Negative Space: marijuana
- The African Dagga Cultures
- If Indian use of an unapproved drug was a problem, there’s no question that Africans would get in trouble from their white masters for using it. White leaders in South Africa forbid the sale of any portion of the hemp plant to “any coolies whatsoever”.
- Can marijuana replace alcohol?
- Some evidence shows that for people who have used marijuana, alcohol becomes a lesser drug. Getting drunk is more degrading than getting high. Some of this is circumstantial, however, for example the beer distributors deciding that when beer sales drop it must mean that a marijuana “shipment” arrived somewhere.
- Cannabis as a Medicine
- Amazingly, as early as 1972 doctors were for all practical purposes prescribing marijuana to cancer patients as a matter of course; or, they left it to nurses to do so. By that same year, glaucoma patients had realized it helped them, too.
- Cannabis Comes to the New World
- As with other countries, Americans had to be nearly forced to grow hemp. Drugs such as tobacco were far more lucrative than rope. War changed that temporarily, and at one point we even used hemp as money.
- Cannabis in the Ancient World
- Hemp’s place in mythology and ritual is influenced by its use as quality rope. Only in India is there definitive evidence of cannabis use for its psychoactive properties.
- The Cartoon Guide to Recreational Drugs (213.7 KB)
- The Birds and the Bees do it, Pigs and Porcupines do it. But evidence suggests that humans are champion drug users. We are born with a natural urge to alter our consciousness. Children spin until they drop for the same reason that their parents drink alcohol. Nature requires it.
- Cerebus the Gopher
- Cerebus the Gopher is my personal Internet site, dedicated to comic books, role-playing games, and information about drug prohibition, as well as a bit of information on gun control and other politics of personal freedom.
- Chronic Effects
- Even heavy use of marijuana shows no or practically no signs of addiction. Of course, if marijuana is saving your sight, you might get angry when someone tries to take it away.
- Conservative policies go to pot
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Prohibition is the conservative Obamacare: it doesn’t matter how bad the law is, or how many times people must be unilaterally exempted from it: we need it for aspirational purposes. Conservative prohibitionists can talk a good game about state-level experiments when it comes to education, and recognize the importance of the rule of law when it comes to health insurance. But when it comes to marijuana the only solution is arbitrary federal control of whoever doesn’t kowtow sufficiently to government officials.
- Daru and Bhang: Cultural Factors in the Choice of Intoxicant
- G. M. Carstairs in 1951 researched the usage patterns between alcohol (daru) and marijuana (bhang) in Rajasthan, India. There was also some mention of opium among the respondents. Bhang tended to be used for worship, and daru (and opium) for driving away fear. Warriors preferred daru, and Bramin preferred bhang.
- Drug Information
- Links to web sites with useful information about recreational drugs, especially caffeine and cannabis.
- Epilogue
- Congress noted that since organized crime was making so much money off of marijuana prohibition, that they ought to help ’em along a little.
- A Final Comment
- Throughout the report, the commission continually discusses that because of the unfairness and disproportionality of the laws against marijuana, they would even recommend going even further away from punitive laws than they’re already recommending, were it not for the “social realities”. The social realities being, the public does not yet support at greater than 50% the legalization of marihuana.
- General Considerations
- We take drugs because we have achieved our cultural goals. We are at the “end of a myth” and are searching for a new one.
- Hashish and the Arabs
- In Arabia, marijuana may have been the drug of choice of those who could not afford wine. As today, prejudice against marijuana use may have reflected class warfare.
- The Hashish Club
- In the 1800s the elite began to take notice of this obscure drug. One of the most famous was Dr. Moreau’s Club des Hachichins in France.
- Hashish in America
- It isn’t surprising that early experimenters might find themselves mildly addicted to marijuana: some samples turned out to have up to 25% opium! Rumors also that the Pentagon is built on a great dope farm.
- Heaven on Earth
- A vision in a burning bush brought to Earth. “I have given you every herb-bearing seed. To you it shall be for meat.”
