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Horizon BBC Two 03 Feb 2009, 21:00 on cannabis – marijuana
I very much enjoyed the programme, a lot of facts, a lot we already know, and encouraging to see that the science accepts that there is a positive – in terms of its many therapeutic effects on the mind-body – including its anxiolytic and relaxation effects.
The presenter accepted all that, the positives and negatives in balance, then right at the very end he says that the most pervasive problem is what he called ‘wasted lives’ of non-engagement. This, after having accepted that cannabis is an anxiolytic and relaxant. Given that our society functions through a fear-anxiety dynamic that promotes excessive competition and overwork what he is really saying is that cannabis is counter-cultural, but he didn’t say that. Instead he put the blame on cannabis rather than examining the assumptions of Western society. This let the whole thing down in my opinion. I’m a fellow psychologist and one of the taboos for social scientists is to not use rhetoric in this way. By putting that comment based on no evidence alongside an hour of lucid facts is disingenious.
I wanted to shout ‘and what about the all the lives of wasted engagement chasing consumerism and work and the commodification of everything, the rationalising objectifying and controlling of everything!’ It reminds me of Bill Hicks’ statement:
‘They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you’re high, you can do everything you normally do, just as well. You just realize that it’s not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference.’
The War on Drugs is a mess. Preventing harm cannot be achieved while some drugs are legal and others are not – it is a conceptual muddle and hypocritical. Many smart people have been saying for decades that drugs have positive aspects as well as negative. Educate people and let them choose what substances they want to use and the world will be a safer, healthier, and potentially better place.
Peace
“The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world. “- Carl Sagan
Ecological
“The fact that Richard Nixon saw Timothy Leary [proponent of LSD] as ‘the most dangerous man in America’ is an indication of just how threatening the values of the ‘counter-culture’ were deemed to be. However, few people in ’straight’ society had even glimpsed the extraordinary power of the revolutionary tool which Leary and others were propagating. As Jay Stevens observes in his seminal study of the drug, even the activists of the New Left had overlooked ‘the role LSD was playing in redefining the Counter-culture’s thrust’. For the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, ‘technology had produced a chemical which catalyzes a consciousness which finds the entire civilisation leading up to that pill absurd’” – Rory Spowers, A History of the Environmental Revolution and Visions for an Ecological Age.
We no longer live in a world of straight versus counter culture and yet we continue to fail to calculate the social good (in the Spowers’ example above the context is ecological awareness) against the potential social harm from the drug. In terms of ecological awareness there has never been a more pressing need for an awakening pill.
A tiny percentage of all those trillions so far spent on the War on Drugs would have been better spent on education (including educating the medical profession) and treating side effects. All drugs have benefits, not least social benefits and yet ’social harm’ always seems to come up as an argument for prohibition. Let’s try an intelligent approach instead.
Drugs mess-up your head. This message is carried explicitly or implicitly within every warning on illegal drugs. The warnings are very rarely placed alongside a balanced description of their benefits. If this were the case we would see: ‘Sometimes drugs mess-up your head, and sometimes they help solve your mental problems’. However, when have you ever seen that realistic message portrayed by the government or mainstream media?
The reason we are rarely told about the psychological benefits of drugs – apart from the promotion of legal and costly pharmaceuticals – is that governments and medical professionals are finding it very hard to reverse the decades of negative spin that they have applied to the subject. So they continue in the vein: ‘Drugs screw you up’.
In contrast with this dogma, grass-roots drug reform movements have long known that simple dichotomies presented by governments and right-wing campaigners are unhelpful and often seriously wrong. It’s not their fault of course, because governments are by their very nature incapable of thinking in complex ways and presenting complex messages. An issue has to be binary for them because they are dumb and reactionary. As for anti-drugs campaigners I make no comment.
Cannabis appears to be useful in helping to treat chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, gastrointestinal tract disorders and HIV/AIDS. It is also claimed that cannabinoids play a protective role in the brain, slowing the rate of disease. Studies have shown it to slow the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice – lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia and in another study THC destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats. Notably a recent epidemiological study found no greater incidence of lung cancer among cannabis smokers than among those who did not smoke cannabis – potentially due to the anti-cancer properties cancelling out the effects of tar or due to its expectorant effect producing mucous which may catch the tar and lift it from the lungs before damage occurs. Most recently, a study has shown it is far more effective than available Alzheimer drugs to halt the disease’s progression. It has also been found to be related to new cell growth deep in the brain’s memory areas. Cannabis appears to be a drug of significant medical utility as well as a drug that some people abuse.
The medical benefits of cannabis may also be psychological. Hallucinogen researcher Charles Grob says that ‘psychedelic drugs have the potential to alter modern medicine’. Charles Grob is editor of “Hallucinogens: A Reader” and recently co-edited, with Roger Walsh, “Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics.” Cannabis as a hallucinogen has the effect of promoting direct perception alongside relaxation. This potent combination for behavioural change and self-awareness is only one of the ways in which a person can be helped to provide him or herself with psychotherapy.
Endogenously created psychological change and personal growth is ideal because it is controlled by the patient and permits introspective analysis of the person’s problem as well as presenting unique creative solutions for those problems. Quite often mental problems are based on incorrect perceptions of the world (e.g., depression) and can be alleviated by altering the perceptual frame. As cannabis becomes more accepted as a medicine we can expect to see greater use of both its biological and psychological properties.
