cannabisnews.com: The Harsh Taste of Progress 





The Harsh Taste of Progress 
Posted by CN Staff on October 10, 2003 at 14:51:49 PT
By Christopher Caldwell 
Source: Financial Times UK
Posters have gone up in Washington bus shelters and underground stations in recent months, urging commuters to "Enjoy better sex: legalise and tax marijuana." The posters are sponsored by Change the Climate, one of two large lobbying operations urging Americans to reassess whether pot-smoking should be a criminal offence. The other is Norml, the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
In spite of their misleading argument - for surely it is the smoking of marijuana, not the taxation of it, that delivers the alleged aphrodisiac kick - the posters have made many middle-aged Americans think about pot for the first time since university.Worldwide, marijuana has not enjoyed such prestige for three decades.In July, Canada began permitting doctors to prescribe cannabis, as Germany and Australia do already. The Netherlands followed suit in September. In several cases working their way through Ontario courts, judges are deciding whether Canada's marijuana laws pass constitutional scrutiny at all, given that the government has, in effect, declared the drug a medicine. Spurred by such concerns, Canada's parliament is rushing to decriminalise possession of 15 grammes of pot or less.On the surface, the US appears to buck this trend. The Bush administration has favoured prosecuting doctors who prescribe marijuana. The Federal Bureau of Investigation recorded 723,000 pot arrests in 2001, double the number of a decade ago. But such figures may reflect not the public's intolerance but the drug's popularity, as Washington finds itself at odds with local authorities across the country.At the state level, the estimated 18m Americans who regularly smoke pot have won significant victories. Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington all have medical marijuana laws. At a September forum during the California governors' race, the candidates were unanimous on only one thing: keeping medical marijuana legal.In Seattle, 58 per cent of voters passed a law ordering police to assign the arrest of pot-smokers their lowest priority. According to Keith Stroup, executive director of Norml: "We have essentially won the hearts and minds of the American public."Not so fast, others might argue: wherever marijuana has made advances in recent years, it has done so as a medicine, not as a means of getting stoned. Legally, this is true; practically, it is hard to separate patients from recreational users. The list of people authorised to smoke pot tends to lengthen. Dutch law, for instance, allows pot to be prescribed for cancer, HIV, multiple sclerosis and Tourette's syndrome; but activists are urging that glaucoma and migraines, Crohn's disease and chronic neuropathy be added to the list.In the US, where many medical-marijuana laws allow authorised users to grow their own drugs, telling patients from pot-heads is even harder. A new law in Maryland allows marijuana defendants to argue for nominal sentences if they can show that they have any condition for which the drug could be prescribed. As one giddy Maryland lawyer said last week, "How many people out there don't have any kind of physical pain that marijuana might alleviate?"Some people will continue to serve time: a California man who claimed he was growing marijuana to treat a wrestling injury recently got 18 months in jail - though it probably did not help that he was growing a 100-bush orchard of the stuff and had a semi-automatic handgun in his pocket when arrested. But, barring such circumstances, it is hard to imagine an HIV-positive person, or one who has ever had cancer, being convicted on a marijuana charge.The medical basis for the marijuana campaign is in striking contrast to similar movements in the 1970s. Back then, the agitation to decriminalise grass was overtly hedonistic and was carried out in the context of a society-wide easing of restrictions on all manner of vices and nonconformities. Today's bid for liberal marijuana laws takes place in the context of an uninterrupted crackdown, in virtually every western country, on other illegal drugs.Not to mention legal ones. The western jihad against cigarette-smoking continues to spread, even to the most unlikely venues: Israeli restaurants, Italian airports, Irish pubs. Alcohol is no different. Scandinavia now has zero-tolerance drink-driving laws. France is enforcing its own, for practically the first time, as part of President Jacques Chirac's campaign against reckless driving. America's National Academy of Sciences devotes vast resources to measuring "teenage binge drinking".In late September, a UK Cabinet Office study warned that booze cost British workers 14m missed work days a year. No one is scrutinising marijuana's effects nearly so closely .There is a strange bifurcation of criteria. We now take a puritanical view of traditional intoxicants such as alcohol and tobacco and a libertine view of non-traditional ones such as marijuana. How come? One answer is common sense: marijuana is simply a far less dangerous drug. You could legalise it tomorrow across the UK, say, and still not wind up with the 1m annual casualty-ward visits that the British Association for the Advancement of Science attributes to alcohol.But surely part of the appeal of the marijuana movement is that it defies common sense. In today's self-doubting west, the most energetic politics is dedicated to stopping the runaway train of progress that the west set in motion. We see this in green, gay, anti-colonial, anti-globalisation, animal rights and feminist politics, all of which aim to throw into reverse longstanding western preferences and power arrangements.In their minor way, alcohol and tobacco are vulnerable precisely because they are proper to our culture; marijuana gets a pass because it is not.The most deep-seated values are delegitimised by the very fact of their having been formed in the first place. Whatever the people who brought us slavery, the Gulag and the hydrogen bomb did, we want to do the opposite. Right down to our choice of intoxicants.The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard Source: Financial Times (UK)Author: Christopher Caldwell Published: October 10, 2003Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 2003Website: http://www.ft.com/Contact: letters.editor ft.com Related Articles & Web Sites:NORMLhttp://www.norml.org/Change The Climatehttp://www.changetheclimate.org/Scrap The Pot and Sex Ads http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread17468.shtmlPro-Pot Ads To Be Posted at 10 Metro Stationshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread17456.shtmlMarijuana Chemical Eases Tourette's Symptomshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread12427.shtml
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Comment #2 posted by FoM on October 10, 2003 at 18:13:00 PT
Bills Signed Friday by Gov. Gray Davis - 10-10
MARIJUANA RESEARCH -- Ends three-year limit on California Marijuana Research Program at the University of California, SB295, by Sen. John Vasconcellos, D-Santa Clara. Complete Article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/10/10/state2057EDT0143.DTL
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Comment #1 posted by observer on October 10, 2003 at 15:13:25 PT
''Enjoy better sex ...''
http://www.changetheclimate.org : 
"Enjoy better sex: legalise and tax marijuana."In the words of Carl Sagan, scientist and author:''Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex – on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.''-- Carl Sagan
http://marijuana-uses.com/examples/Mr_X.htm
very latest raw breaking pot news - http://drugpolicycentral.com/bot/pot
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