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May 02, 2010
Parsing Mexico, 3
The last entry ended on the suggestion that trade in “marijuana,” an illegal drug almost unknown to most Americans when JFK was elected has, since then, become important enough to threaten economic and political stability in both Mexico and the United States. Further, that the two governments' mutual reluctance to acknowledge such obvious problems suggests they may be even more serious than is being reported.The evidence for those startling claims is relatively straightforward: marijuana use, essentially unchronicled before the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act, remained rare throughout the Forties and Fifties. That the few celebrity "busts” that did occur received so much publicity (Gene Krupa in 1943 and Robert Mitchum in 1948) only emphasizes their rarity. The relative insignificance of whatever market there was for marijuana between 1937 and the early Seventies is further confirmed by the explosion in arrests that began in conjunction with passage of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970 and has been sustained into the present as successive waves of adolescents have continued trying "pot," between ages 12 and 18, a phenomenon amply confirmed by Monitoring the Future surveys since 1975.
What Accounts for the Timing of Pot's Popularity?
The first literary interest in marijuana was by "beat" authors . As the first whites to use it and write about it approvingly, they were clearly an important influence on the emergent “counterculture” that developed when Baby Boomers born right after World War Two began coming of age in the Sixties. Drug experimentation and use soon became one of their hallmarks. Because they were so new and unfamiliar to boomers' parents, the drugs their children were trying: marijuana, LSD, and other “psychedelics,” were all the more frightening, a circumstance that clearly played a key role in Richard Nixon's 1968 political comeback, which in turn, enabled his dubious legacy: Watergate, diplomatic recognition of China, extension of the Viet Nam war to Laos and Cambodia, and the “War on Drugs."
Just as the 1914 Harrison Act was bereft of science that could justify its assumptions about “addiction,” there have never been pharmacolgic studies that would support the assumptions by which the Controlled Substances Act's Schedule 1, gives medically untrained lawyers (US Attorneys General) the power to prohibit drugs they literally can't understand for what amount to moral or religious reasons.
Anyone with the necessary medical knowledge should be able to recognize there now exists an enormous amount of medical literature refuting the CSA's Schedule 1 assertion that cannabis and other listed agents lack “redeeming” medical benefits. That assertion was absurd in 1970 and is now ridiculously out-of date. A critical question then becomes: why is such an absurd, obsolete assumption still the basis of a UN treaty that subjects any international traveler to arrest for mere "possession?"
Whether we are at more risk from an uncontrolled oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico or equally uncontrollable political instability on dry land may be a moot point.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at May 2, 2010 05:59 PM