February 03, 2007
Blowing Smoke
The last entry on smoking made two important points which I'd gleaned from data supplied by cannabis applicants: the first, and historically more important, was that the rapidly developing popularity of cannabis with adolescent and young adult baby boomers in the mid Sixties was what had frightened a majority of Americans then over thirty into accepting Richard Nixon's invidious war on drugs.
The second point was that it was the rapid onset of pot's anxiolytic properties that occurs only when it is inhaled, which had made it so popular with that era's young people who, until that time, had only alcohol and tobacco as readily available psychotherapeutic agents with which to self-medicate.
Those two concepts are basic; they also raise several other implications which challenge critical assumptions accepted on behalf of the drug war over the past forty years, assumptions which can now be seen as reflecting the blatant bias of a policy that has always placed a higher value on self-defense than on truth.
The first such assumption was a lame, never-validated ‘gateway’ idea which has never even passed muster as a hypothesis, but nevertheless has been trumpeted as a 'theory' by both the relentlessly self-interested Robert DuPont and the lay press. It has also been sucking up large amounts of NIDA research money for policy- compliant behavioral 'scientists since 1975.
Significantly; a NIDA-sponsored summation of those studies, which unwittingly also reveals their emptiness, was published in 2002, the same year a seminal theoretical analysis by Morral, et al demonstrated that some as yet unknown ‘common factor’ could offer a more coherent explanation.
In the next entry, I’ll discuss how the (probable) nature of that common factor can also be gleaned from data supplied by California pot smokers...
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at February 3, 2007 07:03 PM