- History of Cannabis
- When Congress debated marijuana legislation, the AMA opposed it, and was told to “get out of the way of the Federal Government”. That’s been pretty much the history of marijuana legislation and regulation ever since. Need it to maintain your sight? Go blind. Need it to stay alive? Then die. Get out of the way of the federal government.
- The Indian Hemp Drug Debate
- One of the earliest examples of a commission to determine the ill effects of a drug. The commission was called because of the dire warnings of the governor of India and decided that the governor was overstating the issue. But the real issue, as usual, was not the drug but the people who used it: the real issue was rising Indian nationalism.
- Introduction
- In general, if hemp is grown in a way that produces better fiber, it is less psychoactive; if grown in a way that makes it more psychoactive, it is less useful as a fiber.
- Introduction
- You have to love the politicalese of this introduction. They had to know that Nixon (and probably Congress) wanted no such thing as a “rational” recommendation.
- The Jazz Era
- During the prohibition era, marijuana use probably increased, and made its way into the culture of the Jazz era. Racist portrayals of the drug’s users spread throughout North America.
- Marihuana
- Potency of marijuana depends on the plant, not on the environment in which it is grown.
- Marihuana and Social Policy
- They noted that, if this were alcohol, we already know that its prohibition is unconstitutional. The right to be let alone is “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” Recommendation: personal, private use no longer a crime; casual distribution no longer a crime.
- Marihuana and the Problem of Marihuana
- The commission asks a very good question: Why marijuana? Why now? It isn’t as if there aren’t other vice, illegal for even longer than marijuana, that could be exciting public interest. The difference is, who takes part in these vices? Gambling and prostitution is for older people; marijuana is for the younger counter-culture.
- Marihuana Through History
- Note that that’s my title, not the author’s; I haven’t kept the title if this section in my notes. As a rope-making plant, hemp has an ancient, well-documented history. It has long been the best known plant for general rope-making, and every culture that uses ropes seems to know this.
- Marihuana Use and Its Effects
- Marijuana use pervades all parts of society, throughout class, religion, gender, and race. Cross-cultural studies showed no “deterioration of mental or social functioning” despite “heavy long-term cannabis use”.
- Marihuana, The First Twelve Thousand Years
- Ernest L. Abel has written a fascinating, if sometimes apocryphal, history of marijuana, gleaned from the archaeological record, myth, and written history.
- Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding
- Raymond P. Shafer, chaired. the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. They submitted their official report to Congress on March 22, 1972. Whereupon, like most official inquiries that were given the freedom to investigate, it was completely ignored: it recommended lightening or outright removing sentences for marijuana use.
- Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine
- Lester Grinspoon & James B. Bakalar write a fascinating combination of medical history and survey on the medical uses of marijuana. The descriptions by patients, especially cancer and glaucoma patients, of what happens when they lose access to marijuana are heart-breaking.
- Marijuana
- Cannabis and hemp facts, factoids, and myths.
- Marijuana
- Once it caught on among whites in the sixties, marijuana became the most popular of all illegal recreational drugs.
- Marijuana and alcohol prohibition
- Marijuana was originally seen as a “Mexican” drug.
- Marijuana and Cocaine: The Process of Change in Drug Policy
- Robert R. Carr and Erik J. Meyers survey many of the studies—many of them government-commissioned—that have shown the relative harmlessness of prohibited drugs and the dangers of prohibition. The one drug that may live up to its hyped dangers is alcohol, but we already know that, as dangerous as alcohol is, it becomes far more dangerous when illegal.
- Marijuana and Hashish
- Working overtime against alcohol and opium, the Treasury Department didn’t initially see marijuana as a threat.
- The Marijuana and Hashish Era
- While some researchers noted that marijuana might have intoxicating qualities as early as the sixteenth century, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that scientists started taking its effects seriously. But by then, its inability to be injected meant that use fell after the civil war from already low levels. Its use as an intoxicant, however, began to rise.
- Marijuana history
- The short history, the legendary Washington hemp story, ancient marijuana use, and more
- Marijuana: The New Prohibition
- John Kaplan, an internationally recognized expert on drug-abuse, “analyzes the medical and social evidence on America’s third most widely-used drug and discusses the case for legalization.”
