The Cannabis Stampede: Jenny “Wildflower” Sandusky

Jenny “Wildflower” Sandusky

“It’s about damn time. I mean, these anti-pot Republicans are so pious when they talk about the government — excuse me, govermint — trampling on individual rights but when it comes to those individual rights they don’t like they are suddenly on the other side of the table. Government regulation of business is so, so bad but banning abortion is so, so good.

This is the problem with ideologues. They will twist logic to fit their point of view for one political end and then deny the same option for a political point of view that is a shade different from theirs. They are all in favor of relaxing rules on diet supplements — which are drugs — but are against the same option for marijuana. It reminds of Jimmy Durante in JUMBO. Here he is trying to sneak an elephant off the circus grounds. “Where are you going with that elephant?” demands the sheriff to which Durante replies, his back pressed against the elephant’s trunk, “What elephant?”

Yes, I am an old hippy and, yes, I have been smoking dope for years. I can say that now because the United States Constitution does not allow ex post facto laws — and you can look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls because you don’t know Rowen and Martin from oosiks and tulips. But just because I am old does not mean that I am stupid. When it comes to drugs I’m a lot smarter by myself than every Presidential Administration since Ronald “Ray Gun” Reagan, zap.

The basic problem is that we have no problem. The War on Drugs has been a multi-trillion-dollar failure. There has not be a single victory. All the War on Drugs has done is drive up the cost of illegal drugs. More profit means more violence. Instead of fighting for turf with switchblades gangs are using assault weapons. Which also, by the way, shows the schizophrenia of those ideologues. They are all in favor of the NRA and even letting card-carrying crazy people carry weapons into bars and then they talk about getting tough with street gangs that carry weapons. Where do they think those gangs got those guns? They bought them legally!

Now that I’ve blown off steam, Jeanine, I’ll answer your question. Let me repeat it so I’m sure the answer I give will be to the question you asked. What you wanted to know if I thought the legalizing marijuana would lead to the legalizing of other drugs. The answer is yes, no and maybe. Yes, there will be a push to legalize other drugs. Will that push be successful? Maybe. It depends on the drug. A lot of the street drugs you can buy today did not exist when the drive to legalize marijuana started. What about drugs like heroin, morphine, cocaine and OxyContin? Well, all of those drugs are legal. It just depends on who is doing the buying. A doctor can buy any one of those drugs legally; a kid on the street cannot.

The most important question you should be asking is: Where are we going from here? The so-called War on Drugs has been a failure. So what do we do now? Or, more important, what should we be doing that makes sense? First, what makes the most sense, is to stop doing what we are doing now. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Since you asked, let’s play a little game of logic. Let’s take heroin as an example. That’s OK? Good. Heroin it is. Right now the general belief is that if you legalize heroin you will get more addicts. Isn’t that what you’ve heard? Good, we are both hearing the same thing. Now the heroin that the average addict is getting on the street is not that good, right? Yes, that’s right. It’s not top-quality heroin it’s cut down, cheap stuff. The good stuff costs a lot more, right? And if the real good stuff was available at a low cost we’d have a lot more heroin addicts, right? Good, we agree so far. With better heroin — and at a lower cost — we’d have more addicts because heroin is incredibly addictive. Good, we are still in agreement.

Now, every year there are about 50 million surgical operations which use heroin on some offshoot of the drug. That’s 50 million people getting the highest quality heroin that money can buy and in most cases it’s free. That is, the cost of the heroin is rolled into the cost of the surgery and the bulk of that cost is paid by health insurance. So we have 50 million people a year who get the highest grade of heroin for free.

But we don’t have 50 million heroin users on the street. We only have about 7 million of them. If heroin were that addictive than we’d have 50 million addicts. So why don’t we?

