It’s a silent cry for help, I tell you. People with excellent brains are fronting for morons and thieves—because it’s the only game in town—or keeping silent for fear of losing their grant to political correctness. We live in the only society in the past 200 years too dumb to know basic research always pays off, in cash. These are truly the Crazy Years.
Buzzed High Zonked Stoned Wasted
FIRST PRINTED NOVEMBER 2002
I’M IN A UNIQUE POSITION to pin British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell’s drug troubles on New York State, all the way back in the sixties. Unfortunately, I can’t prove a word of it.
At the end of that dizzy decade, I was an impoverished State University student living on dishrag soup and scraped icebox. By good fortune I caught the eye of a powerful official in the administration, who got me into the Work-Study Program—something very like being named A Friend of Ours by certain Italian-Americans in the adjoining state of New Jersey. The Work-Study Program was a wonderful boondoggle in which one provided part-time unskilled sinecure labor to the university and got paid at fulltime executive assistant rates, with the tacit understanding that most of it would eventually come back to the system in tuition, fees and taxes. The more I think about it, it was exactly like being a friend of Tony Soprano’s.
I did a lot of different things for my pay—most of them ridiculous and none remotely onerous. I sang folk music in dormitory lounges. I ushered at rock concerts. When everyone else left for vacations, I prowled the deserted campus with a flashlight, a walkie-talkie, a hat that looked just like a police officer’s and a shillelagh up me sleeve. For one preposterous and absurdly lucrative semester I was, personally, the entire fire alarm system for a whole quadrangle—long story.
But mostly what I did for the state was type. This was not just before personal computers, it was also before cheap photocopying. It was possible to make at most three copies of a typed document, using something you don’t want to know about called “carbon paper.” I typed bazillions of words, either on triple-sandwiches of paper and carbon paper, or on something you don’t even want to think about called a “mimeo stencil”—all while unaware I was enduring the basic training and developing the iron carpals that would enable me to survive as a freelance writer.
One day I had to type up the results of a study conducted by something called the New York State Narcotics Addiction Control Commission. Google search yields no mention of it after 1988, nor can the search engine at the New York State home page locate any reference to it, so I presume it’s either extinct or renamed. NYSNACC was born the same year I was, a branch of the corrections bureaucracy tasked with frightening citizens about drugs.
To that end, it decided to compare the effects of alcohol and marijuana on driving performance.
The study was large, well-funded and unusually intelligently designed. First they established five levels of intoxication for each of the two drugs—I can’t remember the terms they used, but basically it came down to Buzzed, High, Stoned, Zonked and Wasted. (Sounds like Cheech and Chong’s attorneys.) They brought experienced volunteers into the lab and quantified what dosages would reliably bring them to each level. Then they had the volunteers spend weeks driving a course intended to test their driving competence—first cold sober, for a baseline, and then at each of the five levels for each drug, all this under honest double-blind conditions. Finally, they’d have the proof that cannabis really was a menace to—
Perhaps you’re already wondering at this point why you’ve never heard of this study. Or why in the forty years since, apparently nobody else in the anti-drug industry has ever had the same idea.
I’m not wondering, because I’m one of the few people who ever got to see the results.
With alcohol, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, driving performance began to suffer immediately at Buzzed—the equivalent of one beer. By level two, the subject was already legally drunk, significantly impaired. By level four, he was a crash test dummy that vomits, and at level five he was a very large amoeba. At each level, he would typically insist that he was completely unimpaired.
With marijuana, level one subjects showed slight but distinct improvement in their driving.
Peripheral vision expanded slightly, reaction time improved and subjects became alert, observant and acutely cautious. These positive effects declined at level two, but did not disappear until level three. By level four, the pot subject drove about as badly as the drunken subject had at level one. At every level, he tended to overestimate his own impairment.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t toke and drive on my say so: I can’t prove these results ever existed—and more importantly, since they were never replicated I have no way of knowing if they were even accurate! Maybe those researchers were bozos, or pro-marijuana guerrillas. That’s the point. Nobody knows.
Faced with evidence suggesting the state might have a moral responsibility to furnish moderate amounts of marijuana to drivers on demand, someone apparently made the no-brainer decision. Instead of being published, those results I typed, plus the several cubic feet of raw data, were filed forever in some enormous anonymous government warehouse, two aisles over from the Lost Ark of the Covenant. No anti-drug agency ever reconsidered the topic, as far as I can find, and nobody else ever got funded.
So I say Gordon Campbell should try to pin the blame for his drunk-driving scandal (at least) on New York. Here in Canada we de facto have no law against marijuana possession at the moment; our courts have scrapped the law we had and nobody seems to be breaking their neck to craft a new one. The country seems poised on the trembling verge of outright decriminalization, like England, Portugal and several other nations. If only the state of New York had not kicked dirt over that study forty years ago, who knows? Even the US might already be there by now…and if it were, British Columbia’s premier might not have gotten in hot firewater and landed himself in the Campbell Soup. Maui and his home province are, after all, both world renowned for their cannabis: martinis would have been doubly politically incorrect. If nothing else, we’d have understood why he was grinning for his mug shots.
