Gulliver's Travels

Still Life with CWHO and Frida**

"Absolutely,"  Christie said. "I will crack down and not permit it."

That was the answer Governor Chris Christie gave to a conservative Iowa radio host when asked what he'd do about marijuana if he were to become POTUS. He was referring to the "flaunting of federal law" that is going on in Washington and Colorado. He said a whole bunch of other stuff, too, most of which is not even true.

Sigh.

This whole thing is confusing on so many levels, isn't it? On the one hand, you've got conservatives bemoaning marijuana as the evil weed, a "gateway drug" that leads to debauchery, addiction and moral decline, and on the other hand, you've got conservatives crying out about the evils of government over-reach and grand conspiracies against the people. Then there are conservatives who believe that marijuana is a gift from God thrown up against scientists who believe there isn't enough research. Thrown into all of this are families desperate to try cannabis for their children or themselves as they're suffering from not just epilepsy, but autism and multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's and lupus and cerebral palsy and cancer. You've got Rand Paul supporting the cause, a guy who believes in the supremacy of the individual at any cost, but there's Chris Christie hell-bent on stomping it out. You've got Obama waffling around about the issue, and then you've got -- well -- me. 

I stand for full legalization of marijuana for both recreational and medicinal use. Yeah, and I haven't smoked or ingested the stuff in about thirty years. I went through different gates, too, than the ones referred to by that poor Chris Christie, none of which involved drug or alcohol debauchery.

I was going to tell ya'll about the history of marijuana -- how it was used for thousands of years not only as medicine for a host of diseases, but also for textiles and military uniforms and navy ships. It was one of this country's earliest crops and was used for pain, as a sedative, as an anxiety medicine, as an anti-inflammatory, as an anti-epileptic and so forth right up until the 1930s when the Powers That Be conspired to put it under. Those powers were William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Mellon and Charles DuPont. Hearst owned all the timber in the land, as well as the newspapers that needed wood pulp that needed DuPont's bleach to make newsprint and paper. Mellon was not only the head of the biggest oil company in the land but also, conveniently, the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Down in Mexico the people were brown and dirty and Less Than, held "up," or down (according to how you see it) as examples of what could go wrong with hemp/marijuana. Hearst's newspapers thus reported the evils of this drug, how it turned people into rapists, thieves, drunken louts, dirty Mexicans. In 1937, The Marihuana Tax Act was passed which destroyed the hemp industry. In 1938, the movie Reefer Madness exploited the image of marijuana as a drug that turned youth into crazy rampaging degenerates. And in 2015 we've got big ole Chris Christie spouting off about the moral dee-cay of our youth.

Well, I did just tell you a bit about the history of one of the world's oldest cultivated crops (12,000 years old, to be exact). 

These are almost Swiftian times, are they not? Gulliver comes to mind and the most clever satire one could imagine.