“Composer Artisan” ISFP. Socially and economically libertarian for reasons having nothing to do with Ayn Rand. Current fields of study:Playboy, A Course in Miracles, building a new life in Humboldt County.
Hollywood, California, is my spiritual hometown. I actually grew up in three other communities in California, but it hardly seems to matter which three. How could my heart take root anywhere under the tyranny of American public schooling?
I don’t have to work for a living. After my father died in December 1997, my family and I won a legal settlement.
The Blog About
Nothing: Sudheer of Hyderabad, India, is a big fan of Playboy and an
even bigger fan of Seinfeld. In this blog, he composes humorous
dialogues for the show’s characters.
Hit & Run: the official
blog of my other favorite magazine, Reason: Free Minds and Free
Markets; winner
of the 2005 Weblog Award for Best Group Blog; “the best
libertarian blog” according to the October 2005 issue of
Playboy.
Scoobie Davis Online: a self-described “filmmaker, surfer, and party crasher” in southern California. He’s also a Playboy fan, a left-leaning political gadfly, and a connoisseur of Jack T. Chick religious tracts.
The Search for
Health in Decadence: poetry and philosophical writings of Will, who has
engaged me in lengthy, good-natured debate through comments on my
blog.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven
Pinker. With stylistic flair, a Harvard cognitive scientist
refutes myths about human nature underlying a multitude of political
beliefs—including many of those that would either favor or
oppose the sexual revolution.
God in Popular Culture by Andrew M. Greeley. A liberal Catholic
priest sees quasi-Christian messages of grace abounding in the
allegedly soulless realm of commercial pop culture. For all I know,
Greeley is not necessarily a Playboy fan. But his
interpretation of Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin” has
influenced my impression of Playboy. (In case anyone wonders, my religious heritage is Lutheran on my father’s side and secularist on my mother’s.)
At 1:10 in this video of a Playboy Mansion party, the March 2008 Playmate shows her good judgment and good taste.
I was there for that party. Click here for the embarrassing details of my encounter with Miss March.
The hot brunette in the video embed freeze frame is mistress of ceremonies and Playboy model Adrianne Curry (February 2006 and January 2008)—technically not a Playmate, though not for lack of beauty, as you can see.
Do you wonder what I look like? Wonder no more. On June 12, I made it to the third annual benefit party for the Marijuana Policy Project at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. From left to right, the Playmates in this photo are Katie Lohmann (April 2001), Marketa Janska (July 2003), Amanda Paige (October 2005), and Janine Habeck (September 2006).
That time of year, the sun hadn’t gone down at eight o’clock, when the party began.
As it got dark, guests came in by the chartered busload.
These female guests were justifiably proud to be seen inside the grotto.
The Playboy Mansion loves animals! This picture shows only part of its pet cemetery.
There were speeches about the marijuana law reform movement. Then DJ Native Wayne Jobson spun tunes while sexy dancers entertained the crowd.
Miss May 1998, Deanna Brooks, is an acquaintance from my visits to the first and second Mansion benefits for MPP.
How embarrassing! I made Miss March 2008, Ida Ljungqvist, a little nervous with the creepy monotone in my voice, my stammer, and the case of Fashion Tourette’s that led me to believe I would look cool in cheap black gloves. Fortunately, she was persuaded that I meant no harm.
Playboy: It’s a scary world out there. What’s it like with your triplets being 15? That’s the age when all the sex, drinking and drugs kick in, right?
[Dr. Drew] Pinsky: I’m less freaked out about the sex than about drugs and alcohol.... I don’t think kids ever tell you if they’re using drugs and alcohol, but I put it on record that if there’s even a hint of something, I will bring the whole thing down. I’ll have their asses hauled in by the police.
Playboy: So you’re not one of those parents who say “You can drink as long as it’s under my roof”?
Pinsky: To me that’s the worst kind of parenting. Drink here but not there? Please! It becomes “You can drink everywhere,” because that’s how the adolescent brain works. Kids need very clear boundaries. My thing is, if you do something illegal, you’re going to jail and I’m not bailing you out. And they know I’ve got perfect radar, too....
