"As long as you’ve been living you’ve never heard of a motherfucker overdose on Marijuana. Why it’s illegal, I don’t know. Aspirin is legal but if you take 13 of them motherfuckers it’ll be your last headache.”
-Katt Williams, Comedian
In Minnesota, it’s illegal to cross state lines with a duck on your head. In Alabama, putting salt on railroad tracks is punishable by death. In Alaska it’s illegal to push a live moose out of a moving plane, medicinal marijuana is still illegal in 37 states, and in Connecticut it’s against the law to walk backwards after sunset.
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Hi there! Welcome to my brain. I’m sorry we haven’t had formal introductions, but since you’re still reading, I assume you’re interested in learning more about my brain and its respective thoughts (unless, perhaps, I have offended you in some manner, in which case you’ve probably stopped reading, possibly something I may or may not have said about mooses. You may be a moose sympathizer, and easily perturbed by ribaldorus language. Moose fans are known to be quite proud and stoic. A moosely people, they are).
That opening compendium above is a fair warning to the following essay you have by now no doubt determined yourself to get to the end of: The fact that cannabis is illegal in any form for a large majority of America strikes me as highly ludicrous. Being held for hostage in the enticing charisma that is the audience-author relationship, I thought it only fair that you be aware of that, as I show you how the country’s drug policy reminds me of putting a donkey in bathtub in Georgia—illegal and ridiculous.
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First and foremost: Weed cannot kill you. It is nearly impossible. There are no recorded cases, anywhere, of a cannabis overdose. A 160 lb person would have to smoke nearly a thousand joints in one chain-smoking sitting in order to achieve a shuffling from this mortal coil. In a study printed in Britain (since securing hemp in America in order to perform scientific test on human subjects is nearly as impossible as it is to die from it)—conducted by a Dutch scientist with a nigh-on improbable to pronounce name—your chances of dying on weed while even behind the wheel of car is considerably low. Driving while consuming a “moderate” amount of marijuana (probably around the amount Fox News stops being terrifying and starts being hilarious) is actually still safer than drinking up to a Blood Alcohol Content of 0.04—one half what is the legal limit to keep drinking and still be able to drive oneself home in most of the United States of America (By comparison, by the way, 11,773 people died in drunk driving accidents in 2008). The study also showed that High Drivers also have a tendency to give a wider berth on the car in front of them, and drive slower than they would whilst sober. For reasons of hilarity, I want to make this clear: a study suggested that potheads might actually make the roads safer to drive on. Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether pot is illegal now, or soon becomes legal—loosened restrictions will not breed several dozen million doped up four-wheel killing machines. Beer has been and always will be the more dangerous of the two. Combinations of the two chemicals, of course, raise dangerous driving rates more than either of the chemicals alone would—just as tying cement blocks to both of your feet would make you a worse driver than if you just strapped one foot down—but ideally we can raise children smart enough to remember how to spell the initials for “designated driver” no matter how messed up they are on anything. If not, and it comes down to it, I’d just like to say for the record that I’d trade away liquor being legal if you gave me pot in the bars instead. But that’s just me.
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“Say you’re at a ball game or you’re at a concert. Someone’s really violent, aggressive, and obnoxious. Are they drunk, or are they smoking pot? I have never seen two potheads get in a fight because it is fucking impossible. ‘Hey buddy!’ ‘Hey what?’ ‘……I don’t remember’. End of argument.”
-Bill Hicks, Comedian
An economics Professor at Harvard—yes, that Harvard, the one that would probably only spend its time and research grant money on things it actually thinks are important—wrote a letter to congress in 2005 showing that legislating marijuana could bring anywhere from 10 to 14 billion dollars into the nation’s budget: $8 billion on court and prison fees for processing and holding non-violent drug criminals—which is money we will save by not doing that anymore—and somewhere from $2.4 billion to $6.2 billion in actual profit from providing cannabis to citizens, otherwise known as selling a thing, for money, to people who want the thing you have, and will give you their money in order to get it. Or “capitalism”, as I’ve heard it called on the hip-hop streets of Everywheretown, Americaland.
Oh yeah! By the way, funny story. Listen to this: A science group of dudes—or “gaggle of white coats”, as they’re called—got together in Madrid and put some candid cameras on tetrahydrocannabinol—or THC, the biggest ingredient that makes weed do what it does—to see what happened when they locked it in a Petri dish with some brain-cancer cells, and picked up some zany footage of the THC making the brain-cancer cells commit suicide. Hilarious!
The positive affects of weed in one’s body has not even begun to be mapped fully. There are several hundreds of stories (and only stories, since, like I said, getting government grants to study cannabis in America is a little harder here than compared to…just about every other developed country in the continent of Europe) of weed being the last thing left for a doctor to prescribe to a terminally ill cancer or AIDS patient, and it being the first or only thing that’s gotten them to hold down a meal long enough for their body to remember it has a digestive system and could really use some nutrients, thank you. Post-Traumatic stress, arthritis, glaucoma, stroke recovery, Immune support for HIV suffers, suppressing the gap reflex caused by chemotherapy—even suggesting inhaling is easier for weak gags then swallowing a pill—spasticity, multiple sclerosis, a better post-op pain killer than morphine, does less brain damage if taken at an adolescent age than alcohol does, and, to put it in perspective as an actual source of relaxation, it has only a 9% addiction rate for heavy users, compared to 15% for alcohol, 23% for heroin, and 33% for tobacco.
