Marijuana Status
It has long been a sore point with medical scientists, familiar at all with the physiological aspects of drugs and drug abuse, to find just how political and cultural our legal system is with regards to the various recreational drugs of abuse. For the most part, practically everywhere in the world, the legal recreational drugs of abuse are the most popular ones, and the illegal ones are those used by the minority. Science is not heavily involved.
Even more disappointing is just how little attention is paid to exactly why people abuse recreational drugs. People do a lot of things which just makes them feel better, or relaxes them, or elevates their emotional state, or relieves the stresses in their lives, or just gives them weird mental experiences. The fortunate people are those who feel good without the need of any drugs to generate these ‘good’ feelings. We get hungry, we eat, and after we eat we feel better. We may exercise, and after we exercise we feel better, we may watch a ball game because it adds some excitement to our lives and we like that, we may go shopping because it makes us feel good to have more stuff, we may seek sex for the evening because it makes us feel ‘good’, we may bet on the horses for the chance to feel ‘good’ when our horse wins, and the list goes on and on. Strangely, when someone takes a recreational drug to feel ‘good’ we start attaching moral and character components to this kind of habit—depending, of course, which recreational drug is being used.
Part of the problem with this topic on recreational drug abuse is that we tend to feel we have to prove the substance being ‘abused’ is a medical danger to the person taking it. If a person spends too much time gambling, it is bad because they may be losing a lot of money or hurting their career advancement, or breaking up a good family life, etc. A person who shops too much may end up hopelessly in debt, a person who chases after endless sex may find such compulsive behavior leads no where but endless inability to maintain a stable social life, and so it goes on and on, simply a reflection of the down side of compulsive behaviors. Something does not have to be medically toxic to be harmful to our lives.
In reality, the acquired compulsive behaviors to make ourselves ‘feel better’ rarely achieve any real contentment. It always requires more personal investment to get the same high, and the crashes become more severe. All compulsive behaviors, past a certain degree, require medical attention. If we did the right thing, there would be medical centers all over the country which exist to help all citizens let go of compulsive behaviors of any sort. To take a compulsive disorder and make it a criminal behavior ensures the person so affected will not get any help, and in the case of a drug, it will create a massive underground industry of drug trafficking, turn many cities and rural areas into ‘drug zones’, which in turn drive out businesses, and ghettoes are born or made more dangerous. Ethically this is plain wrong, and economically it is just stupid. It costs roughly $30,000/yr to keep some teenage kid in jail for selling illegal recreational drugs. With mandatory sentences, we may be talking $300,000 for a ten year sentence. Of course the economic burden doesn’t stop there. After getting out of jail, now near 30 years of age, the person has no skills to get a job, few want to hire felons, they are uneducated, they grew up in a social atmosphere where thuggishness ruled their living situation, with criminal behavior the means to any money. It would be hard to create a worse model for how to treat recreational drug abuse. Yet we have been doing just that for over 50 years, and all along the way the ‘answer’ has always been stiffer mandatory sentences. It would be hard to choose which has been a bigger hoax on our society, the “drug war” or “trickle down economics”. We currently have more people in jail and more living in poverty than ever before.
Those of us who use alcohol know why we use it. It gives us a little buzz in social situations or settles us down mentally after a stressful day. Smoking may settle our nerves, mellow us out, or whatever. Cocaine will generate a more excited state of mind, add some energy to a life that otherwise has no such energy. Heroin will enable us to care less about pain, whether it be physical or emotional pain. Marijuana will mellow us out, calm us down, make us giggle, or make us more pensive, or make life feel more acceptable. No attempt will be made here to go into detail about any particular drug of abuse. That constitutes a book.
In America, nicotine and alcohol are the recreational drugs of the majority. Of all the common drugs of abuse in America, these two are also the most toxic common recreational drugs. Nicotine is by far the most toxic to our bodies. Alcohol toxicity is dependent on dosage, frequency, and genetics. Some people, with a genetic disposition to alcoholism, should never touch alcohol at all. For others, one drink a day may even be beneficial. How much alcohol anyone can tolerate varies a lot. The medical costs for treating conditions caused by alcohol and nicotine are exceedingly high. Those not addicted end up helping to pay these medical costs.
So why has marijuana been so harshly treated legally in the United States? Marijuana use was originally associated with latino workers who found marijuana their favorite recreational drug of choice. It was a cultural thing. Then it became a political football. These migrant workers wandering around the country using marijuana were not going to become something to bring down others in this country to their level. Of course their level in our society had nothing to do with their use of marijuana, but more to their inability to make a decent living. If we take drugs to alter the way we feel, then common sense dictates that the poor and least fortunate in life will be more likely to use drugs to feel better. Unfortunately, most people prefer to think drug use caused their situation rather than their situation cause the drug abuse. Interestingly, affluent people are hardly immune from a perceived need to use drugs to alter their emotional state. Thus, the problem crosses economic levels. It also shows that one doesn’t have to be poor to be unhappy about their lives.
President Richard Nixon was the first modern President who attempted to line up science behind our drug laws. He authorized scientific studies to straighten out the ‘drug mess’. The results of the studies did not support political and cultural realities and he never released these studies. The political pressure back then, and up to now, has been to ‘get tough on drug use’, at least those drugs not used by the majority of Americans. The tougher we got, the more our jail population rose, the higher the crime rates in the country, the the more barbaric our ghettoes became——and these ghetto populations became poorer and poorer, and in a sense our ‘drug war’ bombed these communities back into some sort of ‘stone age’.
Over time the illegal drug industry became one of our biggest industries, and not only did it not eliminate illegal drug use in this country, but it destroyed the political stability of many foreign governments who supplied the drugs. These foreign countries, most of them poor to begin with, were terrorized by drug cartels which were as well armed as government police, and terrorized communities across their own lands. The ‘war against drugs’ is over 50 years old now and has only made the situation worse for many of our domestic communities and foreign countries. In this country the affluent can ‘gate’ themselves off from the turmoil and poverty associated with this war, but the cost of subsidizing all this created poverty has created one budget crises after another. Between the ‘war on drugs’ and the refusal to tie the minimum wage to any rise in the cost of living, as is done with social security, the poor in this country cannot sustain a living without 2 jobs or unemployment benefits. If so many people need two jobs to make a living wage, then of course there will not be enough jobs for everyone to find work. All this mess is called positive feedback, and the problems grow, not decrease. The driving force behind all this is the obsession of the wealthy to acquire more wealth—enough is never enough. For them to do this, taxes and all kinds of laws are adjusted to make it easier for the wealthy to acquire even more wealth. But that added wealth has to come off the backs of others. Today, no more of this addicted additional wealth by the wealthy can come from the poor so more and more of the middle class need be driven into poverty as their share of our countries wealth decreases.
So what is it that makes the use of marijuana so harmful to the users? From a physiologic standpoint, the effects on the body, compared to alcohol misuse, or nicotine use at all, are miniscule. That is hardly surprising since we are well aware of the behavior of alcoholics and we see every day the medical consequences alcohol or nicotine takes on the users. But who are all these people who use marijuana? We really don’t know, for the most part, since there is little to observe and they are not clogging up our medical facilities with medical problems. The most common charge of those who strongly oppose legalizing marijuana is that the drug lessens motivation and impairs memory. And of course, marijuana is often a precursor for the more hard drugs. The trouble is, the most toxic drugs drugs are the two most drugs in popular use—alcohol and nicotine. These two drugs, from a medical standpoint, are hard drugs.
It must be made clear again that people who abuse recreational drugs are people who, for whatever reason, feel a need for the emotional state created by their recreational drug use. This has nothing to do with ‘bad’ people vs ‘good people’. It has everything to do with circumstances (environment), personality, emotional stability, success in achieving goals in life, family situation, work situations, or social situations, and genetics. Every person exists in a unique mental state for many reasons, and if a current mental state leaves someone with a need for a particular drug, then that is just the reality of it.
It is the mental state which determines the particular recreational drug selected. If you want to lose inhibitions in a social setting you use alcohol. If you simply want a little ‘buzz’ with your meal or to relax at home, you use alcohol. If you are used to having your nerves settled a bit with nicotine, you smoke. If you want to reduce mental or physical pain you gravitate to heroin/morphine (they both operate via the same body receptors). If you want to elevate your energy level and get higher levels of emotional responses you gravitate toward cocaine/amphetamines, if you want to simply mellow out from stress you use marijuana. We need keep in mind that everyone’s mental state is different, and it is the mental state which determines to what extent and for what effect any particular drug will be employed.
