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March 29, 2014
What Applicant Demographics Reveal
One of several things I discovered shortly after starting to take medical histories from people seeking my "recommendation" to use cannabis medically (cannabis applicants) in accordance with Proposition 215 was their division into 2 groups based on year of birth. Fewer than 5% of all the 7200 applicants I've seen since November 2001 were born before 1946. That unexpected finding helps establish origins of the huge modern market for "marijuana" that inspired Richard Nixon's Controlled Substances Act after the Warren Court unexpectedly struck down the Marijuana Tax Act pf 1937.That early pot smokers were so predominantly “Baby Boomers” was also unexpected and raises its own questions: what had encouraged so many "boomers" to discover cannabis, a drug that had been poorly understood when first outlawed by the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937?
We know from the dearth of press coverage devoted to "marijuana" between 1937 and the early Sixties that its market must have remained small until the Sixties when members of the newly emergent Counterculture began challenging the norms of the Eisenhower Fifties become the first ever mass market for a "Drug of “Abuse” in history and- quite likely the same young people Nixon was targeting with the "War on Drugs" implemented with the CSA in 1970. Those same applicant demographics also reveal when adolescent boomers first began trying pot in large numbers; also when they liked it well enough to begin growing it domestically.
In a word, California "medical users" reflect the huge modern market that began when the oldest baby boomers began aging into adolescence in the early 60s. It has obviously aged into Medicare right along with them as a thriving illegal market for "weed" that has been sustaining itself as it has matured into a senior market and continues to defy the best efforts of global police forces to suppress it.
Could it be that we have something to learn from questioning those satisfied customers– not as "addicts" who are defying a foolish law but as rational people with good reasons for their continued use of an illegal drug at significant personal risk?
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at March 29, 2014 01:46 AM