Playboy: What’s your history of drug use?
Pinsky: Mine personally? Because my kids may read this, I’m going to follow the advice I give to parents, which is that talking to your kids about what you did or did not do as an adolescent is the equivalent of issuing them a license to pick up where you left off. I guarantee you. I’ve been through this thousands of times. When parents tell their kids, “Well, I experimented with pot when I was 15, but that was all,” the kids will think, Of course I’m going to experiment with pot. They did it; why shouldn’t I? It would be hypocritical.
Playboy: So what do you say to kids?
Pinsky: You say “We don’t talk about it.”
Playboy: Come on! Tell kids that and they immediately think it means you did it!
Pinsky: When the child hears that, it has an entirely different impact on his behavior than my saying “Let me tell you about my experience.” If you did or didn’t do drugs, it’s not up for discussion. Don’t lie to your kids—never do that—but you aren’t obliged to tell them everything.
—Playboy Interview, July 2008
Hello, ladies! I don’t care what the state of California says about you as “minors.” If you let me, I would gladly buy you beer and cigarettes. I’m not kidding. Having been politically abused by your sanctimonious father, you’re entitled to self-medication.
The kernel of truth in parental anxieties about teenage sex and drug use is that postpubescent adults (i.e. 15-year-olds) need intergenerational dialogue to behave wisely and safely. Don’t take it personally when your dad spoils any hope for dialogue by condescending in his attitude towards your “adolescent brains.” No discovery in cognitive neuroscience will ever “prove,” for instance, that teens should abstain from alcohol. This is for the same reason that science can never “prove” the correct highway speed limit: the relevant political question always boils down to management of conflicting value judgments.
I don’t doubt your father’s honest wish to keep people safe with the value judgments he imposes on the supposedly diseased brains of teenagers, alcoholics, abuse survivors, and so on. The trouble is that he is a civil-liberties moron. If he had to actually think about that stuff, his brain would herniate. OK, fine, there are some bad brains.
Bill Maher: Okay. Last time we talked to you, you wanted to say something about Proposition 215 [California’s 1996 medical marijuana ballot initiative].
Dr. Drew Pinsky: I was really offended by 215. As you know, what I am mostly against is misinformation. And 215, to me, seemed like a sham. It was some sort of Trojan horse, concocted to try to get people—using the sympathies of people about individuals with chronic illness, to try to cram this thing into legality.
—the panel discussion show Politically Incorrect, May 15, 1998.
When no one remembers a time without a Food and Drug Administration, important philosophical questions about drug policy, drug manners, and drug morals can fall down the memory hole, too. It’s intellectually irresponsible for Playboy to call Pinsky “a guy who knows how to be a responsible pleasure seeker,” as it does in the “Next Month” page anticipating the July issue with Pinsky as the Interview subject. Besides him, Frank Owen, author of the March article “The Medical Marijuana Murder,” is also dangerously overrated by Playboy as an authority on drug issues. Both men would lead us on a road to hell paved with good intentions.
A close look at the customers of these dispensaries reveals a not so shocking truth: Many are not ill at all. Exactly how many medical marijuana patients are really sick and how many exaggerate minor aches and pains in order to get high is impossible to gauge....
There is as yet no solid proof that smoking pot cures anything. Instead, there is a small mountain of evidence—both anecdotal and scientific—that suggests pot is a useful palliative for some people, good for boosting appetite among HIV patients and suppressing nausea among cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Patients may feel better after smoking marijuana, and life may seem more bearable, but until further research is done it’s impossible to say whether the drug is doing anything to retard the progress of their disease.
Nearly all illegal drugs possess some medical utility. Heroin was introduced in the late 19th century as a treatment for opium addicts. In the 1950s methamphetamine was used to treat everything from depression to alcoholism to Parkinson’s disease. Yet nobody is talking about medical meth.
....
