Drug Propaganda

It has been said that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets out of bed. Nowhere is this illustrated any clearer than in the decades - long effort to condemn marijuana. When dispassionate observations are made of the attempts that our government has made to vilify marijuana - I'm speaking of future generations - then textbooks will be written about the way truth can be distorted to coerce mass populations into accepting pure gobble-de-gook as fact.

First, let's define the word "propaganda." In Merriam Webster's 10th Collegiate Dictionary, propaganda is described, in part, thusly: ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause; The doctrine of Refer Madness did both, as it furthered the cause of so many corporate lobbies that stood to gain from hemp's prohibition while at the same time damaging the cause of hemp and marijuana proponents. A few examples will illustrate this.

Isolated instances of hemp bashing go back as far as the late nineteenth century. Some stuffy British occupation forces observed some laughter associated with ganja smoking in India and decided that ganja smoking induced insanity. In 1893 the British House of Commons looked into the "problem" and what resulted was the exhaustive Indian Hemp Commision report. Nine volumes - over 3,000 pages - and all it really showed was the lengths a government will go to, to exert its own predisposed will upon its people. In the end it seems that after smoking ganja, some people feel like laughing.

In the 1930s the campaign to villify hemp really started to get some traction. During the hearings in congress that resulted in the ban on hemp, Harry Anslinger testified for the government that "marijuana is the most violence causing substance known to man," and "marijuana is the biggest problem in our schools today." Facts that Harry just pulled out of his butt.

The first statement is patently absurd. The last thing you think about after smoking a joint is going out and kicking someone's ass, just the opposite is true. (Here is just another case of the government wanting it both ways. They will also ague that marijuana causes indolence and apathy.) Statistics show that an overwhelming number of violent acts are committed by people who have consumed alcohol, not marijuana.

Does it ever happen that someone under the influence of marijuana commits a violent act? Sure. There are six billion people in the world and there is no law of nature that guarantees that violent people will not smoke pot, but to hold up the worst case as an example and claim that it is the norm is just... well, pure propaganda.

Hell, when I was in prison, this is a true story, I watched two guys get into a fist fight after arguing which one of them was the better Christian. About Harry's second "fact," when asked if marijuana was the biggest problem in high schools in America, the head of the NEA was quoted as saying, "Well if it is, this is the first I've heard about it."

Then there's the famous pan of frying eggs, the "Your Brain on Drugs" ad that got so much run on the stand-up comedy circuit. Pure propaganda. First, that's not "your brain," it's video of an egg, and second, that's not "your brain on drugs," it's video of breakfast.

Another commercial that was aired around the same time ostensibly showed the brain-wave patterns of a normal youth compared to the brain-wave patterns of a youth under the influence of marijuana. The normal youth's brain-waves were bouncing around in sugar-coated bliss, while the brain of the child on marijuana was just about a flat line. A pretty compelling argument against smoking marijuana had it been true. But it wasn't.

The brain-waves of the would-be marijuana smoker were actually the brain-waves of someone in a coma. It took a law suit to remove those commercials from television, but only after they had been seen by millions of people and little if no attempt was made to correct the misinformation.

The list of examples goes on and on. A study was performed in Boston where rats were stuffed with THC and kept that way for their whole life, maybe two and a half years. This was to prove that THC was a carcinogen but it turned out that the THC rats developed fewer cancers than the control groups, but to this day the government goes on about THC and its supposed link to cancer.

Not long ago I read an article about how people who smoke marijuana have an increased risk of heart attacks. This was given quite a bit of run, but what it boiled down to was that in the first minute after smoking a fatty, some people with bad tickers croaked. Well sure. People with bad tickers have died jogging, playing golf, laughing. Rocky died in the saddle. That doesn't necessarily mean that any of those activities is dangerous, just that there are a lot of fat couch potatoes around who better not get into a hot bath.

I'm no doctor, but common sense will tell you that the biggest cause of heart attacks is being out of shape and stress. Does smoking marijuana make you get out of shape? No. Sitting around on your lazy ass watching T.V. and stuffing your pie-hole with Cheetos and drinking beer might. Do out of shape people smoke marijuana? Yes, of course they do, but you don't have to look any farther than the NBA to prove that smoking pot does not cancel out being in shape.

And then stress. The only stress that I ever noticed associated with marijuana was the stress I felt when I was being pulled over by the cops when I had a sack of green-bud under the seat of my car. That stress was brought on by marijuana laws, not marijuana itself. In fact, marijuana might be the greatest natural stress reducer in the world.

If and when the whole marijuana issue is looked at fairly, I am sure that this wonderous plant is going to be credited with saving lives, not taking them. Our government, us, we the taxpayers spend one to two billion dollars a year producing anti-drug propaganda. Television shows have submitted scripts to the White House's Bureau of Nonsense to see if their plotlines were anti-drug enough. Seventeen Magazine and U.S. News & World Report have been accused in print of planting anti-drug ads within their pages disguised as news stories. Where does it end? And this in a country that spends billions of dollars a year on drugs. Who would buy Vallium if they were free to grow a few marijuana plants on the back porch?

Americans consume billions of dollars worth of Vallium each year, enough to fill 120 box cars. That's two train loads of just one drug. I hope you're beginning to see that the campaign to smeer marijuana is pure propaganda. You really can't blame corporate America though, they do have so much to lose.