- A Nation of Drug Takers
- When America discovered that there were foreigners in the country, they conveniently forgot how recently they themselves had come over; the drugs those foreigners used became illegal. At first the laws targeted specific races; in time, the laws targeted everyone.
- New Uses for the Old Hemp Plant
- Hemp has a history in folk remedies and occult histories, though to what end when combined with such drugs as belladonna it’s hard to imagine, especially when many of these formulas came not from witches but from the fearmongers who railed against them.
- Nobody in 2000
- If you want to win in this election, vote for Nobody.
- The Once and Future Medicine
- Study after study shows marijuana as safe; survey after survey shows that some patients improve after using it and that doctors will recommend it. But even in 1993 we were willing to pay billions of dollars a year to keep prohibition going.
- Outlawing Marihuana
- You can tell who had the power in the Progressive Era: the American Medical Association opposed the tax act but it was enacted nonetheless. But an exception was made for bird fanciers so that hemp seeds could continue to be sold in birdseed.
- Prohibition Politics
- The politics of prohibition, from alcohol to marijuana. Includes “Why End Prohibition?” and “The Pocket Guide to Recreational Drugs”.
- Reefer Racism
- During the great depression, America needed a new scapegoat, and in the southwest that turned out to be the Mexican. One means of oppression was to stereotype them as marijuana users and then claim that marijuana turned them into brutes that only superior firepower could stop, much as law enforcement in the south claimed about Negros and cocaine.
- Rope and Riches
- Where with alcohol, wartime causes governments to repress it, with hemp, wartime caused them to enforce the growing of it. Part of the reason it had to be forced on farmers is that the rope-making process was time-consuming; hemp fields required more time between crops than other plants.
- Social Impact of Marihuana Use
- No relationship between marijuana and crime, except perhaps a negative one: marijuana use lessens crime. Driving tests revealed “no significant correlations between marihuana use and driving disabilities.”
- Social Response to Marihuana Use
- Throughout the history of marijuana prohibition, lawmakers have had to create blatant lies in order to pass laws against marijuana.
- Sources of the Impasse
- Richard Nixon drastically ramped up the powers of federal law enforcement in the name of the war on drugs, using trumped-up data and claiming a national emergency.
- Support the Dope
- Some narcotics officers group is cold-calling for fundraising, and they’re actually prepared for marijuana supporters.
- Uses of Marijuana
- Solomon H. Snyder writes about the history of marijuana use, with an emphasis on medical use and mostly from the 1800s up. One of the interesting points he makes is that the hypodermic needle was part of what reduced interest in marijuana as a medicine. Marijuana isn’t soluble in water, and thus isn’t injectable. A drug that can’t be injected is of less interest to doctors more and more interested in miracle drugs.
- Victimless Crime My Ass
- “I hope I pissed you off, maybe you’ll do something. Don’t bother e-mailing me your anger. The Vets did not fight and die so that a few could run my and your life. They died for freedom: everyone’s and anyone’s.”
- Weighing the Risks
- It is difficult to measure the toxicity of marijuana in humans, because no human has ever died from its use. Data from other animals indicates that it would take tens of thousands of doses at once to result in a “marijuana overdose”.
- Why End Prohibition? (123.1 KB)
- A practical solution to the marijuana question.
More Information
- What Conservatives think about California Proposition 19
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“If someone wants to smoke marijuana or someone wants to eat too many cheeseburgers, that’s their right.”
- Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine•
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This is a fascinating combination of medical history and survey on the medical uses of marijuana. The descriptions by patients, especially cancer and glaucoma patients, of what happens when they lose access to marijuana are heart-breaking.
- Nixon Tapes Reveal Twisted Roots Of Marijuana Prohibition
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“The Nixon White House tapes demonstrate that the foundation of the modern war on marijuana was Nixonian prejudice, culture war and misinformation. Doug McVay [listened] to the Nixon tapes to find conversations about the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. He found Nixon blaming calls for marijuana legalization on Jews.”
- California Sanity
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“I’m astonished it’s 2010 and we’re still at such a primitive stage, but any move in the right direction is a good one. This will save Californian taxpayers an incredible amount of money… My opinion of both Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin just shot up significantly.”
