One Nation Under Drugs

8/6/2019 One Nation Under Drugs

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40 SALVO Issue 17

When a star promotes a product in a

flm, its called an advertorial. So is

the flm Its Complicatedan adver-

torial or smoking marijuana? Jason

Silva notes in his review o this movie at the Huff-

ington Postthat it shows successul, cosmopolitan

adults enjoying a marijuana joint with no conse-

quences.1 Upset that the flm received an R rat-

ing merely because o its potheads, Silva protests,We should all be proud o director Nancy Meyers,

and actors Meryl Streep and Steve Martin or help-

ing solidiy marijuanas entry into acceptable pop

culture status.

One Nation,

Under DrugsHow California & the Rest

of Us Can Become More

Like Yemen

or medicinal purposes.4

How did this come about? Healysays,

I guess it began the mo-ment medical-marijuanaadvocates began equat-ing pot with somethinghealthul and peoplestarted actually believingthem . . . to treat nauseaand headaches. . . .

You wont likely hear o potsharms,5 while millionaires likeHugh Hener and billionaires likeGeorge Soros have helped fnancemarijuana legalization.6

Making it healthy has madepot seem no more dangerousthan a bottle o spirulina, saysHealy, who complains that pot isnow so widespread, its no longercool.

How widespread? Silva crows,There are now more marijuanadispensaries in L.A. than there areStarbucks. And to date, fteenstates and the District o Columbiahave legalized medical mari-juana.

More states are likely on theway. A 2010 Franklin & Marshallpoll ound that 81 percent oPennsylvanians supported makingmedical marijuana legalup rom76 percent in 2006, noted Mack-enzie Carpenter in the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette:

Theyre lighting up jointsin Bryn Mawr and SquirrelHill [Pennsylvania] aterputting the kids to bed.At [Ava Lounge] in EastLiberty, pro-medical mari-juana activists are recruit-ing and organizing newmembers over martinis.7

What about those medicalreasons or marijuana? In Calior-nia, writes Mackenzie, otherwisehealthy young people with backpain are wangling permission romunscrupulous doctors to obtain the

COLUMN p / / H a z m a t s _ w i t h J u d i t h R e i s m a n /

Apparently pot is acceptablethese days, with starring celebri-ties toking in eature flms such asIts Complicated, The 40-Year-OldVirgin, and Forgetting Sarah Mar-shall. Even three years ago TheChristian Science Monitornoticeda trend: Films eaturing charac-ters using marijuana have mush-roomed. It is cinemas stonedage.2 (Theres even a list o the 20best stoner movies.3)

Silva happily notes, Our10,000-year relationship with can-nabis can now exist without shame

or rebellion. (Our10,000-year re-lationship with cannabis? The can-nabis relationship here began inearnest in the 1960s.)

In GQ Mark Healy agrees:

By all accounts this shouldbe a golden age or ston-ers. Weed has never beenstronger, more accessible,and less criminalpar-ticularly i youre wealthy,white, and living in one othe thirteen [now fteen]states where its approved


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Summer 2011 SALVO 41

drug. She quotes Lynn Abraham,Philadelphias ormer district attor-ney:

Why is it that in Calior-nia most people using itare 20 to 35 years old?Give me a break. Is thiswhat we want to becomein Pennsylvania? . . . Apleasure palace? Yikes.Were just going to turninto a bunch o spoiled,sel-indulgent dopeheads.

Deenders o cannabis legalization,o course, would say Abraham isjust wrong.

Yemens Woes

What might a society with wide-spread drug use over a ew gen-erations look like?

My interest in this question be-gan in 1978, when I read an articlecalled Qats Cradle in HumanBehavior. It recounted how theU.S. Department o Health, Edu-cation and Welare had paid twoUCLA researchers to spend twoyears in Yemen to ascertain whatlie would be like in a total drugculture. Yemen was a good placeor such a study because a largeproportion o its population culti-

vated and used qat (pronouncedkhat), a so-called mild narcoticlea, considered less addictive andless harmul than marijuana. Theresearchers reported that Yemeniso all ages used qat:

Students chew [the leaves]liberally. . . . Children chewqat starting at seven oreight years o age . . .women . . . have their ownqat parties . . . taxi driverschew. . . . Politicians chewwith politicians; religious

leaders and schol-ars chew with theirgroups. Qat chewingeven plays a role inthe highest govern-ment circles.8

This habit o qatchewing in Yemen issome 400 years old, theresearchers reported, cit-ing a 19th-century trav-eler to Yemen who triedit and commented, TheYamini can go or severaldays without ood, butnot a single day withoutqat. Men and womenand children, they all useit.9The society that en-

SEX

gaged in all this qat chewing wasdescribed as a lethargic populationthat endured widespread malnour-ishment, impoverishment, and in-ant mortality.

