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April 15, 2007
Time to Organize?
Over the past three years, as I’ve accumulated an increasing amount of information from chronic pot users, I’ve become progressively more confident in my belief that American drug policy has been a tragic mistake from its earliest legislative emergence as the 1914 Harrison Act. I’ve also become considerably more specific in my criticisms of a drug policy ‘reform’ movement that still refuses to take full advantage of the brilliant political victory it won by adding Proposition 215 to the 1996 California ballot.
The reason I’ve become so confident is knowledge: first, what I'm still learning from pot users and, just as importantly, what I later learned from from (relatively) unsuccessful efforts to share their data with reform leadership. It soon became clear that reform's response to unwelcome new information was denial, the same way most of us respond to it (there’s perhaps no better illustration than George Bush’s reluctance to give up on the invasion of Iraq).
Along the way, I’ve been forced to learn several other things; fortunately, learning has always been a pleasure, and access to information (culture), has never been greater and is increasing by the week. Then too, there’s the ability of people like myself to publish their opinions in blogs they hope will be discovered by search engines. That brings me to the point of this entry.
Now seems a reasonable time to organize the blog into an arbitrary hierarchy of the topics emerging from the welter of observations and opinions I've been exposed to since late 2001. I also think I’ve had enough time to integrate that new material with my past experiences as a child of the Thirties who became a physician in the Fifties and has since been privileged to interact with thousands of patients in a variety of complex dramas; what we doctors refer to collectively as our ‘clinical experience.' The blog will continue to focus on my most recent clinical experiences, those gathered from the pot smokers I'm still seeing.
I will simply be trying improve coherence by organizing them within a limited number of recurring categories...only time will tell how helpful that effort will be.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at April 15, 2007 07:50 PM