A year after [Denver med-pot seller] Ken Gorman’s murder the police have yet to make an arrest. In the end, who killed Gorman may be less important than why he was killed. His friends blame prohibition: If pot were fully legal, this wouldn’t have happened. But Gorman’s death resulted from a poorly thought-out system that puts patients and growers in peril even when they act within the limits of the law.
I agree with Owen that it’s dangerous to implement a poorly thought-out system. Unfortunately, Owen’s article is a poorly thought-out system, because it doesn’t give enough thought to who is empowered to implement what kind of system at what level of authority, and why.
The medical marijuana situation in the U.S. is chaotic, and Owen is doing exactly the wrong thing in response to the chaos as far as the Playboy Philosophy is concerned. Social chaos deserves to be exploited for the purpose of everyone’s individual liberty whenever possible. Eastern Europe in 1989 is a shining example of chaos done right. “Chaotic” individuals opportunistically decided to say fuck you to the Iron Curtain. When I use Proposition 215 to vaporize cannabis several times a day psychotherapeutically (for want of a better adverb), I’m effectively saying fuck you to drug prohibition by acting as if it never happened. When I treat pot as merely another item I deserve to be allowed to pick up in a store, it acts slowly but surely as a self-fulfilling prophecy for everybody. If I claimed, as some of my fellow libertarians do, that 215 is “a bad cause in bad faith,” I would be hesitating inappropriately in the name of intellectual integrity. Excessive analysis is paralysis—especially when chaos needs to be exploited and a fuck you needs to be said.
Pinsky is as clueless as Owen on where the prerogative of a citizen to use a substance comes from in the first place. On the 1998 PI panel, he essentially agrees with the federal government that more research is needed to be sure whether the people can handle as much freedom as they get under Proposition 215. Meanwhile, history proves that the government is neither competent nor morally legitimate as the pharmacological gatekeeper of the citizenry anyway. Pinsky’s point of view on this is difficult to interpret from the show’s transcript, and it’s probably because he knows he doesn’t really have a point of view on it. He is too intellectually lazy to imagine a world that much freer than ours, so he falls back on his modus operandi of self-righteousness. He can do this all he likes, but he can’t convince me that this is the voice of “responsible pleasure seeking.”
According to a Hindu proverb, it takes a thorn to remove a thorn. I’m finally getting over the “Why did they always tell me I’m wrong?” thing by being told by Someone Else (through A Course in Miracles) that, in a manner of speaking, I’m literally always wrong. Meanwhile, I’m also getting kicked out of my apartment just when I’m preparing to go to the Playboy Mansion for the third time. But God’s grace has provided an elegant solution in the division of labor according to comparative advantage. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
After the party, I’ll need a cheap place to live while I plan necessary changes in my life. It might as well be your guest bedroom, so you should expect me there in mid-June. Because of my criminal record for ill-advised scuffles with cops just a few years ago, I warn you against “teaching me a lesson” with another arrest. California’s “three strikes” law could mean disaster after that. If you have to worry about something, worry about that. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
Don’t try to make me go to rehab; I won’t go, go, go. Although I know that I can’t afford to deny the consequences of my behavior, I categorically refuse to medicalize my behavior in any way. I acknowledge no “disease” of any kind for which I need to take twelve steps or any variation thereof. Besides, I’m already doing superbly with the do-it-yourself spiritual program I’m on. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
You don’t have to believe in Rousseau’s doctrine of the Noble Savage to recognize the tyranny of America’s public schools. When I remember the slavery of homework that you helped bind me to—the unnecessary anxiety, guilt, shame, boredom, and sense of impending failure all the way—I feel no compunction whatsoever farming out my worries to you. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
Nobody’s guilt trip about my “growing up slowly” can discourage me. All I can say in reply is that I’ve been doing the best I know how all along. By logical necessity, this ends the argument. You do the worrying; I’ll do the partying.
If you live in the U.S., your tax return is due tomorrow. While the price tag of our overreaching federal government has your attention, please watch these videos on good things that the government wastes money to save us from, respectively immigrants and marijuana.
