Fetters: Marijuana

Marijuana.  No herbal remedy has kicked up more data, factual or otherwise, and yet how little of it seems to have settled.  The one observable certainty is that smoking marijuana makes you temporarily retarded.  Hence the marijuana preachers make retarded arguments, and the marijuana congregation nod at their soundness.  The herb has lately taken on the character of a patent medicine: what started as a modest tool for managing pain and nausea has lately become the belle of the ball, a means of combating HIV, cancer, Alzheimer’s, seizures, and a world of other ailments.  I suppose it’s hard to spot a red flag with half-closed eyes.

If it was the health effects smokers were after you would think edible extract or a vaporizer would do.  When I see someone blast a J I’m guessing it’s for a different reason.  It’s always fun to watch a freethinking anarchist rail about carcinogens in the atmosphere and then blow out a huge billow of smoke.  Marijuana advocates then say characteristically retarded things like, “weed is from the Earth” and “God put it here,” -  arsenic is also from the earth, and God put deadly nightshade here.

They like to hold up the fact that the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew hemp and that we should take a page out of their book – let’s hope it’s a page that does not mention slaves.  I’d be surprised to even have to point these things out if I did not recognize the drugs primary effect: the retardation.  Lest I be accused of just poo pooing other people’s fun let me say that I mostly don’t care if people smoke marijuana.  It’s not entirely without benefit and its ill effects are relatively mild; it probably should be legal.

My own personal problem with the drug boils down to two consequences: the more superficial of them being that when people smoke marijuana they become about as interesting as ice fishing.  Being a non-smoker among a party of smokers makes the non-smoker feel like some sort of reverse buffoon: in the position of having to entertain everyone with their sagacity.  To me the most grievous crime is the insidious myth that marijuana is a material source of creative genius – an idea that could only sit well with the temporarily retarded.

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