Over the past year and a half, I’ve skimmed the surface of medical cannabis like a bat snatching bugs off the surface of a Sonoran creek. I’ve swooped down week after week, picking tidbits from the surface but never dipping much below it.
There are a lot of reasons for that, one of which is that I’m not sure I have the stomach to immerse myself in medical cannabis. As a journalist, I have always had a pretty good bullshit meter. It has a served me well throughout a lengthy, successful career in the news industry. My bullshit meter has been working overtime since taking this gig.
Sometimes I look around at the cannabis community, and all I can do is sigh and shake my head. There are a lot of marijuana-obsessed people out there who have hijacked the medical paradigm, stripping away any real chance of significant credibility among the establishment. I’m guilty of some of it myself.
This column has at times become a shrill, screaming fit of hyperbolic grammar and syntax that has surely sometimes widened the division between Us and Them. I’ve probably pissed off a few Teabilly fuck sticks, but most of them were already pissed, so I feel only marginally bad. I’ve pissed off some friends of cannabis, too.
What I haven’t done is jump blindly on the cannabis train, waving my green flag at rallies and various and sundry gatherings of cannabis advocates and seeming profiteers. Interestingly, a lot of these people advocated legalization before Cali struck medical gold in 1996. They simply went legit, veiling their weed obsession with medical garb.
Some of you may have noticed that I didn’t acknowledge 4/20. If that bothered you, then Mr. Smith suggests you take a look at your motivation. I didn’t recognize 4/20, because it has nothing whatsoever to do with medical cannabis.
Nothing. Period.
I think I’ll start a new holiday—10/20. That’s what time people take ibuprofin for headaches that would otherwise keep them awake. Let’s contrive a holiday and have a huge rally. The official color will be ibuprofin red. We can march in the hundreds, openly taking ibuprofin right in front of everyone, singing the virtues of our favorite wonder drug. We can carefully craft giant flags with pills on them and wave them around for the television cameras. Sound ridiculous?
It is.
The 4/20 obsession is a childish excuse—invented by high school students, according to urban legend—to smoke dope. People try to cast it as something more, as if it were a reasoned, measured response to oppression by The Man. Sorry, but cheering and waving a blunt around in the street isn’t helping the medical cannabis world. It’s making you look like a high school sophomore.
I hear a lot of hyperbole from fellow cannabis advocates. They get all up in arms about the lies and selective truths coming from the establishment … then they spout lies and selective truths. My favorite is the “cannabis never killed anyone” song.
Bullshit.
If you believe cannabis never killed anyone, you are every inch as naive as the anti-cannabis pig fuckers who want you to be their pig. Cannabis has undoubtedly killed many, many, many people. If you think millions of people can inhale carcinogens daily through their entire adult lives, all of them somehow miraculously avoiding cancer and none of them dying because of it, I feel sorry for you. I hope you are not in a responsible job that requires well-reasoned, life or death decisions.
Yes, I use cannabis daily, but I don’t have any pot leaf shirts. I don’t have pot bumper stickers on my car. I don’t keep cannabis in a tray on my coffee table next to a giant Fathead glass piece, like some kind of altar to be approached with reverence and ritual as need arises. It isn’t integral to my psyche.
After all, it’s only medicine.
This article appears in Jun 13-19, 2013.
“I don’t have any pot leaf shirts. I don’t have pot bumper stickers on my car.”
It’s always been my belief that a person who does exhibit these items in public also might as well wear shirts or have bumper stickers that read: “Hey law enforcement or anyone who likes to contact law enforcement, please harass my dumbass for not being smart enough to keep incognito about an item that is still considered very taboo by a lot of everyday people.”
I know this was wordy, at least it gets my point across.
Sir:
Point is well taken about medical -v- “medical” (wink-wink) usage, but regarding “If you think millions of people can inhale carcinogens daily through their entire adult lives, all of them somehow miraculously avoiding cancer and none of them dying because of it, I feel sorry for you.”:
While the jury is apparently still out on whether smoking cannabis is less bad, as bad, or more bad than smoking tobacco (some articles are here — http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/13/is-pot-good-for-lungs-new-marijuana-study-adds-to-health-effects-debate.print.html –) that question only addresses the delivery method and not the cannabis itself, per se. (Tangerines are generally considered healthy, but drying and smoking them is probably not.)
Although it could be argued that cannabis PLUS OTHER STUFF (e.g., alcohol, driving, contamination with molds/other toxins, “Hey, watch this!” and other misadventure, &c) may have taken some lives, the oft-cited statistic that cannabis — solely and by its own self — never killed anyone is probably true.
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found marijuana smoke to be not as damaging as cigarette smoke, and occasional marijuana use is actually associated with increases in lung capacity – a good thing.
Harvard University scientists reported [ http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v95/n2/abs/6603236a.html%5D that THC slows tumor growth in common lung cancer and “significantly reduces the ability of the cancer to spread.” What’s more, like a heat-seeking missile, THC selectively targets and destroys tumor cells while leaving healthy cells unscathed. Conventional chemotherapy drugs, by contrast, are highly toxic; they indiscriminately damage the brain and body.
Mr. Smith, it is not often we get to enjoy in print a raving maniac such as you. If you don’t want to wear t-shrits and display bumper stickers to avoid enraging the cops, that is your wise choice. I don’t wear them either. Here is Houston cops are part of the drug trade. They might think I was trying to cut in to their territory. Or I might be a prospective customer. But mostly they work for the big boys. However, I do enrage cops, military types, and religious crazies with a “War is Not the Answer” bumper sticker.
(I was charged nearly $400 for a dollar fuse for my air conditioner at an auto repair shop just outside the entrance of Davis-Monthan because I had this anti-war bumper sticker. The testosterone rose to such a level I thought the macho/wussie war-mongering owner was going to attack himself.)
If you think grass is carcinogenic, why do you smoke it every day?
You are a very confused, hysterical person. I hope grass is not to blame.
Here is Texas we think of 4/20 as Willie Nelson’s birthday. And happy hour usually starts for us a little after 4 pm, so 4/20 works for us every day and we are a happy lot, except for the hate-filled teabaggers and right wing religious crazies. If smoking pot were mandatory for them I wonder if they would light up, loosen up, and become sane. That might be too much to ask of one beloved, magical plant.
I voted for that stupid bill because I figured that if it helped someone and I didn’t have to be any part of it, that it would be fine.
Then you promptly polluted the environment with the fucking green leaf symbol. You’ve turned entire city blocks into that coffee table you describe.
Lower back pain my ass, pothead.
“yes Bob” must be in the pay of the drug cartels. The best way to keep Mexico flush with US dollars, keep the border awash with death and destruction, keep the industrial jails producing license plates is to keep weed illegal. Think of the social programs, or better yet the debt reduction the US could gain with a stop to the Marijuana Wars. (cut a few police budgets while we are at it) Keep up the good work Yes Bob.
“Ibuprofen,” not “ibuprofin.” Don’t smoke and spellcheck.