Flinging Phlegm at the Flim Flam in Flin Flon
FIRST PRINTED AUGUST 2002
RECENTLY I WENT IN HOSPITAL for a test which required injecting me with a radioactive drug. I told them, as I always do, that drugs invariably hit me harder than most people, and they nodded and shot me up with the standard dose, as always, and I vomited nonstop for the next eight hours. One of these days I’ll write on why donning a white uniform induces deafness—but not today.
This essay’s about what they did for my nausea that day, which was nothing. They shot me up with four successive drugs, starting with Gravol (a standard dose) and working up to the mightiest antinausea drug in the pharmacopoeia, without effect. I retched continuously until it was simply not possible for my stomach to clench anymore; then, thank God, I was able to persuade them to stop helping me and let me go home. My problem soon vanished. My impulse to vomit uncontrollably only returned today, when I sniffed the latest mound of media manure from Health Minister Anne McLellan.
There’s a memorable moment in Casablanca when Claude Rains, as Captain Reynaud, calls down a raid on Rick’s Place, announcing, “I’m shocked—shocked!—to discover that gambling is taking place in this club.” What makes the line immortal is that, as it leaves his lips, he’s accepting his winnings. Total, bald hypocrisy, naked as a kick in the groin.
In that precise spirit, I’m shocked—shocked!—to discover that Ms. McLellan is a typical contemporary Canadian politician. That is, a protean pile of adjustable principles prepared to call excrement strawberry jam if the alternative is to risk offending a trigger-happy Texan. Her bashful confession that the Manitoba Marijuana Mine she’s been overseeing in Flim Flam—excuse me, Flin Flon, Manitoba—has really been a giant 6 million-dollar dribble-glass joke, along with the recent police persecutions of Compassion Clubs across Canada, demonstrate that her government has sold out every suffer
ing citizen who believed they could look to it for relief from pain, nausea or other debilitating symptoms.
So if you believed two years of promises that medical marijuana would soon be made available to sick people who need it desperately…what have you been smoking? The cowboy-bootlickers we allow to pick our pockets have already made it clear they feel little obligation to provide even Third World medical care for any of us, so why would they make an exception for troublemakers antisocial enough to acquire diseases that require Ottawa to grow a conscience?
What they meant by the best possible medicine was, the best medicine Dubya says we can have.
You’ll also be stunned to hear Ms. McLellan’s been able to find a few doctors either shameless enough to pretend to believe, or perhaps dim-witted enough to actually believe, that marijuana’s safety and efficacy have not been known fact for over a century, established repeatedly in every reputable study from the LaGuardia Commission in the US and the LeDain report in Canada to the most recent reports from the World Health Organization and Harvard. A Dr. Raju Hajela of Kingston, for instance, told the Globe and Mail, “a single joint is as harmful as ten cigarettes,” a preposterous falsehood. Fortunately, for anyone with interest, Internet access can find the true facts effortlessly, as former health minister Allen Rock did. (Try it yourself—please!)
The Globe has also reported on Alison Myrden of Burlington, Ontario, one of 806 registered sufferers who’ve been jerked around by their alleged representatives for the last two years. She now knows that “bureaucratic compassion” is an oxymoron, like “ministerial honor.” For the rest of her life, according to Dr. Hajela and Ms. McLellan, she’ll be much healthier downing thirty-two pills and 600 milligrams of morphine a day (!) for her MS than she would have been if she’d been able to use a few natural flowers without fear of arrest.
There was a time when this country had the guts to tell America to go to hell when it was dead wrong. Back in the 1960s we were led by a man who actually had the stones to tell the US that any of its children who had a problem with being forced to murder strangers in Asia were welcome here. Canada gained immeasurably thereby: in prestige, in pride and in immigrants who’ve made a powerful positive contribution ever since.
Today America tolerates, like a cancer on its heart, a cult of armed hypocrites who pretend to believe marijuana is a dangerous drug like heroin, PCP or crack, and who on the basis of that flagrant lie have spent decades imprisoning not tens, but hundreds of thousands of decent people for possession of a plant that causes laughter…and incidentally assured themselves steady income and low-risk thrills. In God’s name, why are we enabling these foreign parasites—at the cost of torturing our own citizens? Why not align ourselves with societies with rational marijuana policies, like the Netherlands, England or Portugal?
Every sentient being in Canada knows marijuana is not a “drug” any more than coffee is. Every child we try to educate about the real dangers of real drugs knows the very first words out of our mouths are a lie. How long will we go on like this, spending vast sums we can’t afford to pay armed bullies to persecute our own children for giggling too much and our infirm and elderly for seeking relief from chronic misery?
It’s not the money I mind so much—it’s the minutes. Horrid minutes of churning awfulness that will seem to last a million years each to every poor nauseous patient who has to rely on the present government for compassion. Every day it remains illegal here to supply pot to sick people legally entitled to smoke it, this nation is in disgrace.