“Thank you for calling Reason.tv. Please press one for English.” Say, I wonder whose voice that is at the very beginning of this video on immigration. (That reminded me to update my blog post on the women of Reason magazine to include the lovely and talented Virginia Postrel, by the way.)
Thanks to Pot TV, I can direct you to something beautiful that YouTube won’t allow me to embed here: Hugh Hefner’s statements about marijuana policy from March 30, 2006. (By the way, I also attended the same event in 2007.)
Explaining the virtues of both personal and economic freedom to friends with high-speed Internet connections has never been easier. Reason.tv, the online video department of the renowned libertarian magazine, has opened up shop.
Their first editors’ pick is this YouTube video of ABC newsman John Stossel sharing his libertarian wisdom with an appreciative crowd at the Blue Velvet in Los Angeles:
Scott Imler, a United Methodist minister in West Hollywood, would rather regulate herbs in hell than serve liberated health care customers in heaven. He was willing to appreciate the logic of letting people use cannabis as a healing herb at their own discretion—until too many of his sacred cows were slaughtered by the alleged scandal of medicine’s commingling with capitalism at California’s medical marijuana dispensaries. Americans will stop worrying about health care soon after they learn to think calmly and rationally about it. Imler proves that point in the negative.
The Supreme Court has upheld the DEA’s right to go after dispensaries, no matter what state law might say. And even one of the key proponents of medical marijuana says things have gotten out of hand.
“It’s just ridiculous the amount of money that’s going through these cannabis clubs. It’s absolutely ridiculous,” says Scott Imler, a minister in the United Methodist Church who has long been active in promoting medical marijuana.
Eleven years ago, he was working to pass proposition 215, the [statewide] ballot measure that legalized it. Today, Imler has second thoughts.
“The purpose of proposition 215 was not to create a new industry. It was to protect legitimate patients from criminal prosecution,” Imler says.
The aim back then, reflected in television spots, was for a highly regulated system in which licensed pharmacies would dispense medical marijuana to the seriously ill. Proposition 215’s backers had people with AIDS, cancer, and glaucoma in mind.
“What happened when we were writing it was, as you can imagine, every patient group in the state and they all have their lobbies. You know, the kidney patients and the heart patient. Every patient group wanted to be included in the list,” Imler recalls. “And so we didn’t wanna get in the position of deciding what it could be used for and what it couldn’t be used for. We weren’t doctors. We weren’t scientists. We weren’t researchers. We were just patients with a problem.”
Imler says they were forced to make the proposition vague.
So the law voters passed mentioned not only cancer and AIDS but “...any other illness for which marijuana provides relief.” A decade later, if you’ve got a note from a doctor, you can buy medical pot for just about any imaginable condition.
“Let me just ask you plain and simple. Is there this proliferation because people are simply using, quote, unquote, medical marijuana, to get high?” Safer asks.
“I think there’s a lot of that. And I think you know, a lot of what we have now is basically pot dealers in storefronts,” Imler says.
Many businesses calling themselves dispensaries or cannabis clubs advertise in alternative papers, as do doctors around the state who will give you a quick once-over and, for a price, a permit to buy.
Regrettably, Safer doesn’t see through the phony scandal of adult citizens purchasing an amazingly safe herb for the difficult to explain but very real benefits of getting high. I credit Imler with intellectual humility when he says, “We weren’t doctors. We weren’t scientists.” I wish he would take that reasoning a little further. Why doesn’t Imler notice the alarming discrepancy between the scientific and political processes? Why doesn’t he then apply the same standard of intellectual humility to politicians (and the health care workers they have forcefully deputized) that he does to himself?
If I could, I would deny any doctor or pharmacist the prerogative of vetoing my request for any medicine. Generations of government growth have taught many Americans to think of health care (and education) as things that come down from the government like manna from heaven. But the laws of economics are nearly as dependable as the laws of physics. It always sucks to be relatively poor. It entails relative deprivation in every worldly good and service, including health care. Meanwhile, free markets regulated minimally to avoid coercion, fraud, and gross threats to public safety are the historically proven way to make all goods and services continually better and more available. California’s medically sound Proposition 215 is a model for taking health care in general away from slow-witted bureaucrats and back to the people.