Ah, yes, science. It’s those experiments. Jeanine, just because someone says that scientific studies show something does not mean it is true. It’s how the experiment is done that makes the difference. If you don’t set up your experiment properly you will get results that make no sense. For instance, and this is a step aside but let’s take it anyway, if you really wanted to know the impact of alcohol on an unborn child you would get 10,000 women to drink heavily while they were pregnant and, at the same time, get 10,000 women who did not drink at all while they were pregnant. Then you would compare the number of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome babies in both groups. But you could never set up an experiment like that so you have to depend on other numbers. That’s why every doctor asks their pregnant patient how much they drink, how long they have been drinking, if they have stopped since they knew they were pregnant, and what they were drinking. Then the answers of those millions of doctors goes into a data base and someone in some government office finds a correlation between fetal alcohol syndrome and mothers who drink heavily while they are pregnant. This is also what you call a no-brainer. The reason it is called fetal alcohol syndrome is because is the effect of alcohol on a fetus. It’s even called that. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to know that heavy drinking is bad for your unborn child. Hell, heavy drinking is bad for anyone! That’s why every doctor on the planet will tell you to drink modestly.

Now, let’s go back to science and the drugs. Remember, what we were talking about was the belief that drugs are terribly addictive and there are scientific experiments to prove it? OK, good, you didn’t get lost when we shifted subjects. A lot of those scientific experiments were done with little thought to what was being tested. Worse, a lot of those experiments were not designed to be fair. Like they were done by a government-funded college with the implied directive that the studies must show that drugs were bad. But for the moment, let’s just pretend that the tests that were conducted were reasonably accurate.

The standard for most tests — then and now — is to reduce the number of variables so the scientist can focus on the one aspect of the experiment that is important. Keeping this simple, if the scientist wanted test for the freezing point of water she would put a water in a paper cup in a closed box and then drop the temperature of the box. She would keep the pressure inside the box constant, make sure there weren’t any air currents blowing over the water and that there was nothing shaking the experiment box like a jackhammer ripping up pavement a block away. By reducing the variables inside the box, the scientist will be able to focus on a single scientific variable: temperature. If she tries the experiment a dozen times it is a good bet that the cup of water will freeze at a constant temperature of 32 Fahrenheit.

Now back to the drug testing. The bulk of the testing of drugs was done on rats because, well, they are not human. So scientists did things like put a rat in a cage and give the animal a choice of two bottles of liquid. One of the bottles was water and the other was water laced with a drug like heroin or cocaine. Since the rats drank water from the bottle laced with heroin more often than the bottle with just the water the inevitable conclusion was that the heroin was abdicative. Looks like an open-and-shut case, right? Well, from my part of the country this is called shooting the wrong alligator in the swamp. See, the researchers made three mistakes at the same time.

The first mistake was thinking that all rats are the same. Rats were — and still are — considered lower forms of life that have little intelligence and no free will. This is like saying that all trees are the same. But all you have to do is walk through a forest and see that all trees are not the same, even trees of the same species. You can have two spruce trees growing side by side and they are in the same soil get the same amount of water and the same amount of sun but the two trees are different. Why? I don’t know. I just know that the trees are different. They are not the same.

You can go even further than that. Some cars are lemons. Everything is wrong with them. How can any one car have so many flaws? That’s a good question for which no one has an answer. There is always one shower in the gym locker room that never heats up and one towel in the pile that frays well before its time. There is always one new car that has a faulty radio. Why? No one knows. All anyone can say is that every thing is different.

Animals are just the same. Rather, animals are different too. No two rats are the same. They may look the same and act the same but they are not the same. Just like humans. To a being that is not a human we will look the same but we are all different. Rats are different. They are smart rats and dumb rats. So the first mistake the scientist made was assuming that every rat in the heroin experiment was just like every other rat in the rat kingdom.

The second mistake the scientists made was drawing the wrong conclusion from the experiment. If you tried the same experiment with humans you would get the same result. That’s not because heroin is addictive — which it is to some people — but if that is the only stimulant in your world you will use it. If you put a human in a cage with nothing to do and give that individual a choice of water and water laced with heroin, the water laced with heroin in going to win out every time. Why? Not because heroin is addictive but because that’s the only thing different in that environment. Being in a cage with nothing to do for days on end will drive anyone to drink. If your choice is water or water with heroin, of course you will use the water with the heroin.

