Culture of drugs

I am writing in response to the Aug. 31 article in the BDN by the self-proclaimed “expert” on drug abuse, Dr. Harold Crossley. What Mr. Crossley failed to say was that we should make alcohol and tobacco illegal, and decriminalize marijuana. He did admit, however, that there is not a lot of hard data concerning the dangers of pot usage.

The fact is that pot’s social consequences are negligible compared with those of alcohol and tobacco. Fact is that cannabis is anathema to the patriarchal-male dominator culture in which we live, because it deconditions or decouples users from accepted values. For this reason, marijuana is unwelcome in the modern office environment while drugs such as coffee, cocaine and pep pills, which reinforce the values of industrial culture, are both welcomed and encouraged.

Cannabis use is sensed as heretical and deeply disloyal to the values of male dominance and stratified hierarchy, whereas the beery-jeery womanizing rapist sort of mentality is praised and perpetuated by the mass media.

However, legalization and taxation of cannabis would provide a tax base that could help clean up the national deficit. Instead, we continue to hurl billions of our own dollars into marijuana eradication, a policy that creates suspicion and a permanent criminal class in communities that are otherwise among the most law-abiding in the land.

If every alcoholic were a pothead, if every crack user were a pothead, if every beery-jeery wife-beating macho man were a pothead, if every smoker smoked only cannabis, the social consequences of the “drug problem” would be transformed. Yet, we as a society are apparently not ready or evolved enough to discuss the possibility of self-managed drug-indulgence, and the possibility of intelligently choosing the plants and substances we ally ourselves to. In time, and perhaps out of desperation, this will come. In the meantime, we might as well try to stop the wind from blowing. Richard H. Dyer Orono