In other words, I am the final authority on whether getting high is beneficial to my health. Rev. Imler prattles onward:
“Most of these cannabis centers are buying their marijuana off the black market. They’re dumping millions of dollars into the criminal black market,” Imler says.
“Marijuana—what? Coming in from Mexico or wherever?” Safer asks.
“Some of it is,” Imler says. “Some of these places sell hashish, which comes in from the Becca Valley in Lebanon.”
“What you’re suggesting is that the traditional black market or part of the traditional black market is now legal?” Safer asks.
And looking back on a decade of controversy, Rev. Scott Imler concedes that good Samaritans with good intentions weren’t enough. He argues it’s time for the federal government to step in and legalize and properly control medical marijuana.
“Until that happens, we’re gonna have what we have now, which is chaos,” he says.
Those are the last words of the 60 Minutes story. For some reason, what Imler calls chaos is supposed to be scary, like a movie presented by Count Floyd. Unless Imler can justify his fear of that kind of chaos without regurgitating hoaxes about marijuana, his newfound hypocrisy ought to diminish his reputation in the medical marijuana community.
Go fuck yourself, Reverend! You’re a Falwell in sheep’s clothing!
Obviously, I made up the second half of the post title. I only wish I could say the same for the first. The July issue’s “The Dark Side of the Summer of Love” by Frank Owen should have been called “The Journalistic Dark Side of Frank Owen.” His account of Dr. David E. Smith’s experiences founding and running the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic 40 years ago misses the real story with a pattern of thinking doomed to repeat drug-war history.
Neither Owen nor Smith takes any care in distinguishing behavioral cause and effect when describing the hustlers, thugs, and con men who destroyed that San Francisco utopia—and who also, for some reason, tended to like crystal meth a lot more than the general square or hippie population. If he won’t try meth, can Owen at least do math? Crunching his numbers from page 128—“Today 10.4 million people have used crystal meth at least once in their life. There are an estimated 257,000 addicts.”—reveals that more than 97% of those who dare to try the stuff don’t have the irresistible urge to try it again. Hmm. Could it be that the dangers of a substance associated with certain unsavory people (accurately or inaccurately, it shouldn’t matter in terms of good civic logic) have been overstated in a spirit of moral panic? Does that ever happen? Unless you’re seriously worried about the public threat of, say, chocolate addiction, you have to admit that addictive potential does not justify prohibition of any drug, anyway. If you don’t respect the difference between correlation and causation, you deserve to drown by leaving your mouth open in a rainstorm and you just might be dumb enough to do it.
Immediately after undermining his own point of view with those stats, Owen places the blame for meth’s “exploding labs, ...overdoses, [and] ...battles with law enforcement” on what happened way back in 1967. The fact that prohibition itself causes or exacerbates all those problems in 2007 is completely overlooked. The article can’t even keep its story straight on the kind of person that crystal meth turns you into. Dangerous sociopaths preying on the innocent during the Summer of Love aren’t the only meth lovers. It’s also “a substance we know today as the favorite high of hillbillies, right-wing preachers and suburban moms.” (p. 58) Fortunately for Owen, most citizens don’t notice when the official story about a drug suddenly changes—or when groups of other citizens presumably out of earshot are demonized.
The annual benefit parties for the Marijuana Policy Project that I’ve had the pleasure of attending are consistent with the best of Playboy’s socially libertarian legacy. The top-billed article of July, on the other hand, depresses me with its intellectual laziness. I need to light up my bong and sip some Peruvian coca tea.
Edward Sanchez of Dearborn, Michigan, probably feels naked after resigning his policeman’s uniform in disgrace. About 90 minutes after he and his wife ate brownies laced with marijuana he had confiscated from criminal suspects, he made a hilarious 911 call:
Sanchez: I think I’m having an overdose and so is my wife.
