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January 06, 2008
Hear No Evil... (Personal, Historical. Logical)
The most obvious conclusions to be drawn from my six year clinical study of California pot smokers is that our federal drug policy has almost certainly been spectacularly wrong; not only about the effects of marijuana, but also about the significance of its continuing large scale initiation by juveniles, a phenomenon that could never be properly addressed by annual federal student surveys, despite the millions spent on them since 1975.
The main reasons for hedging the devastating conclusion above with “almost certainly” is that my study is, so far, the work of only one investigator. Also, of necessity, it has to rely on data provided by self-selected “volunteers.” Nevertheless, the very uniqueness of the opportunity to study them, when considered in light of reform’s non- response, should immediately raise 2 other serious questions: how is human cognition affected by our emotions, and isn’t that the critical issue that’s still being almost universally ignored by so many of the policy "experts" one would expect to be more curious??
That our national drug policy was both dishonest and doctrinaire should have been obvious, almost since its inception during the First World War; yet its bipartisan support only intensified after it was abruptly converted into a ”drug war” by Presidential fiat in 1969. Even as its societal distortions were becoming grotesque and its failures have become increasingly well known to the public over the next three decades, the policy itself has retained enough political support to seem as invulnerable as ever.
Just why a failing policy wsould continue to be supported so avidly is still uncertain; it may simply be that human fear of death is now finding expression as religious faith. Certainly, our human intolerance of such beliefs, especially when they differ from ours, is a well known cause of most wars
In any event, American drug policy from its very inception in 1914, has served as a workshop for fascism. Trying to “reform” it without correcting its mistaken assumptions is akin to excusing the pseudo science behind the Holocaust or continuing to ignore (and thus deny) the unacknowledged racism that justified American Slavery and Segregation. The intensity of NIDA's organizational bias is so unabashed that any "research" it would sponsor should be immediately suspect
To err may be human, but admitting one could have been wrong is downright un-American.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at January 6, 2008 11:36 PM