough THC to affect your brain. And, unlike marijuana, it is high in cannabidiol-an antipsychoactive compound that inhibits THC. Because of this, says David West, a plant breeder hired by the University of Hawaii to grow an experimental plot of hemp under special permit from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), hemp "could be called antimarijuana." Hemp products are not illegal. In fact, the U.S. hemp-products industry does about $125 million in retail sales a year. Not only is hemp harmless, it has enormous versatility. Added to worthless fibers that are currently burned-such as straw from oats, rice, and wheat-hemp can produce superb paper and construction materials lighter and stronger than lumber. American cropland, 85 percent of which is stuck on a soil-depleting, chemical-dependent treadmill of corn, wheat, and soybean production, could be released and renewed if hemp were used as a rotation crop. In England and Hungary, hemp grown in rotation with wheat hiked the wheat harvest 20 percent. Hemp seeds, better tasting and more digestible than soy, could be rendered into hundreds of foods, thereby taking pressure off America's bottomland hardwood forests, which are being replaced with soybean plantations. Hemp fibers can be woven into cloth more durable than and as comfortable as cotton. Cotton is much more difficult to grow; it's addicted to chemical
