The Eastern Shoshone consider cannabis

In one of the many posts that I start and never finish, I had in my draft posts a item that was from the Irish Times on Irish physicians lamenting Ireland's headlong rush into legalizing marijuana use.  They were concerned as there's really very little in the way of study on its long term effects. What studies there are, we should note, are pretty negative.  The physicians were worried about what rushing into this uncharted territory would mean.

Well, perhaps their argument should have been to have the Irish just sit on their hands and see how things go in the United States.  Not that the Irish would have done it.  Ireland right now is one of the Anthony Kennedy's of nations, busy trying to be hip and cool and in the process coming across as just one more oldster who doesn't look hip and cool.  So they're going down this path no matter what.  If they did look, so far the results in the US don't look too good.  I've written about that in the past in regard to Colorado. Rather than repeat it all here, I'll simply link in what I wrote before:

And in an environment that's awash with dope, making it all the worse.

Now as every one surely knows, unless they've been living in a cavern within a cave, and hiding in a corner of that, Colorado has legalized marijuana.  There's been a lot of commentary everywhere about this. And a lot of the commentary really misses the point.

There's a common thread in these stories about how marijuana has been "good" for Colorado. Well, maybe, but it hasn't been good for Coloradans, or the drifters who floated in there, at least by my observation.  Indeed, while I tended to be of the view that the law shouldn't worry about marijuana before, even though I don't approve of its use (and I think most of the "medicinal" excuses people give for using it are a crock), seeing it first hand has really and strongly changed my mind.

Some of the ill effects of the drug I was aware of before, mostly by having been exposed to people who had become addicted to it.  To some degree, they may have been cognizant of the problems it caused, them, and to others, not.  The degree to which they became listless and lazy in some instances was notable.  The addictive nature of it was obvious, and probably most notable to me when a former soldier of mine from the Guard stopped me on the street, after he'd gotten out, and asked me for help to get him off it.  Now, at 22 or so years old and a college student, there wasn't much that I could do. That an older fellow, in his 30s by that time, would ask for help, because I guess I'd been his sergeant, made an impression.

Well, Denver has really made an impression.

And not a good one.

Since weed became quasi legal, and then fully legal in Denver, a giant social experiment has been conducted on its streets and the results are pretty easy to see.  They're overrun, downtown, with listless dirty addicts begging, often quite openly, for money for marijuana. No job, no prospects, no motivation, just a craving for the stuff.  Not pleasant.

The first time I really ran across it was just after or just before, I can't quite recall which, it was legalized fully and there was some sort of dopers gathering in Denver.  Now, admittedly, a convention of dope fans may present a skewed image of the stuff, or not.  But present an image, it certainly did.

I could describe it, but I think the best way to describe what I saw on that occasions, and subsequent ones, it to describe singular people.

On that occasion, the person who made the biggest impression was a girl sitting on the corner, back to traffic.  She was probably about 20, and had once been fairly pretty. Now she was dirty in that funky way that only the really ills, or the really stoned, get.  Not that honest sort of dirty that oilfield workers, for example, have.  No, dirty in a diseased way, probably something we note because in an earlier era our natures told us to watch out when we encountered it.

She was glassy eyed and had a sign begging for money.  On her lap was a Husky puppy.  The puppy was cute.

I almost gave her money, but would have extracted a deal that I got the puppy. That isn't very Christian of me, and I didn't do it, but money for drugs wasn't going to help her any, maybe somebody could have helped the dog.  But then, in her condition, I suspect, the dog was truly her only real friend.

Since that time situations like this have been really common.  I've heard panhandlers yell for money.  I've seen seen other glassy eyed dressed in bizarre mixes of discarded clothes rambling in begging appeals.  They're addicts. Marijuana is all they want.

"Radar plot depicting the data presented in Nutt, David, Leslie A King, William Saulsbury, Colin Blakemore. "Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse" The Lancet 2007; 369:1047-1053. PMID:17382831. For more information, see image. It contains not only the physical harm and dependence data like the aforementioned image, but also the mean social harm of each drug. This image was produced with the python plotting library matplotlib"

Now, I know, I'll hear the argument that "well, those are the exceptions to the rule" and "it's no more addictive than booze". Well, those are hardly good arguments. 

First of all, at least based on my exposure to it, its far from the exception.

Now, I'm sure there are occasional users of marijuana that suffer no ill affects, maybe.  But then this is the case with any drug of any type, so its not much of an argument.  The real question is whether it has a demonstrative ill impact on a significant percentage of the users. It clearly does.

Now, right away, the argument will be made that "well it isn't as bad as alcohol". That's a pathetic argument.

First of all, according to some studies, it is in fact "worse than alcohol" is some real ways.  The study printed above, in chart form, for example, would have it as causing less physical harm, a little less social harm, and causing a little more dependence.  That's hardly a sterling endorsement.  And that assumes that this is correct.  It probably has caused less social harm and less noted psychical harm, so far, as its' been widely illegal.  As it becomes increasingly legal we will likely be surprised to find, oh my, it causes harm.

Indeed, we're already learning that a bit.  A recent study shows that relatively little use amongst minors, including teenagers, causes permanent alteration in the brain.  Not good.  And I suspect that the impacts from smoking it will likely duplicate much of  the non cancerous impacts of smoking tobacco, none of which are very good.  Indeed, people tend to associate smoking tobacco's risks only with cancer, but in reality, there's a lot of other cardio vascular and respiratory damage that it causes.  I can't see a good reason why this would be different for marijuana.

