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May 07, 2007
More from the Gulag
I’m an incorrigible sloppy desk person; the other day, I found a hand-written letter from Dustin, one I didn’t remember seeing before. The date tells me it had been written just before he was whisked off from Bakersfield to Oklahoma City. In fact, he probably never made that phone call...
3/21/07
Hi, Doc
Planning to call you in a few minutes, but I wanted to get these thoughts down first. The biggest problem you and I face is not that people don’t listen or even that they don’t understand. In fact, I think what we believe with respect to marijuana and anxiety is readily understood by almost everyone we explain our views to. Not only are we understood, I think most folks actually believe us, or are at least willing to give us the benefit of the doubt. We are fighting a cultural problem— a preference for the warm and fuzzy thinking that assumes there is a ‘solution’ for every problem.
What you (and I) are doing is not simply pointing out the ‘truth,’ but suggesting ramifications of that truth that go well beyond disturbing. We represent the equivalent of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and the Hiroshima Bomb— and then some.
What we are engaged in is the beginning of a cultural paradigm shift that is stunning in its scope. We are really talking about far more than what’s wrong with the drug war. We are talking about the need to transform traditional notions of parenting and rearing children.
It is a noble fool’s errand we are engaged in, but one I believe can actually succeed because of pot’s enormous popularity and because we offer the best explanation of how and why that popularity came about. It is incredibly important, therefore, that your work be made public as soon as possible, so as to encourage the kind of studies needed to both investigate/explain the ABYM problem. You know what I’m talking about better than I do, but I simply wanted to give you some support and, hopefully, additional perspective. There has to be a key to unlocking the cultural problem for folks like ____, and even ____ ______ .
Perhaps simply publishing your data will give you enough standing to get the creative intellectual side of their brains working. Perhaps, too, if you could link your data in a functional way to notions like my Pot4Meth idea, it would show that not only is the notion of ‘substitution’ a great insight, but there’s a way to make it work productively.
Think about it this way— how often in your lifetime have you heard someone say to a critic: “if you think (the thing being criticized) is so bad, what do you suggest we do about it?”
I think not only is Dustin more than a little OCD, he also makes a lot of sense...
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at May 7, 2007 05:16 PM