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January 10, 2008
Connecting Dots (Personal, Historical)
Among the first crimes committed by most American adults were their trials of two legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, at an an illegally early age. That fact alone should provide supporters of our futile drug war with an understanding of why their policy is, at best, a waste time. However, the doctrinaire (religious) claim that our drug laws are absolutely necessity is the nearly universal response of elected federal politicians, especially Republicans. That rejection of the drug war’s failure, when coupled with its acceptance as a necessity are solid evidence that support for it as policy is illogical. Also frightening.
So great is the current “reality gap” between drug war doctrine and what can be easily learned from a few Google searches, that continued suppression of the medical pot market, denial of its significance, and their massive fear-based propaganda campaigns are about the only tactics drug warriors have left. Interestingly the same reality gap now poses a growing danger to the reputations of policy supporters; especially those with academic pretensions: no matter how passive, any support at all could easily become a source of future embarrassment few academics would survive.
One way to understand that in greater depth is a consideration of how the term “anxiolytic,” came into use over ten years after “Miltown” (meprobamate), had been introduced as a “tranquilizer” in 1952. There are varying opinions about what led to the new term, but one thing is clear: from the Sixties onward, “legitimate” anxiolytic agents have become a (necessary) revenue bonanza for both physicians and the Pharmaceutical Industry, even as US drug policy has fallen for the blandishments of a runaway DSM system of psychiatric nomenclature while preserving as sacrosanct its core assumptions that “addiction” as a disease to be avoided all costs.
Timid recognition that inhaled cannabis is a potent anxiolytic and the (logical) deduction that it was that property that jump-started today's massive illegal market at the High School level is both an undeniable finding of my study and the best rational explanation of MTF data gathered by the federal government since 1975.
We may finally be at a point where reality is about to catch up with myth...
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at January 10, 2008 09:50 PM