When the experiment was done again years later, some scientists had the brains to offer the rats a wider choice of options. Rather than being in a cage by themselves, the rats were in what was basically a rat farm. There were other rats around, lots of food, exercise wheels and some of those tube tunnels that link together so rats could crawl out of the main cage and travel all around the laboratory. Then, when the rats were given a choice of regular water or water laced with heroin, the per-rat drinking of water with heroin went way down. The logical conclusion now was that if rats were given a wide variety of options, their consumption of heroin went down. So heroin was nowhere near as addictive as the initial studies seemed to indicate.

If those scientist had really been on the ball they would have isolated the rats that took the heroin-laced water and given them some kind of a rat IQ test. Run them through a maze or something like that. If they had I’m sure they would have found that the rats that used the most heroin were the dumbest. The smart rats were out indulging in sex, good food, exercise and adventure in the tube tunnels. The dumb rats were the couch potatoes of their species.

Hey, you are right. I am an advocate of the legalization of marijuana. But just because I am an old hippie does not mean I’m stupid. When it comes to marijuana you should be reading your history! Marijuana was no big deal until Richard Nixon became president. Than it was a big deal because everyone who was smoking marijuana was voting Democrat. If there had been young Republicans smoking pot, there never would have been a War on Drugs. But here were all these college student anti-Vietnam War Democratic pot smoking voters protesting across the country. That was not good for Republican candidates to Richard Nixon thought he had a stake to drive through the heart of the vampire of the emerging Democratic majority. Making pot illegal gave every arrest a double hit — a small victory for the War and Drugs and one less Democrat at the polls because felons cannot vote. Making marijuana illegal had nothing whatsoever to do with the THC. It had everything to do with the V-O-T-E.

Which brings us to the third mistake a lot of people make when it comes to scientific study. Before you even look at the results of a study you should see who funded it. Whenever you read about some new study, look most carefully at who funded it. You are not going to find a government study that says that marijuana is a good thing. There is too much money tied into the War on Drugs. Too many people on the government payroll. If the government funds some college to do the study, then the study is going to say what the government wants. Government money goes to colleges and universities that come up with the conclusion that the government wants. You are not ever going to find a government study or a government-funded study that reports that cocaine is not as addictive as the War on Drugs wants you to believe it is.

That’s why Marijuana is a Schedule 1 Drug. It’s supposed to be more addictive that cocaine! According to the government Schedule, cocaine is a gateway drug. That is, if you use cocaine it will lead to using harder drugs, like marijuana. But everyone knows that the opposite is true. A lot of people use marijuana but not that many go on to cocaine and get hooked. A lot of people drink beer but they don’t all move on to hard liquor.

The big problem we have right now is one of vocabulary. Marijuana is an illegal drug and people get arrested for it. But alcohol is a legal drug and unless you drive under the influence, you do not get arrested for buying it, transporting it or using it. Hell, you can let your kids drink at home and as long as they don’t leave your property, it’s legal. But when it comes to marijuana, we arrest people every day. We spend about $9 billion a year on police, court and jail costs for people who are smoking a plant. That’s one-tenth the cost of smoking another plant: tobacco. Tobacco smoke costs the United States about $100 billion a year in direct health care costs. But no one is talking about making tobacco illegal.

Jeanine, you are in college. One of the most important of life’s lessons is that you think for yourself. That’s what an education is all about. You listen to what you are being told and you read the studies. Then you let your common sense be your guide. Sometimes what you hear is true, often it is not. It’s not false; but it’s not true. It’s what someone wants you to believe. Life does not come with a textbook.”

[This short story comes from Steven Levi’s THE CANNABIS STAMPEDE available on ACX and Kindle.]