Additionally, in regards to the oft made comparison to alcohol, it's worth remembering that the best evidence suggests that human beings have been consuming alcohol for so long that they have a genetic adaptation to it, varying by human population. This has been addressed here before, but the human tolerance for the poison that is alcohol is likely related to the fact that it was once safer to consume it than water.  But that doesn't make it safe.  The point is that we've been consuming alcohol now for thousands of years, probably tens of thousands of years, and we still can't really handle all of its ill and evil impacts.

If we can't really handle something that's been widely legal for maybe 200,000 years, what makes us think we're going to be any better at this?

I don't think so.

And what is going on, on a large level, that we seem to need to be numbed so much?

Alcohol, as noted, has been with us forever.  Marijuana has not doubt been around for some time, but not as long as an intoxicant, and certainly not in such a widespread manner.  But it isn't just these.   We have made real progress in tamping down some really dangerous drugs that were getting widespread circulation, but at the same time we seem to be in a full scale effort to numb ourselves as much as possible.  We still have booze (but not anywhere near at the consumption rate it was once at, in spite of what some may think).  But we are also numbing ourselves in all sorts of other ways.

Indeed, the pharmaceutical level of mind alternation is at an all time high.  Thousands of people have to take medication just to make it through their day, mentally.  And news came this past week of a new psychological ailment based on an addiction to computerized technology. That is, people so deeply into the fantasy world provided by the Internet that they cannot escape it.

I know that this isn't convincing to weed's fans.  Indeed, the post above is one of the rare ones here that not only drew a fair amount of attention at the time I put it up, it drew some really negative attention from Colorado marijuana fans.  But that's the way such things work.  I still recall hearing from smokers as late as the 1990s how smoking wasn't really bad for a person.  And there are plenty of heavy drinkers who deny that they're being hurt in any fashion.

That's going to be the history of marijuana.  We'll find out that it was hugely destructive, and at some point in the future we'll look back at this and be horrified and amused by how dense we were in this era on this topic, and a host of others that seem to be floating about in the confused era we've really slipped into.  But for the time being, we're charging ahead into marijuana like there's no tomorrow.

And now comes news that the growing of marijuana may be coming to the state, but without the state as the regulator.  The Eastern Arapaho are considering legalizing the growing of it on the Wind River Reservation.

This gets into a complicated legal situation that I'll forgot getting into in depth, but the two tribes on the Wind River Reservation are sovereigns, as are all similarly situated Indian Tribes.  Their situation is perhaps more unique in that the Wind River Reservation itself is shared by two sovereigns, which is not the norm and in fact may be unique to that reservation.  The Reservation has its own Law & Order Code, but in recent years the two tribes have acted independently of each other to a fair degree.  In September the Eastern Shoshone Tribe's General Council voted in favor of a resolution authorizing a group to study legalizing medical marijuana and allowing for hemp cultivation.  One of the goals is financial, as a spokesman has noted. stating "We’re trying to transition hemp and medical cannabis into Wyoming so our tribe can get financially stable.”

The group is frank about its goal being to get cannabis onto the Reservation, which of course means getting it into the state.  And their position in regard to hemp cultivation isn't any different from the state's itself, which has now legalized that and which is seeking to secure Federal approval for the same. Federal approval will come.

Hemp production definitely has legitimate uses, primarily for fiber production.  I.e., it makes good rope, and there are reasons that a natural rope may be better than one made with synthetics.  For one thing, it makes good hay twine as cattle can eat it, which isn't true of the orange synthetic twine that's currently used.

The overall problem, however, is that distinguishing between hemp and marijuana isn't really completely possible overall, as the difference between the two is somewhat like the difference between wolves and wolfy dogs.  Is that a dog, or a wolf?  It's hard to tell.  In fact, there's really no difference between hemp grown for rope and hemp grown to smoke, other than the name and the fact that marijuana has generally been cultivated for its impact on humans, rather than its fiber.  So they're two sides of the same coin.  It is true, as has been noted by others, that smoking hemp won't achieve much in terms of a "high", according to people who have studied it, but that's because the cultivation hasn't emphasized that aspect of it.  Like most plants used by humans in this "no GMO" world, almost all plants we use have been genetically altered through selective cultivation.

Where this really has caused a legal problem is in regard to transportation across state lines.  People get arrested and their fates are uncertain, for doing something that seems to them completely legal at the time they engage in it.  So, on this topic, both the state and the Tribes will have to authorize hemp, and Wyoming is in the process of doing that, lest there be a train wreck for somebody.  There still could be, of course, for those trucking out of the state in any direction other than south.

Beyond that, and finally, the Shoshone aren't proposing to legalize growing marijuana and they definitely aren't proposing to authorize it for any use other than medical use.  But keeping the lid on medical use alone has proven impossible nearly everywhere and the now commonly accepted concept that it actually has a medical use that isn't duplicated without negative effects by other pharmaceuticals is very far from proven.  Indeed, so far about the only really established medical use is for glaucoma sufferers and maybe for Parkinson's sufferers.

What the negative impacts are, and there are definitely negative impacts, aren't known fully.  They may be severe and they definitely aren't minor.  Study on this topic in the US hasn't been done as the FDA doesn't study illegal non pharmaceutical products.  Here, the study better start.

Legalizing marijuana is charging ahead everywhere it seems.  But this should be kept in mind.  At one time it was thought healthful to take a "bracer" of alcohol first hing in the morning.  Now everyone knows all that does is dull your wits.  You can find plenty of advertisements extolling what cigarettes physicians recommended, even after it was already known that they were killers.  Everyday on television you can hear dozens of advertisements from lawyers who are suing drug companies for drugs once considered safe by the FDA but which proved not to be.

This is dangerous territory.

Addendum

Since this was first typed out, its been made clear that the Reservation in general is seeking to establish to legalize the growing of hemp, not just the Eastern Shoshone.