« Age of Anxiety | Main | Lessons Learned in 8 Years as a Pot Doc »
October 12, 2009
How I Became a Pot Doc
As mentioned previously, I hadn't learned anything about cannabis during my Forties high school daze because the tiny pot market then in existence was for "hip" insiders and almost completely invisible to straight adolescents. Thus to understand how I would find myself screening pot smokers at an Oakland cannabis club in 2001, one has to start with my reasons for despising the drug war: first, its interference with pain relief for surgical patients, and second, I simply couldn’t understand how a government that had been forced to abandon alcohol prohibition in the Thirties because of its failures could remain blind to the failures of its drug war for exactly the same reasons. In short,it was a growing disgust with the intellectual dishonesty of American drug policy that eventually led me to discover its nearly invisible political opposition in 1995. By pure chance I was then living in the Bay Area and the unexpected passage of Proposition 215 was about to create, albeit in slow motion, a huge new gray market for marijuana, two additional developments no one could have predicted in 1995.As I became more seasoned in the “movement,” I quickly learned that a majority of my fellow activists were pot smokers; that was because its redolent odor filled hotel corridors at every national meeting I ever attended. Even so, I had no way of knowing then that they were really self-medicating in the same fashion as the Prop 215 applicants I would begin interviewing in November, 2001.
I now also realize how irritating my profiles of pot use must have seemed to most of those same activists; here I was, someone they knew to be a novice, suddenly telling them things they didn’t want to hear (and considered unflattering) about an activity they'd long been engaged in. An e-mail from one summed it up neatly: “when I read your stuff, I feel like someone is holding a mirror up to my face-- and I don’t like it.”
One phase of my early policy explorations led me to a small, elite coterie of drug policy academics at leading universities, often in prestigious schools of ”Public Policy.” I soon realized they provided critical intellectual cover for the policy I'd come to despise. Obviously very smart and committed to (at least) an appearance of neutrality, they always took extreme care in their writings to avoid outright condemnation of certain critical items of drug war dogma, the most important of which is the idea that illegal drugs are "bad” because of "addiction." A critical, but unspoken, corollary is that drug control is a moral imperative; thus designated "drugs of abuse" must be controlled to the extent possible.
I realized through that early scrutiny of a policy I hadn’t ever paid enough attention to, that their academic standing was providing important cover for the drug war; also that refuting them would not be easy, if for no other reason than “science,” as it pertains to illegal drugs, has always been tightly controlled by the policy’s official minders.
In that connection, there have been two important historical eras of federal "control" (the word "prohibition" is never used). The first was dominated by Harry Anslinger, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, appointed as its first Director by Herbert Hoover in 1930 and ruled by him with an iron hand until he was forced into retirement by JFK in 1962 for reasons that remain uncertain. The obvious comparison is between Anslinger and J. Edgar Hoover who not only ruled a rival federal police agency for a longer interval during the same era (1935-1972), but died in harness.
To get back to Anslinger, he was such an obvious fraud and so unscrupulous in protecting both his agency and its contrived mandate that no serious biography has ever been written, a shortcoming I have attributed to the difficulty of doing so and still presenting his policy in a positive light. In that connection, it is important to remember that most UN member nations maintain agencies like the FBI and CIA, but because the concept that drug prohibition must be a global mandate was so obviously Anslinger's, our American fingerprints would be all over its failures, were they ever to be publicly acknowledged.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at October 12, 2009 04:51 AM