A World Bank report issuedin 2007 corroborates the picturepainted by the UCLA research-ers. Titled Yemen: Towards QatDemand Reduction, this reportstates that until the 1960s, qatchewing was an occasional pas-time, mainly or the rich, butthat in the last hal-century, it hasbecome much more widespread,with trend data showing increas-ing use by children as young asfve years old. The report showshow qat use has been linkedto widespread child malnutritionand household ood insecurityand numerous other problems. Itstates:

The adverse health eectso qat . . . include highblood-pressure, under-weight children (whenpregnant women chewqat), cancer (rom consum-ing pesticide residues),and dental diseases. Con-sumers spend, on average,nearly 10 percent o theirincome [on qat]. . . . [Qat


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42 SALVO Issue 17

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is] inimical to the devel-opment o a productivework orce, with as muchas one-quarter o usableworking hours allocated toqat chewing.10

A Universal Problem

Yemen is not unique. Joints andvarious hallucinogens have longbeen with us. In his book The Waron Drugs, James Inciardi, an au-thority on drugs and crime, writesthat

reerences to marijuanaappear in early Persian,Hindu, Greek, Arab andChinese writings [and the]chewing o coca had al-ready been in Inca mythol-ogy or centuries.11

Though surrounded by rich na-tional resources, most indigenouspeoples in Central Mexico, CostaRica, India, Pakistan, Aghanistan,Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Jamaica,Colombia, Peru, Brazil, and Fiji livein dire poverty with culturally ac-cepteduse o drugs fltering downto children.

Marijuana and betel nut arecommon in most o Egypt andAsia.The Cree Indians o NorthAmerica brew and chew calamusor rat root, while arther south,rom Central Mexico to CostaRica, hashish and thle-pela-kano(Lea o God) keep the inhabit-ants hooked. Opium, heroin, hashoil, and hashish are indigenouslyAsian. Hashish abounds in Paki-stan, Aghanistan, Lebanon, andNepal. Like other Third Worldcountries, Nepals lie expectancyhovers at about 51 years o age,in sync with its annual per capitaincome o about $1,010.12

Widespread consumption oindigenous drugs oten correlateswithpoverty, early mortality, andilliteracy, and it may explain a gen-eral condition o apathy or lethar-gy called amotivational syndrome.Adult use otenleaves children

vulnerable to neglect or abuse, bytheir parents or others.

Kick It!

What do the people o Yementhink about their qat habit? TheWorld Bank report states:

Most users believe thatqat is bad or them. Morethan 70 percent o therespondents describe qatchewing as a bad habitthat is also bad or theeconomy and bad or thenations image. Users wantto kick the habit butthey cannot. Either be-cause o social pressures,or because o the psycho-logical dependency result-ing rom prolonged use,users do not eel that theycan stop using qat on theirown. Some 53 percent oall male and 61 percent oall emale respondents de-clare that Government in-tervention is necessary toaddress the qat problem.13

They want governmenthelp toquit? Do any o the legislatorsrom the fteen U.S. states thathave legalized marijuana knowabout Yemen? They should.

Meanwhile, back at the Hu-ington Post, Jason Silva concludeshis story about our new marijuanaculture thus:

One thing is certain. ItsComplicateddoes a goodjob o showing somethingnot so complicated: mari-juana can make you giggly,hungry and maybe evenhyper-philosophical . . .but it doesnt make youa couch-dwelling, pizza-eating sloth or criminal.

There probably is little dan-ger that rich Hollywood elites likeMeryl Streep and billionaires likeGeorge Soros will become sloths,

whether or not they smoke potor chew qat leaves. And eveni they did, their wealth wouldmitigate the ensuing problems orthemselves and their amilies. Butwhat about poor and working-class citizens? Take Detroit, aboutwhich Matt Labash wrote last allin the Weekly Standard: [T]hatsexactly what a city with 15 percentunemployment thats as chronicallycrime-ridden and dysunctional asDetroit needs: more drugs.14

Michigan did approve medi-cal marijuana, and up to 900people a day were applying ormarijuana use when Labash wrote:

A state court o appealsjudge recently lamentedin a decision, Michiganwill soon have more regis-tered marijuana users thanwe do unemployedanincredible legacy or theGreat Lakes State.

The Yemenis might warn us aboutour grand experiment in medicalmarijuana. Are we in any state tolisten?

Jim Kushiner contributed to this column.

Endnotes

1. www.hufngtonpost.com/jason-silva/its-not-that-complicated_b_415332.html.2. www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Mov-ies/2008/0516/p15s01-almo.html.3. http://movies.popcrunch.com/the-20-best-stoner-movies-o-all-time.4. www.gq.com/entertainment/hu-mor/201001/pot-culture-stoner-culture.5. www.ncamily.org/FNC/0901S2.html.6. http://cannabisnews.com/news/20/thread20166.shtml.7. www.post-gazette.com/pg/10192/1072041-51.stm.8. Kennedy, J. and R. Hurwit, Qats

cradle, Human Behavior(October 1978),pp. 3839.9. Ibid.10. www-wds.worldbank.org/external/deault/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2007/06/26/000090341_20070626112355/Rendered/INDEX/397380YE.txt.11. James Inciardi, The War on Drugs(Mayfeld Publishing, 1986).12. www.who.int/countries/npl/en.13. Op. cit.14. www.weeklystandard.com/articles/gone-pot.

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One Nation Under Drugs