As a disease called scleroderma was killing my grandmother, she suffered from constant pain and loss of appetite. The loss of appetite, in addition to a difficulty chewing and swallowing, led to severe weight loss. Her final months were spent in and out of hospitals and nursing homes.
If you ever risked fines and a prison sentence to toke up, then you certainly know that pot could have helped her with the appetite problem. Everyone knows that a Twinkie or a gallon of ice cream don't stand a chance against a pot smoker.
But did you also know that marijuana can help a hardened esophagus, another condition of scleroderma? Or that marijuana can reduce vomiting? Or that marijuana has possible immune suppressive properties?
I didn't. And it pisses me off. It didn't even occur to me until after my grandmother died that marijuana use may have helped her.
Scleroderma is an autoimmune disease, like arthritis, rheumatism, multiple sclerosis, and AIDS. There is evidence that all of these diseases could be treated with marijuana use. Unfortunately, the United States Government has convinced most of its citizens that the marijuana plant is evil. So evil, in fact, that people should be shot, their homes invaded, and their automobiles searched in order to prevent people from getting their hands on it.
If my grandmother had decided to get baked, she might have been carted out of the nursing home and into a jail cell. That's where another scleroderma sufferer had to go. As described in the Boston College Law Review:
In 1993, in Commonwealth v. Hutchins, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rejected the medical necessity defense. The defendant, Joseph Hutchins, was a forty-eight year old Navy veteran who suffered from scleroderma and Raynaud's phenomenon. In addition to causing other physical ailments, these diseases had an especially severe effect on Hutchins' gastrointestinal tract. Hutchins found that smoking marijuana alleviated many of his symptoms including: nausea; loss of appetite; difficulty in eating, drinking or swallowing; loss of mobility of the esophagus; spasticity; hypertension; and anxiety. Unable to secure a legal supply of marijuana, Hutchins was eventually arrested for cultivating and possessing two pounds of marijuana with the intent to distribute.
(Boston College Law Review, May 2000)
But perhaps the worst part of the marijuana laws isn't the prohibition on the possession and use of marijuana. Perhaps it's the effect on our thinking. After all, I could have jumped on a bus and picked up an ounce in Greenwich Village if I thought it would have helped my grandmother. But it didn't occur to me. Sure, I blame myself. But goddammit, the U.S. Government deserves some of the responsibility.
The anti-drug laws, along with the so-called "drug education" that goes along with it, affects the way we think about drugs. But what we get isn't "education", it's propaganda.
I don't know about you, but I've never seen a government-funded pamphlet with Skippy the Pot-Free Skunk telling me about the medicinal uses of marijuana. Or that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would be in jail today for growing it. Or that the United States Constitution was printed on paper made from it.
Of course not. All you hear is that pot kills brain cells. Isn't this kind of "education" like teaching kids that math is only good for designing homeless shelters and calculating tax increases?
The question is: how does the government get away with this? How do they justify the propaganda, let alone the all-out war against drug users? What the Boston College Law Review says about the Hutchins case points us in the right direction:
"The court held that the harm to the defendant did not outweigh the potential harm to the public as a result of the negative impact on drug enforcement efforts"
So the complete answer is: the "public good" mentality. This is the thing that that permits the B.S. in the classrooms and the drug war in the streets. It's the idea that as long as you claim you're "helping" someone else, you're free to screw over anyone in your path. For the good of "others", people alive today with diseases like my grandmother had are forced to suffer.
But why do we need to choose between "the public" and specific individuals? Was Hutchins not part of the "public"? What's so "good" about him living in pain? The answer given by the "public good" advocates is that it doesn't matter.
To quote novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand:
"Since there is no such entity as "the public", since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that "the public interest" supersedes private interests and rights, can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others."
(Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 170)
All members of "the public" deserve to pursue their own interests. Individuals need freedom to decide for themselves whether using marijuana would be an appropriate choice for them.
The suffering of people with scleroderma and other diseases may not be as inevitable as we've been taught to assume.
Signing off,
JR
You can find more information at NORML, The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws
