cannabisnews.com: Reefer Madness





Reefer Madness
Posted by CN Staff on May 24, 2003 at 07:57:49 PT
By John Jurgensen, Courant Staff Writer 
Source: Hartford Courant 
Mark Braunstein smokes pot, and everybody knows it. Friends. Co-workers. Even the local police. He'll tell anyone who asks that he gets high every few days. It used to be daily, but now he says he needs fewer tokes to quell the painful muscle spasms he's weathered since a 1990 spinal cord injury.Armed with a prescription from a Dutch physician, Braunstein, a vegan who has long shunned pharmaceuticals, "came out" as a medicinal user of marijuana seven years ago. As a paraplegic, he felt completely free to talk about the drug that, before his car accident, he had used more for its mind-altering effects. 
"Speaking for myself, I really feel that once you legalize it medicinally, the next step is to legalize it recreationally," said the 51-year-old Connecticut College librarian. "I'm just doing my part to get the process going."With his twin missions for the future of marijuana, Braunstein straddles the crooked line defining cannabis sativa's place in American culture. The Connecticut House of Representatives recently navigated the same line in deciding whether the state should grant patients the freedom to use a drug that the federal government forbids them. The bill, which would have allowed patients to grow three plants for personal use with a doctor's consent, was snuffed out Wednesday. But the debate lasted 21/2 hours, a testament to how deep the weed has sunk its roots into our social fabric.Advocates say it's been used medicinally for millenniums, but marijuana has become better known as America's illicit drug of choice - 37 percent of people over age 12 have tried it, the government says. For a favorite of the underground, pot sure has a high profile.Last week, Tommy Chong, 64, patron saint of potheads, pleaded guilty after getting caught in a February federal roundup of bong and pipe sellers. And in his first interview since his possession bust a few months ago, Ben Curtis, the "Dell Dude," said he did more than play a stoner on TV.On Thursday, Maryland's governor resisted pressure from his own Republican Party, signing a bill to relax punishment for medicinal users of pot. Eight other states have similar laws in place.Other news comes from north of the border, as the Canadian government, to the Bush administration's dismay, moves steadily toward decriminalization. Ottawa says it wants to unclog the nation's courts by giving tickets to people caught with less than 15 grams of pot.Contrast that to the United States, where more people are behind bars for marijuana violations than at any other time in American history. Meanwhile, pot smolders openly throughout popular culture. Today, dope is as much a musical totem in hip-hop as it ever was in hippie rock."It has all this symbolic meaning attached to it by the people who smoke it and by the people who want to prevent people from smoking it," said Eric Schlosser, author of "Fast Food Nation." He tackles pot in his new book, "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market" (Houghton Mifflin, $23). Marijuana unites "a powerful subculture, and the subculture and the anti-culture feed off one another," he said, referring to the propaganda wars that started in the 1930s with the release of the film that gave his book its title."Some of the early prevention efforts had an overreactive tone to them. They weren't based in research. Today, we have a much clearer understanding of the implications of marijuana and how it can adversely affect ... perception, behavior, functioning and fetal development," said Wayne Dailey, spokesman for the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. Moving beyond the Reagan-era "Just Say No" campaign, recent commercials have tied weed to international terrorism and a potentially fatal mental impairment when guns or vehicles get involved."I don't think [marijuana is] a moral issue. Of course, it is to some people. But my own belief is that it's much more critically an issue of health," said Sue Rusche, head of the Georgia-based National Families in Action. Like many on her side, Rusche sees the rally behind medical marijuana as the latest form of pro-pot propaganda, a smoke screen for the real goal of legitimizing recreational use.What's certain is that marijuana is a cultural Hydra that grows controversies. Everything about it fuels dispute, from its industrial potential as hemp to its importance in the drug war. For example, many frame marijuana in terms of the collateral damage from stiff drug sentences. "What about the people who are taken out of the black and Latino community? It has put those populations in a de-evolutionary state," said Cliff Thornton, whose organization, Efficacy, advocates changes in drug policy.The best grounds for reconsidering the nation's relationship with pot is the hidden population of users who defy the stereotype of the spacey, shiftless stoner, said Jacob Sullum, a senior editor at Reason magazine.In his new book, "Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use," Sullum writes, "People who use drugs in a controlled, inconspicuous way are not inclined to stand up and announce the fact. Prohibition renders them invisible, because they fear the legal, social, and economic consequences of speaking up."Bruce Mirken, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, makes the comparison to another once-hidden culture. "It's almost parallel to the gay community 30 years ago," when being outed could cost someone his job and his place in society.So, if pot smokers are everywhere, as the advocates claim, what do they look like? Where can they be found?Try Smoke 'N' Leather, a 20-year-old head shop in downtown Enfield. Besides motorcycle jackets and samurai swords, the store sells pipes, scales and water bongs, from cheap plastic contraptions to twisted towers of colored glass that cost up to $2,500 - all intended for tobacco, of course.Standing among the paraphernalia, Joe DiFranco fits in. "Most everyone I know smokes trees. But over the years, I've cut people