Crimes of Silence, The Ignominy of Marijuana

The inhumanity of drug laws in the United States are a disgrace. Particularly when it comes to marijuana, a substance with a toxic limit that is virtually unreachable in its inhalable form.

When our most disabled, chronically ill citizens are threatened with prison should they partake of smoked cannabis while seeking scientifically proven relief, we should feel profound shame for our ignominous silence.

In light of historical US drug policy, our current stance towards marijuana is the height of idiocy.

Were our track record with drug laws to be applied to any one politician--say John Kerry circa the 2004 election cycle--it would be more than enough to sink a career on the basis of flip-flopping.

The legalization and illegalization of various substances in this country has its roots in cash. Historically, when a drug first comes under scrutiny, the moral implications play little if any role in decision-making. In 1914, the first taxes were levied on opiates with no talk of the drug's addictive qualities. Roughly twenty years later with a raised profile, they were illegalized outside extremely controlled medical environments.

In the place of easily accessible opiates, a multi-billion dollar underground trade flourishes, with the most addicted users criminalized and marginalized. Often they wind up in prison, the emphasis is on punishment versus rehabilitation. Other developed nations with strong rehabilitation programs and the lack of asinine, failed, and continuing 'Drug Wars,' have lower incidences of hard drug usage and related violent crime across the board.

Still, we persecute users and dealers rather than reevaluate our policy.

In the 1930s, Harry J. Anslinger, a man with no history as a medical professional who'd risen to prominence as a moneyman for railroad companies, became the first drug czar of the United States, heading up the newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics. It bears mentioning that the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was created by the US Treasury Department.

Riding a wave of ill-informed public sentiment, fueled more by fear of immigration along the Mexican border than fear of the drug itself, he waged a vicious campaign against the substance calling it the "Mexican opium."

Despite his lack of medical training, Anslinger dismissed testimony from physicians at the time who pointed out that cannabis had been part of the standard pharmacopeia for years. The drug was quickly demonized by the vast majority of Americans who were quick to adopt a hysterical, rather than rational, approach to the issue.

His poorly conceived policies continue to cast a long shadow.

Today, hubris abounds on the issue of drugs. The public's opinions are not only poorly constructed, but many times entirely hypocritical.

As long as the substance comes from a doctor's script, or wrapped in cellophane with a Surgeon General's warning, or out of a supermarket cooler, we have no problem in consumption. Many fail to realize that acetaminophen, a common over the counter pain reliever, causes thousands of unintended deaths every year due to liver failure.

And drugs that have been proven time and time again to have extremely deleterious consequences, such as tobacco and alcohol, remain legal. And taxed. Whereas tobacco has been shown with repeated use to cause emphysema due to the pathology of the smoke on pulmonary tissue--not to mention myriad cancers, from intestinal to endocrine--cannabis smoke has actually been shown to have no causal relationship with emphysema, and exhibit cancer-fighting properties.

Alcohol, as it is well known, is a poison. The euphoric affects springing from its usage are a direct result of the biological filtering mechanisms. Yet alcohol is widely available, and hundreds of thousands of deaths occur annually from laizez faire use of the two substances combined.

Meanwhile, cannabis has not one single recorded incidence as cause of death, due to overdosage or health ramifications springing from habitual consumption. Yet it has been recently stated by the FDA to have, "a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision."

The high potential for abuse statement is particularly irresponsible. Medical authorities have long compared the addictive power of nicotine to rival that of heroin. At the same time, with extensive testing, marijuana has been shown to have primarily psychologically addictive affects, with discontinuation even after years of use to have little, if any, physical symptoms.

Still, the nation blunders on with blinders firmly attached. Swallowing painkillers from bottles, drinking away its pain, and paying little heed to the hypocrisy and history that have worked to shape our current policy.

If people refuse to get involved and continue to heedlessly believe the dogma, we will find ourselves in an extremely perilous position in the coming years. The public's unthinking panic towards clean, nuclear power, and our current crisis with rampant global warming due to continued reliance on fossil fuels draws apt comparisons.

In an environment where panic prevails over common sense, where we vomit money at useless ideas, we must revaluate our position in the world, and our approach to drugs at the deepest level. That, or fail miserably to protect the most basic tenets of human decency and compassion. Locking up the weak and defenseless.

Imprisoning the ill.