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February 18, 2009
The Significance of the Phelps Fiasco
At first, I thought the attention paid to a photo of Michael Phelps’ November ‘08 bong hit might be a way to publicize the connection between ADD and self medication with marijuana that I have been documenting for the past several years. In the background has always been my delusional hope/belief that if enough people came to understand how pot was helping troubled youth, it would change policy. The most recent developments have demonstrated that hope to be both naive and forlorn; not because people don’t know there's a connection between cannabis and relief of symptoms, but because so many have their own reasons for seeing that complex phenomenon in a completely different light.One example is provided by a South Carolina sheriff improbably named Lonnie Lott, who felt obligated to explain why his department wasted so much time and money investigating the event.
Another is that of President Barack Obama, who has also been affected by “absent daddy disorder” himself, and once got high, but has been disappointing me since late January by allowing holdover DEA administrator Michele Leonhart to authorize pot raids as usual in California and recently proved that despite his obvious intelligence and flare for analysis in some areas, he is as hopelessly committed to the conventional idea that “drugs” are a police problem as all of his predecessors since Nixon. Otherwise; why would he be about to nominate Seattle’s police chief as the next drug czar?
Just as I see Obama as an improvement over Bush, I will probably see Gil Kerlikowske as much better than John Walters; but both Obama and Kerlikowski are way too iittle and too late for the enormous job of changing global thinking about “drugs” and drug policy.
That's because drugs are so densely related to how humans think, and our cognitive process is precisely what has our species in in so much trouble in so many areas.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at February 18, 2009 04:46 PM