off for graduating" to harder drugs like crack or heroin. Wearing a blue tank top that reveals the tattoos on his pale arms, DiFranco, 24, shifted from foot to foot. He says weed calms his hyperactivity better than the prescribed pills that made him "a raving lunatic." He's been "self-medicating" since the seventh grade, he says.The answer might be different in malls, grocery stores or churches, but an informal survey of some Hartford taverngoers revealed that most had at least tried pot. The majority of them, however, stopped smoking it sometime after high school."I just got bored with it," said Paul, 27. "I don't want to sit at home stoned on the couch. Alcohol's more social," he said, hoisting a pint glass.Hailing from a different generation, David and John both smoked just once while in college in the early 1960s. Neither cared for it. Over $75 worth of dinner and drinks at Trumbull Kitchen, they discussed the drug in the context of the decade it will forever be associated with. From that time, David recalled a party where he noticed the room divided. As his group sipped drinks on one side, slightly younger students passed joints on the other - a generation gap in the flesh. Note: Advocates, Detractors Keep Fighting Over Criminality, Harsh Penalties.Source: Hartford Courant (CT)Author: Christopher Keating, Capitol Bureau Chief Published: May 24, 2003 Copyright: 2003 The Hartford CourantContact: letters courant.comWebsite: http://www.ctnow.com/Related Articles & Web Sites:Marijuana Policy Projecthttp://www.mpp.org/Medical Marijuana Information Linkshttp://freedomtoexhale.com/medical.htm Medical Marijuana Bill Dies In House http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16356.shtmlHouse Just Says No To Pot as Rxhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16355.shtmlHouse Rejects Plan To Legalize Medical Marijuana http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16351.shtml
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Comment #2 posted by Ethan Russo MD on May 24, 2003 at 18:17:15 PT:
Ahem
"Advocates say it's been used medicinally for millenniums"I don't "say it," but rather it is the truth. I am sitting next to a 4 drawer file cabinet filled with the documentation. I don't know where Mr. Dailey got his medical degree, but if he believes what he says, he is a victim of his own propaganda and delusions. For the truth on cannabis and fetal development, read Dr. Dreher's work, or this:http://www.freedomtoexhale.com/russo-ob.pdfNow, I am not saying that cannabis is totally harmless or that women who are pregnant can use it indiscriminantly, but the fact is that it can be life-saving for mother and child when really necessary. We need to demand a level playing field, and a fair fight. I tell the truth, you tell the truth. However, that never happens, because in this instance the people who lie have all the power, and threaten the liberty and livelihoods of the ones who tell the truth. 
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Comment #1 posted by Lehder on May 24, 2003 at 17:21:39 PT
where there's smoke there's PRISON
>>Rusche sees the rally
   behind medical marijuana as the latest form of pro-pot propaganda, a smoke screen for
   the real goal of legitimizing recreational use.No. Nearly all reformers on this site demand that marijuana be legalized for whomever wants it for whatever purpose. The benefits of marijuana are too numerous to restrict its use to a few people or for a specific purpose. There's no smoke screen here, prohibitionists. We want marijuana relegalized, and it's a trivial corollary that we want it relegalized as medicine too.The antis, though, spew plenty of smoke screens, statements like>>Today, we have a much clearer understanding of the implications of
   marijuana and how it can adversely affect ... perception, behavior, functioning and fetal
   development," said Wayne Dailey, spokesman for the state Department of Mental Health
   and Addiction Services. that are fraught with falsehood and invariably made by those with an economic interest in continuing the ugly drug war. These are the smoke screens, smoke screens that interpose a specious and insincere concern for health to cloud the real issue of PRISON.I'm not going to argue with Wayne Dailey's claim that expectant mothers who smoke marijuana are harming their babies. I'll leave the scientific argument to someone who is qualified, like Dr. Melanie Dreher, Dean of Nursing at the University of Iowa:   http://search.yahoo.com/search?x=wrt&p=Melanie+Dreher&vm=i&n=20&fl=0I would only be coughing and wheezing in his smoke screen, as Dailey would hope, were I to address his specious statements about the effects of marijuana.But I will argue, outside the smoke screen's haze, that whatever the effects of marijuana on fetuses, they are no reason to hold hundreds of thousands of people in prison for using a natural herb that millions of people for thousands of years have found desirable, healthful and harmless - and those people include smoking mothers and their healthy, intelligent and well adjusted babies. (But you may not care to read about the issue, already having an opinion; or maybe just a feeling is enough for you.)Nor is the fact that this efficacious herb gets a person "high" any reason at all to arrest 750,000 people each year for enjoying that "high" along the many benefits that the "high" confers: prevention of Alzheimer's Disease, prevention of the formation of lung tumors, stimulation of the appetite, a mild cure for insomnia that is free of any morning hangover, and many other benefits that require an entire literature to discuss.But the biggest smoke screen of all, the smoke screen that shows the utter desperation of prohibitionists in their struggle to scream and scare over anything at all besides PROHIBITION and PRISON by any perfidious means, is the billowing falsehood that marijuana has anything at all to do with terrorism. This is the black fuming monstrosity that towers above the burning wells of Kuwait and like a daft PROHIBITIONIST's dank PRISON cell stinks to high heaven.
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