There’s nothing nobler than alleviating suffering. And nothing wickeder than failing to, out of cowardice or ignorance.
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The above was originally published as a column in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
In a letter rebutting that column, the Dr. Raju Hajela I quoted, a white coat and past president of the Canadian Society of Addiction Medicine (and someone who laymen walking past might easily take for someone who knows what he is talking about), wrote, “…marijuana smoke produces fifty percent more tar and contains seventy percent more benzopyrene than the same weight of tobacco. Marijuana smokers generally take a two-thirds larger puff volume, one-third greater depth of inhalation and a four-fold longer breath-holding time than tobacco smokers. So it is easy to see how researchers arrive at the estimate of joint/cigarette harm at about 1:10…”
There’s little chance of my getting Dr. Hajela to concede that he’s spouting mahooha; it’s likely he honestly believes it himself, and if so, his mind slammed shut a long time ago. Few in his profession agree with him, and even civilians with no interest in marijuana are liable to have personally encountered the evidence he declines to see.
Yes, it is easy to see how researchers arrived at that estimate. They either checked their integrity at the door, or never learned to do arithmetic. In the first place, as the good doctor surely must know, the average joint contains about one tenth as much pot by weight as the average cigarette contains tobacco. Only wasteful showoffs smoke joints as fat as a cigarette; knowledgeable hipsters have always rolled ’em needle-thin. So if I were to accept his 1:10 ratio, I would find no difference between the two and would be forced to conclude that marijuana is no more harmful than a product sold legally all over the planet.
Unless I factored in something else that even a senator knows perfectly well: the average marijuana smoker typically takes no more than four to five puffs on his slender joint. I haven’t been a tobacco smoker for quite a while, so I just went to a public place and took an informal survey: the average cigarette smoker takes at least ten tokes. Now marijuana looks half as dangerous as tobacco, using Dr. Hajela’s figures.
But he has somehow apparently failed to notice that even the heaviest—and richest!—pot smokers consume no more than ten or twelve joints a day, whereas heavy tobacco users smoke forty to sixty cigarettes a day. Now his own figures have pot being less than one tenth as dangerous as tobacco, at worst.
If, that is, one is ignorant enough to assume that “tar is tar.” A specialist like Dr. H must be aware, and simply forgot to mention, that tar molecules come in different kinds, with different shapes and sizes, and radically different properties. Some kinds of tar molecules, especially large ones, are handled quite easily by the lungs’ natural self-cleansing mechanisms; that’s why it is possible to live in an industrialized society. Others, like tobacco tars, fall between the cracks and don’t get flushed. Marijuana tar has a quite large molecule: the gross differences between it and tobacco tar are so pronounced as to be immediately obvious to the layman—simply on sight and feel, no microscope or training required.
Next, one of my favorite shibboleths: “Chemically, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in marijuana is a hallucinogen that interferes with perception and is addictive.” Let’s skip details, like there being several kinds of THC, only two of which are believed to be hallucinogenic—that is, imagination-enhancing—and there being several other known or suspected hallucinogens in pot, such as cannabinol (CBN) and cannabidiol (CBD). Such facts might confuse the doctor as badly as the concept that thoughtful humans occasionally need to interfere with perception. Let’s jump to the big buzzword at the end: “addictive.”
I’ll stipulate there may be marijuana addicts in Canada, and there may be many in therapy for it. I do not wish to seem unsympathetic. I won’t speculate on how many of them are actually addicted to receiving treatment and would, if marijuana were magically eliminated from the biosphere, become addicted to something else within a week. What I will do is insist that the misfortune of sixteen hundredths of one percent of the populace is insufficient reason to deprive their fellows of the medical benefits, or even just the recreational joys and comforts, of marijuana—much less put thousands of them in jail or worse.
Robert A. Heinlein once wrote, “I shot an error in the air; it fell to earth…everywhere.” Reefer has been demonized for so long that there exist many people who have dedicated their lives to exorcising it and are use
d to taking their income from preaching about its horrors. Perhaps we need some sort of Intellectual Welfare system to provide support for those whose ideas, however well-intentioned, have been discredited by the advance of knowledge. God knows there are a few surviving Marxists around who could use it too.
O Canada
Citizen Keen
FIRST PRINTED SEPTEMBER 2002
IT’S HARD TO EXPLAIN why it took me so long to apply for Canadian citizenship. Even for one as preternaturally lazy as myself, a quarter of a century is a long time to put off paperwork. It certainly was no reflection on Canada; I’ve known since the day I first set foot on Canadian soil that I was home at last. (I knew it when I discovered that the old friend I’d come to visit in Nova Scotia literally had no way to lock his home from the outside. “Lock my door?” he said, astounded. “Suppose somebody came by while I was away; how would they get in?”)
Nor am I trying to make some kind of veiled anti-American statement. I proudly retain my American heritage, and my firm belief that one day the USA will live up to each and every one of its magnificent ideals. They may be a little hot under the collar down there at the moment, but they have cause; eventually they’ll settle down and act a lot more humanely than many another nation might in their place.
The Crazy Years Page 6