Clearly, drug abuse cannot, for the most part, be stopped until our mental state is changed. Addiction to anything, compulsive behavior about anything—all this has to do with achieving a desired mental state. Judging how successfully we are living our lives can, to some degree, be done by just how much need there is for drug altered mental states or compulsive behaviors to drive our lives. Contented people have minimum need for compulsive behaviors, and that includes recreational drug abuse. Recreational drug abuse is not simply a matter of toxicity to the body. Any compulsive behavior can at some point interfere with the rest of your life endeavors. It can harm family relationships, performance at work, our financial situation, and all kinds of social situations.
While smoking marijuana is not a dangerous medical situation, dependency on it for us to feel ‘good’ can distract us from other obligations. When people say pot heads are less motivated because of marijuana use, this can, in some cases be true JUST AS IT CAN BE TRUE with any other compulsive behavior. Compulsive behaviors always tend to distract us from other objectives which are important to our lives. The reality is this: whether it is recreational drug use or other compulsive behaviors, a balance needs be established so that we can still get our pleasant buzz as sort of a treat to our mental state, and yet not become compulsive about what we employ to get our ‘buzz’.
Young people (or others for that matter) are better off getting high with marijuana at a social event then binge drinking. All of us need find ways to make our lives more bearable, if they are unbearable, rather than take heroin to lessen the pain we feel about our life situation. We all need to find real activities in life to give us more energy, not resort to stimulatory drugs.
Instead of teaching the public to understand why people abuse drugs, the government has always chosen to go the path of portraying these drugs as chemical toxins. In terms of physiological addiction, nicotine is the worst. The body really often does create genuine physiological havoc during withdrawal of the drug. Cocaine and amphetamines can be a a problem here as can alcohol withdrawal. However, most of the time the addiction is psychological in that we simply miss the changed mental state.
For example, the Government has for years, and still does to a certain extent, warn the public that if you ever start taking heroin, you will be hopelessly addicted. They used to preach the same nonsense when it came to hospital relief of pain via morphine (remember both morphine and heroin use the same body receptors). Patients not too long ago had to beg for more morphine for their pain and were told “NO, you might become addicted to it”. Only recently has the medical field given in and actually gives the patient a button to press when they need more morphine. Once the pain in a hospital situation goes away, no patient runs around screaming for more morphine. While in Vietnam many soldiers on the battle fronts used heroin a lot. When they returned home, away from the stress of the battlefield, only 2% continued heroin use and the 2% probably faced stresses back home great enough to generate continued use of heroin. It is very simple. No more pain, no more need for heroin. And we need remember that the pain can be physical or emotional. Another exaggeration by the government is that heroin overdose can kill you. Because the body produces its own endogenous opiates under certain conditions, heroin/morphine is the least toxic major recreational drug out there. It is a natural substance to the body. Of course too much of most anything can kill us, but practically all heroin overdoses involve the use of alcohol and heroin at the same time. The combination can depress breathing enough to kill a person. But the government invariably prefers to say the person died of heroin overdose.
People who are emotionally pained by their life, for whatever reason, may gravitate to heroin simply because heroin reduces this emotional pain about their life. Their life hasn’t changed, but how they feel about their lives has. Same way with physical pain. Heroin/morphine only blocks the emotional pathway of pain. That is why, in a hospital setting, it is so valuable. The doctor gives you morphine for the pain and the next day will ask about the pain, and the patient will say essentially, “It still hurts but it doesn’t bother me as much.” And when the pain really goes away, they have no interest in taking any more morphine. What for? There is no pain to eliminate.
Into all the above context comes, at last, a more honest look about the place of marijuana as a recreational drug. Of course any drug which mellows us out is going to often reduce our motivation. If it has been a rough week there is nothing all that wrong with taking marijuana to mellow out. It is physiologically risky to let ourselves get too stressed out. There is a balance here which is very individualized. Does marijuana affect our memory? I suppose to the extent we get too mellowed out our memory is affected. It is probably not too smart to tackle algebra while high on pot. It does not follow that there are not situations when smoking pot will do you more good than harm. That is why the term drug abuse is so useful. It means what it says——that you are using a drug too much or at the wrong time.
The marijuana question has become so silly, that we actually start making it legal for medical purposes first. In Illinois there are now 36 medical conditions in which marijuana can be legally used. In many states the possession of certain amounts of marijuana is now legal. In some states marijuana use is no longer illegal period. To my knowledge, nothing much has changed in these states. If we can survive nicotine and alcohol being legal, we sure as hell can survive marijuana as being legal. Incidentally, I have used marijuana maybe a half dozen times in my life. I guess I can get high without the use of drugs. Of course a huge unregulated, unrestrained, predatory corporation like the NFL still suspends a player who uses marijuana to mellow out a bit from all the stress, but allows binge drinking, and if a player has behavior problems off the field with assaulting others, they permit assigning a 24 hour security detail to a player to safeguard the public. How ridiculous and unfair can it get? Well, I suppose generating contracts with players which are binding only to the player, is a far more pervasive injustice. Naturally, when you have no bottom line to worry about, can set up your own legal system with the Commissioner being the police, the Judge, and the Jury, and have it all run by a cabal of billionaires, thus you end up with the biggest, most powerful, and most predatory on the public, corporation imaginable. It is no normal corporation since it is exempt from most taxation, with no regulation and no limits. I reckon, if one of these billionaires were to kill some one in public, our regular legal system might kick in, but then we all know the advantage a wealthy person has in our regular court system. If most of us kill someone in public, the trial is over in a few days. If a wealthy person commits the same crime the trial will take months. Reasonable doubt becomes, for jury members, a question of reasonable doubt whether they can digest months of testimony. In most cases, months of testimony can create reasonable doubt just by the volume of testimony.
It took less than a decade for us to decide alcohol prohibition simply generated more harm than good. It has taken us more than 50 years to conclude the same thing about marijuana and it is far less toxic than alcohol and is far less likely to raise havoc with our personal or professional life. We seem to be on a slow learner track the past 50 years. We are only now beginning to realize, after Vietnam, that we really cannot make other countries do our bidding, noble or otherwise. Our choice always seems to end up bombing them into the stone age, or, after many years, declaring victory and leaving behind a more chaotic situation than when we entered the fray. Let’s face it, war makes a lot of people really rich.
In summary, marijuana use is like most anything else we do to alter our mental state, including compulsive behavior about anything——we need to know ourselves well in order to know when enough is enough. Except for nicotine, which no one should use at all, recreational drugs can be used responsibly, at least most of them, but we all need to be educated about the dangers of excessive use. Recreational use of drugs is an artificially created mental state that has no connection with reality. It is our other behaviors and priorities which generate a genuine contented mental state. It should be noted that genuinely contented mental states are not dependent on economic or social status. And they certainly are not dependent on drug use. Drug use, when done properly, can only provide some pleasant moments, temporary moments, which is like a little dessert in our lives. For those of us more fortunate, such temporary moments are never excessive.
Left in limbo is how best to proceed after the criminal ‘war on drugs’ is ended and replaced with addiction centers to help those with addiction problems. Perhaps it need start with individual accountability for becoming addicted to toxic substances. For example, cigarette smoke contains over 7000 chemicals, 69 of which are known carcinogens. Smoking is responsible for around 90% of lung cancer deaths and 80% of deaths due to emphysema and chronic bronchitis. So perhaps those who smoke and get lung cancer, emphysema, and bronchitis should have to pay like 70% of the associated medical costs out of pocket, not via insurance.
While this seems perhaps fair enough with nicotine, it does get complicated. For example, alcohol abuse can contribute to over 200 medical conditions. But it also may benefit some people when used in moderation. Putting any fair monetary penalty would be elusive.
There are no recorded death from marijuana use. So it would be ludicrous to penalize them in terms of medical benefits.
Then again, there are so many things which contribute greatly to medical costs, like being overweight. Or never exercising, or being on a stressful job, and the list goes on. In other words, charging people for engaging in activities of any sort which are bad for their health gets impossibly tricky.
Perhaps nicotine is so directly related to particular diseases (3 total) that a monetary penalty for medical costs could be justified. The trouble is nicotine is the most addictive recreational drug out there. How easy it is to quit smoking varies all over the place. There are people who lose a foot over gangrene from smoking who still can’t quit even though they may lose another foot, or more of the amputated limb. Perhaps the only solution is to grab a person when they first start smoking and start hitting them with huge fines right away, before they can become too addicted. If this seem heavy handed, it is, after all, often a matter of life and death.
For me, when I want to cool out, mellow out, be pensive about matters, I don’t think of marijuana, I walk out into nature alone and walk for 5-8 miles—not a power walk, just sort of meander along. Walking through major safe city neighborhoods, and riding public transportation is also interesting if one likes to people watch. Two totally different environments but intriguing. Watching evolution in action brings an appreciation for the process, and for the Creator of the process, and the laws which govern it. That appreciation is about as much as we can really get from life. Only then can we accept that TIME stays, WE go.
