Conspiracy theories

It's going to be hard to follow the brilliant and incisive work of Larry Gabriel ("When science goes to pot") in last week's Higher Ground, but one thing I've noticed over the years is that when the government commissions a study into the adverse effects of marijuana and the answer comes back "none," the report is simply ignored and the government goes right on with its program for the harassment and eradication of recreational drug users.

My memory isn't that great anymore, but I can't remember a single study that concluded marijuana is bad for human beings or has any negative effect on the workings of our society. As far as I've read, no deaths have resulted from marijuana use. It's not toxic, it's not addictive, it doesn't lead to violent or abusive behavior, and, in fact, marijuana offers great medicinal and healing benefits not found elsewhere — with the added attraction of blessed mental relief from the incessant poundings of daily life.

None of this fits with the orthodox mythology, however, so findings are routinely ignored, alcohol continues as the authorized social drug of choice, the pharmaceutical industry continues to boom as the nation's official drug supply, and the political underwriters of the established policy keep up their barrage of gibberish while voting billions for the relentless enforcement of their endless laws against recreational drug use.

Nixon got one of these reports just before firing the opening salvos of the War on Drugs that's raged almost 40 years and torn apart the lives of millions of American citizens who chose to reject the government's phony science and to smoke marijuana or get high in other prohibited ways in informed defiance of the law.

We've paid dearly for these choices; some think that's the point. Robert Carpenter writes, "It is, of course, true that the drug war has failed, insofar as its stated goals are concerned. The question, however, is whether the stated goals made in support of policy by the political class are necessarily the actual goals. ...

"On the Watergate tape recordings, President Nixon left no doubt as to his deep hatred of hippies, the counterculture, every minority group one can name, gays, and of course blacks. On the tapes Nixon demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of racial slurs and says words to the effect that the problem with the country now is the blacks. And H.R. Haldeman famously remarks that what's needed is a program which can deal with the blacks while not appearing to do so.

"What he means of course is that, in the wake of the civil rights legislation, a new means of containing blacks must be devised, now that the Jim Crow laws have been dismantled. That new means was the War on Drugs in which Nixon deployed his DEA and militarized civilian police forces with his SWAT programs, tanks, armored carriers and the like.

"With the War on Drugs, I believe Nixon — perhaps the most cynical and diabolically ingenious president of all time — understood that with the DEA interdictions he could drive up the street price of drugs, entice the poor, black urban underclass into dealing in them, and use the newly militarized civilian police forces as the front lines of a massive plan to begin turning blacks into felons and creating a ruling class in poor black ghettos where, as W.F. Buckley put it, the drug dealers would become the overlords.

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