Operator: Overdose of what?
Sanchez: Marijuana. I don’t know if it had something in it. Can you please send rescue?
Operator: Do you guys have fever or anything?
Sanchez: No, I’m just, I think we’re dying.
Operator: How much did you guys have?
Sanchez: I don’t know. We made brownies. And I think we’re dead. Time is going by really, really, really, really slow.
(Hat tip: Pot TV.) The unabridged audio of the phone call is that good all the way through, starting with an audible “before I wake...my soul to take” while Sanchez waits for the operator to pick up. Towards the end, he asks her to verify the current score of the Red Wings game to make sure he’s not hallucinating. I wonder how he knows he’s not hallucinating her answer to his question at that point. This guy was really, really, really, really unqualified for his essential job as a gun-toting addiction counselor who makes surprise house calls.
Dirty Sanchez faces no criminal charges, except in the court of public opinion. Stand back when Adam-12 takes his first bite of the Fruit That’s So Good It’s Evil, for you don’t know how big his trip is going to get.
Update, July 11, 2007, 10:48 a.m.: Jacob Sullum, who served our public discourse very well by writing Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, has discovered a music video inspired by the 911 call.
Update, September 8, 2007, 7:05 p.m.: For an alternate Dirty Sanchez reference, see this music video from Carlos Mencia.
Besides being female, the Grinchette is a clever variation on Mr. Grinch. Just as the Leader has a big brain to challenge the Incredible Hulk’s big muscles, the Grinchette has a tiny brain to rival her male counterpart’s tiny heart. You know her better as Connecticut lawmaker Toni Boucher, whom a friend of mine, budding journalist Jennifer Abel, has made a fool of by letting her go around in circles with her argument that people who use marijuana medically deserve prison. I wish the Savage She-Hulk would kick the Grinchette’s ass. Hubba hubba!
Update, 12:36 p.m.: Jenny McCarthy, whom the Wikipedia page on She-Hulk mentions as hulking out in a TV comedy sketch, is the 1994 Playmate of the Year. Six degrees of separation, huh? Watch it on YouTube.
When you summoned me to jury duty recently, I told you by mail that I use marijuana every day for psychiatric reasons—which I have every right to do according to section 11362.5 of the California Health and Safety Code. Since I haven’t received any further communication from you despite having been scheduled to appear the day before yesterday, I thankfully assume that you see the obvious dilemma between state and federal law if I showed up for jury duty with a dropper bottle of olive oil laced with cannabis.
Hypothetically, if my medical documentation had been misplaced or disregarded, my associates in the cannabis community and I would have been superstitious in the Corleone sense. (We’d act within the law, of course, but with that attitude.) Ed Rosenthal has shown how much an intelligent, well-connected stoner can embarrass public officials.
Some might say that Rosenthal proves we need more jurors who think like me. I’m flattered, but I’m either too smart or too dumb to be selected for any jury where I would likely make a difference. Impatient with an experience so reminiscent of a government-run school, I would soon confess my belief in using jury nullification to make victimless crimes unpunishable and excessive civil judgments unwinnable. You don’t want guys like me there. I figure I’m eliminating the middleman.
Get ready for two paragraphs of almost no cause-and-effect reasoning despite three uses of the word consequences:
Q: I think a friend is using, and maybe even selling, marijuana. He has no father and a poor family life, and I want to help him stop. What’s the best way for me to approach this?
A: This may sound cruel, but getting caught may be the best thing that could happen to your friend. He needs to suffer the consequences of his behavior. When he recognizes what he’s doing to himself, and possibly others, hopefully he’ll realize that smoking marijuana isn’t worth damaging friendships or his future. The most important thing you can do is tell him how his behavior affects you, how you see it changing him and what your concerns are. Ultimately, you have to be willing to end this relationship if he continues to use marijuana. It is only through these cumulative consequences and losses that he’ll make the connection between marijuana and the negative impact it’s having on his life. I encourage you to be loving and supportive, and perhaps even help him find a drug treatment program or support group, such as Marijuana Anonymous. You could also alert an adult who has a significant influence on his life. But be prepared to pull away from him if he continues to use or sell drugs. He needs to feel the consequences of his behavior—anything short of that and you are continuing to enable his disease. [link in the original]
According to Pinsky, nobody knows better than MA the negative consequences of the filthy stuff. Um, I’m a little hazy on those consequences, so I’ve consulted the MA website:
Q: What is the effect of marijuana on pregnancy?
