Reefer Medicine Madness

When marijuana-smoking became central to the hippie lifestyle in the late-1960s, getting caught with a couple of joints could get you 40 years behind bars. The use of pot flourished anyway.

While most of those who experimented with smoking weed eventually gave it up, there are plenty of old hippies still smoking it. Some have smoked it for something akin to a daily basis for 40 years, or more.

Thus, whatever will happen to them for subjecting their bodies to such an ordeal has happened. Where are the legions of disease-ridden pot-smokers?

In fact, whatever damage to society that widespread marijuana smoking for decades would cause has happened, too. And, while the penalties for smoking pot aren’t as harsh as they were 40 years ago, possessing, using, or selling it can still land you in jail.

It mystifies me why people continue to sell the notion that marijuana is a “gateway” to anything more than a sudden longing for a slice of apple pie with a little wedge of extra sharp cheddar on the side.

Why is the world does America have so many people in jail for drug-related crimes? Who does it serve? One person in jail for possession of marijuana is too many.

Perhaps the makers of the myriad of expensive mood-control drugs, such as Prozac, know more about why pot stays illegal than I do.

We've known that marijuana can be useful as medicine for a long time, too. Then, there is evidence that it may be much more useful as a medicine than any of us suspected.

May 31, 2000: The term medical marijuana took on dramatic new meaning in February, 2000 when researchers in Madrid announced they had destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats by injecting them with THC, the active ingredient in cannabis. The Madrid study marks only the second time that THC has been administered to tumor-bearing animals; the first was a Virginia investigation 26 years ago. In both studies, the THC shrank or destroyed tumors in a majority of the test subjects.

Click here to read "Pot Shrinks Tumors: Government Knew in 1974" at Alternet.

Click here to view a documentary, "Grass: The History of Marijuana," at YouTube that tells the history of marijuana prohibition in the United States.