Most of this is, of course, initial suggestions and hope, since studies are only picking up since we figured out exactly where pot affects the brain just a little over a decade ago, and for the aforementioned (hat-trick now) difficulty in securing any cannabis from the U.S. government in order to find out more about it.
And so we come to the United States government. The pinnacle of Western civilization. A government with an Attorney General who says DEA agents will no longer raid Medical Marijuana Offices in any state that has legalized medicinal marijuana (before, whenever the Federal Agents got bored, I guess, they could enter and close down any cannabis prescription office, because even though weed might’ve been legal in California, it wasn’t legal in America). So now medicinal marijuana is a state decision. And then, said Attorney General still continues to allow said raids to continue. As long as he just ignores it, I guess it wasn’t him ordering them? It seems sketchy, especially since the Attorney General can re-classify the legal status of any drug he sees fit merely by expelling oxygen out of his lungs past his vocal cords, using what one might call “his very words” in order to make marijuana legally available for medicinal purposes.
Oh yes, quite true. There are five federal groups under which all chemicals fall. Everything from licking poison dart frogs to buying extra mind-looping black markers for children’s classrooms falls under these categories (except Alcohol and Tobacco, which make up the A and the T in the ATF). These are called Schedules. One (I) through five (V) to be exact. The only ones that can never federally legally be used for medication are Schedule I. Schedule II – V has Laudanum, cocaine, opium, PCP, all steroids (including the ball shrivelers) Ritalin, and a thousand other ones with names that make my head hurt when I remember all of them can and do kill stupid people who use them wrong, or to purposely commit suicide with. Marijuana is one of the ones classified Schedule I. That means any doctor who prescribes Cannabis to a patient is a criminal as far as the DEA is concerned. They are literally saying weed can do no one any good ever at all anywhere and if you use it your life will be ruined, and if they catch you using it, they can send you to a large place where they specialize in ruining lives.
It has occurred to me that Attorney General Eric Holder may simply have forgotten this part: the fact that he could literally sneeze into a microphone while saying “Aaahhh—marijuanaisnowascheduletwocontrolledsubstance—kkkbliewshx” and it would literally happen. All this would be solved. Maybe he forgot that he can make the entire issue an instant non-issue. Maybe I will send him a letter to remind him, and maybe if I ask real nicely he’ll throw in a “Shazam!” when he does it. Or maybe jazz-hands. Those always crack me up.
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“I think people started taking drugs when the first Neanderthal walked out of his cave and thought, “This can’t be IT, man.”
-George Carlin, Comedian
So, final thoughts to all this insane giggling gibberish.
When you take all the myriad uses possible for the hemp plant—of clothing, textiles, printing, fiber, rope, plastics, lubricants, soaps, and all those other uses that actually led the USDA to make a 14 minute service announcement documentary in 1942 called “Hemp for Victory”, encouraging farmers to make hemp for supplies in the war effort—and combine that with the hundreds of thousands of millions of billions of dollars that the conglomerates and corporations could theoretically lose if they lost their monopoly on the chemical and synthetic market which would be replaced overnight with a cheaper, safer product that anyone in the entire world could get their hands on, and you realize all the political clout they would likewise lose…well, then we have some dark conclusions. Luckily most places that mention that also occasionally mention the theory that cannabis is delivered unto us from beings beyond stars and space, so we have some comedy light at the end of their knocking-of-bizarre-paranoia-but-still-at-least-plausible suspicions.
I can only speak for myself when I say that I remember the thought through my head when I was looking all this up—that my father is a well-off entrepreneur of his own chain of liquor stores who has made his fortune and likewise his children’s fortune in a chemical that has a nasty tendency to lead to death, spousal abuse, and automotive destruction. I thought about the blood on my hands—maybe not necessarily literally, but certainly in my head from all the fine education I’ve garnered on his monetary good will towards me. Those people made their choices, of course. Maybe we made it a little easier. Maybe I should feel bad. Maybe I shouldn’t. Who knows.
What I do know is that I prefer one chemical over the other. I know that when my dad asked me a dickish-rhetorical question (“Do you think I should smoke pot, Philip?”) and I answered him honestly that, yeah, I thought he should (awkward!), since he’s over 70 years old and he still hasn’t quite figured out the definition of “relax”.
I know when I hear comedians summarizing a point, putting it down to the only sentences and facts you really need to know about an argument, and making you laugh about it, that their attitude was always so…congenial. A shared sympathy that we all agree on this stupidity, but at least we’re smart enough to know what’s above it. What the truth is. And I know I will always resent the fact that I have to talk in euphemisms and code about how I like to sit in my basement and not hurt anybody.
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