A: Marijuana Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues including medical advice or opinions. MA does not know what effect marijuana may have on pregnancy. Some members may have more experience in that area than others, but no more so than the general population. That is a medical question best answered by medical professionals.
Q: What physical side effects does the use of marijuana cause?
A: The pamphlet “Detoxing from Marijuana” that is on this web page [sic: it’s on this other page] does not contain medically based knowledge, but empirical knowledge based on the experiences of many MA members who took the time to fill out extensive questionnaires regarding their own early days of abstinence from their drug of choice. This pamphlet should answer most of your questions on common physical side effects.
Q: Why do I need MA to quit using marijuana?
A: Maybe you don’t. “Marijuana Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share our experience, strength, and hope with each other that we may solve our common problem and help others to recover from marijuana addiction.” If you haven’t crossed over the line from using to abusing to addiction, you can probably quit using it any time you’d like....
Q: How can there be marijuana addicts if marijuana is not addicting?
A: ...Based on our own experiences, we who seek recovery in MA generally consider ourselves to be marijuana addicts. Whether or not our addiction is psychological, physical, or both, matters little. When it comes to the use of marijuana, we have lost the power of choice. It is strictly up to the individual to decide whether he or she feels addicted to marijuana. MA has no opinion about marijuana itself one way or another....
Q: What is MA’s opinion on the legalization of marijuana?
A: The Tenth Tradition of Marijuana Anonymous states:
“Marijuana Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the MA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.”
This tradition protects the integrity of the organization. “Anything that can disrupt our unity, and interfere with our primary purpose of carrying the message to the marijuana addict who still suffers, should be avoided” (Life With Hope, p. 93). Therefore, MA has no opinion about the legalization of marijuana. [bold in the original]
(I assume I can get away with copying and pasting all this, because I don’t belong to MA.) Like, wow, I’m still hazy on the negative consequences. Either I have a marijuana problem, or Dr. Drew wants to shun us potheads Amish-style for no good reason. But at least, if those paragraphs alone are an indication, he doesn’t discriminate between legal consequences for 17- and 21-year-old stoners, or for stoners and junkies.
The Drug Policy Alliance doesn’t have as much integrity as MA. Its site actually answers those rude questions.
I call some, not all, police officers pigs in the same spirit that some doctors are quacks and some lawyers are shysters. Hell, more and more cops themselves admit the piggishness of prohibition.
I vaporize marijuana every day for psychiatric reasons under a doctor’s recommendation. My home state has no problem with this, but my nation’s government does. How safe am I? Technically, I may not even believe in psychiatric diagnoses. Am I acting in bad faith? Cannabis helps me relax and handle a day’s responsibilities, and I’m using inconsistencies in the drug laws to my harmless advantage.
Hey, fellas. I’ve just put my real name and city in the sidebar for you. But don’t forget about my connections to Playboy Enterprises and northern California’s marijuana-activist community. They might make a stink. (Since I’ve got nothing to hide by mentioning it, I’ll point out my letter on page 44 of the March issue of Playboy, now on newsstands.)
I’m saddened to have learned of the death of Playmate Anna Nicole Smith today. She had been rushed from a hotel room to a hospital in Hollywood, Florida. I send my best wishes to surviving family and friends.
Since a blog is an ideal medium for tentative first thoughts about any breaking news story (and since I believe Smith would have understood my wish to attract attention through any medium), I’ll use the rest of this post to voice my opinions with “opportunistic” spontaneity.
