Medical Marijuana Isn't a Trojan Horse. The Drug War is a Trojan Horse.
Charles Lane at The Washington Post stepped in it big time yesterday with an awful piece that literally had to be edited after publication for shocking insensitivity. Now he's returned with another, falling back on the desperate argument that medical marijuana is a Trojan Horse for recreational legalization.
Listen, medical marijuana isn't a trick and it's pathetic to pretend that the people trying to legalize marijuana are behaving surreptitiously when we've been screaming "legalize marijuana" at the top of our lungs for a damn long time now. You can't blame us for the fact that the medical marijuana debate necessarily serves to illustrate so much about the absurdity of marijuana prohibition as a whole. Nor does it in any way undermine our credibility when we place the interests of seriously ill patients before those of casual users when setting our political priorities.
Critics of medical marijuana advocacy often accuse us of demanding unusual regulatory exceptions for marijuana, complaining that it hasn’t been approved by the FDA and that the whole concept of medicine by referendum is absurd, as though there exists any other path for us to take. It really shouldn’t be necessary to explain all the ways in which endemic and entrenched anti-pot prejudice across numerous government agencies renders preposterous any notion that we could just play this out by the usual rules. We've been trying that for decades now and we get cheated at every turn, so you can save your appeals to procedure.
Marijuana can't be treated like other medicines, because it's nothing like them. It was here first and it's vastly cheaper, safer, and more versatile than its modern pharmaceutical counterparts. It's a bush that just grows out of the ground and what we want is for the government to stop arresting people who've found ways to use it. There's nothing even the least bit complicated or disingenuous about that.
Those who now lament the cascading political momentum of medical marijuana as some sort of grand conspiracy have it exactly backwards. Marijuana was prohibited through a vicious series of outrageous lies and perversions of science. We all know the history of racism, demagoguery, and blind hysteria that somehow turned a helpful plant into a scary satanic deathbush. From the very beginning, there has never been a time when any of this made sense. To now stand proudly atop the pedestal of prohibition while questioning our credibility and our motives is just insane.
Yes, there is a massive lie at the center of this debate, but we're not the ones telling it. The drug war itself is the true Trojan Horse that masquerades as a symbol of health and safety, while harboring destruction within its folds.
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redditThe incremental strategy is working pretty damn well
Comment posted by newageblues on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 12:57am"For drug policy reform leaders to believe drug prohibition can be repealed incrementally is either an act of ignorance or hubris - take your pick." I dunno, making such a sweeping prediction about the future seems like plenty of hubris to me. MMJ has overwhelming public support, some of the people who need it really need it, it would be stupid not to push for it on it's own merits. It's success has helped to get pro-cannabis legalization sentiment to it's current close to a majority status, by showing how unproblematic cannabis use is in a legalized setting. And cannabis legalization deserves consideration on it's own merits too, it's too different from hard drugs to just be lumped in with them.
As far as what drug would be picked to focus on after cannabis legalization, I don't think there will be one, it will be probably be all the rest lumped together, I don't see which one would deserve to be singled out for special focus.
Psychedelics are off in a special class by themselves: much, much stronger than cannabis, but with unique value as well. The case for their legalization might be made largely independently, since the powerful argument that prohibition is empowering the violent cartels and destabilizing whole countries doesn't particularly apply in the case of psychedelics, but is probably the strongest argument for legalizing hard drugs.
yes, really
Comment posted by borden on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 11:43amUh, there hasn't been a drug policy reform movement for 95 years. There was a big marijuana legalization movement in the '70s, before things fell apart. The Drug Policy Foundation was founded in 1986, and most of the other groups fewer than 15 years ago.
The overwhelming weight of history demonstrates positive social changes having to percolate and advance slowly for very long periods of time before large changes become possible. Repeal of alcohol prohibition is a spectacular counterexample, but it's an exception, and it had not been long since alcohol had been legal so people still regarded prohibition as an experiment, an advantage we don't have today.
Based on what I remember when I first got involved with this next to all that has happened since, I believe that our movement's strategies are working -- take a trip to Los Angeles or Oakland if you don't believe it. But of course, we have a long way to go, and I don't think we have all the strategies in place yet that we need.
I also don't see an alternative to working incrementally while educating on the bigger issue. We're not going to win a vote to legalize all drugs this year, and we're closing in on majority support for marijuana legalization but are not quite there as of this year either.
David Borden, Executive Director
StoptheDrugWar.org: the Drug Reform Coordination Network
Washington, DC
http://stopthedrugwar.org
Friend, When you say things
Comment posted by borden on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 9:47pmFriend,
When you say things like drug reform leaders must be suffering from ignorance or hubris to make the decisions we've made, it's a little funny to then say that you're offended at being called out. The way you choose to express yourself about others has an impact on how others choose to express themselves about you.
In any case, it's neither ignorance nor hubris. It's that we're smart people who are also realistic, who spend much of our time thinking about strategy and how social change works. The decisions we've made come from that. We might turn out to be wrong about some things -- and we know that we might turn out to be wrong -- but we're making the best judgment calls that we can. We know that predicting the political future with certainty is beyond our limits. But you should know that doing so is also beyond your limits. The fact that you don't seem to know that -- the degree of certainty you expressed about a topic that is characterized by uncertainty -- is what prompted newageblues to characterize your post as being the one exhibiting the hubris.
That said, by no means have you engaged in heresy to call for more of a focus on big-picture efforts. From time to time it is necessary to realize when things have changed and to adapt. Participation like yours on forums like this are helpful in keeping everyone thinking about that. We are proud at DRCNet to have a formal, full legalization position for all drugs, and we have efforts in the works (educational) to increase our efforts in that area.
David Borden, Executive Director
StoptheDrugWar.org: the Drug Reform Coordination Network
Washington, DC
http://stopthedrugwar.org
Why I think hard drugs will be grouped together in making policy
Comment posted by newageblues on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 11:33pmI'm not trying to blur the distinctions among hard drugs, but those differences seem small to me compared to the differences between cannabis and any of them (+ alcohol). You can die of an overdose of heroin or cocaine (and it doesn't take much, they are so heavily refined), chronic heavy use has serious, life shortening effects, and addicts often will do anything to get their next supply. For what it's worth, I've never once before this heard of the idea of picking out one of the hard drugs to focus on after cannabis legalization. It seems farfetched to me. Much of the focus will be on breaking the power and violence of the black market and how some form of legalization of hard drugs is the only way to do that.
Why should legalizing marijuana be held hostage to the understandably harder sell of legalizing such serious drugs? Legalizing all drugs at once is a pretty radical step, I think it's natural for a lot of people to say 'let's start with weed and see how that goes'.
The path to hard drug legalization will probably lie through maintenance programs, which do such a good job of showing how much of the damage caused by hard drugs is caused by their draconian prohibition, as opposed to damage caused by their use. That, and needle exchanges, is what we should be pushing for on hard drugs, to save lives now. It would be interesting to see polling on maintenance programs, especially polling after the arguments for their use are mentioned.
I so agree
Comment posted by Moonrider on Tue, 10/27/2009 - 3:15amWe must begin using the argument that the federal government (and state/local governments) has absolutely no legitimate authority to tell any adult what s/he must or may not consume, whether that consumption is of a food or drug or vaccine, the individual's body belongs to the individual, not the government, and the decisions about what to smoke, ingest or inject are the individual's decision, alone. mandates and prohibitions are both unconstitutional and a violation of the right of the individual to direct his/her own life..
I'm pro-choice on EVERYTHING!