If her death turns out to have been from an accidental drug overdose of any kind, I hope nobody uses it rhetorically to restrict the right of the people to self-medicate. That’s not in the United States Constitution, but it arguably should be. We should be ashamed of ourselves that at least one military dictatorship has been more free than we in this area.
Like many rock stars, athletes, and Saturday Night Live cast members, Smith was known not to take good care of herself all the time. If this tendency contributed to her death at 39, I hope that the bereaved will forgive it graciously. That same recklessness probably enabled her to pose for Playboy, which has surely earned her a place in Valhalla.
Naturally, The Playboy Blog [not necessarily work-safe] has beautiful memorial posts of its own.
A related story: Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the untimely death of Miss December 1994, Elisa Bridges.
In his brief article for the December Playboy Forum, Ishmael Reed would have you believe that The New York Times’ resident whatchamacallit libertarian, John Tierney, applies a double standard to methamphetamine use among whites as opposed to blacks. First, Reed regurgitates some recent Times scare stories about meth. Then, he wildly misinterprets Tierney’s calm, rational, anti-prohibitionist approach to meth as a sign that “for Tierney...to admit that meth use among whites in the heartland is a serious problem would dispute the neoconservative [sic] formula that inhabitants of red states are all God-fearing and virtuous and those of blue states secular and decadent—or that whites dwell in a sort of Lake Wobegon utopia, yet the problems of blacks can be traced to their culture.” (p. 57) Whoa! That’s a hell of a lot of words to put in someone’s mouth.
One need not be as libertarian as Tierney on the issue of drugs to see a kind of racial McCarthyism in Reed’s attack. (That brand of McCarthyism has made me think twice about joining the Michael Richards–condemning bandwagon.) Although Playboy rightly invites diversity of opinion among its contributors, I would have hoped that its long history of opposition to drug-war hysteria could discourage the editors from letting a black man call another man a racist for speaking against a policy that disproportionately hurts blacks—a multilayer cake of depressing irony.
On March 30 of this year, I attended a benefit party for the Marijuana Policy Project at the Mansion in Los Angeles. If I recall correctly, I got an early-bird discount and paid $500 for admission. Also, I seem to remember reading in a letter from the MPP that it will be a recurring event. Bookmark the MPP site and check it regularly for the next Mansion fundraiser. This post, dear readers, is the only notification you’ll get from me. All of you are potential competitors for a limited guest roster. I missed out on Hef’s brief appearance by choosing the wrong time to use the bathroom, and it made me very sad. I won’t make that mistake twice.
Thanks to Hit & Run, I’m experiencing schadenfreude at the sight of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Lee Paige shooting himself in the foot while doing a presentation on firearms for Florida children. I like to imagine that the ghost of Peter McWilliams, who choked to death on his own vomit in 2000 because a federal judge wouldn’t let him use marijuana for his AIDS and cancer, pulled the trigger. Paige is suing the DEA for leaking the video, which he claims has ruined his career as an undercover cop and made him a laughingstock in public. Serves him right, I say, for choosing such an evil career.
I don’t think evil is too strong a word. Drug prohibition largely creates the “drug problem” that it purports to solve. It also encourages the police and the courts to rationalize ever greater assaults on our dignity and our liberty. I’m glad to live under the rule of law, and I appreciate the difficult, dangerous, and sometimes thankless work of those who enforce it. But anyone who specializes in enforcing our abominable drug laws automatically earns my contempt.
Some of my readers may think I’m going too far. Surely crack, meth, and heroin are so dangerously addictive that the law needs to protect society by prohibiting them. Wrong.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the video is Paige’s ridiculous stoicism after taking a bullet to the foot. Panic spreads slowly through the room as the kids realize that he needs immediate medical attention, but he bravely continues the presentation as if nothing had happened. What a trouper (eye roll). The DEA has the integrity to practice what it preaches. Many people with chronic pain have to endure it bravely, because the DEA bullies doctors into undermedicating them. Officer Paige, we could use a little less machismo and a little more logic and compassion from you and your gang. Suddenly, the title character of American Dad doesn’t look like a caricature.
