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Fighting For Mary Jane’s Rights
Legalizing marijuana still up for debate
Tiffany Breyne | Columbia Chronicle | 01/30/06

Clinton tried it but didn’t inhale. Kanye wrote a song about it, and the Kottonmouth Kings base their entire lives around it. Marijuana has found a place in numerous people’s lives, and most people are OK with that.

Now there’s even a book about experiences and thoughts while smoking marijuana—the illegal substance that some organizations are fighting an uphill battle to change the negative image revolving around the drug.

This past December three guys—Arj Barker, Doug Benson and Tony Camin—published The Marijuana-Logues, a humorous book parodying The Vagina Monologues that replaces the female anatomy with an illegal substance. The book, as the authors write, is “written by stoners, for stoners, about stoners.”

While this is an interesting concept that provides some laughs, with pointless conversations, “high-kus” and snippets on marijuana.

In the bigger scheme of things, though, producing a book devoted to stoner/marijuana stereotypes could mean more than just a few laughs. For some, the fight to legalize marijuana for recreational, spiritual and medicinal purposes should be taken seriously. For Louis Silverstein, a liberal education

tion teacher at Columbia and author of Deep Spirit and Great Heart: Living in Marijuana Consciousness, publishing a book like The Marijuana-Logues is a feat with a double-edged sword.

“I certainly think people have a right and should have the right to write and publish whatever they want to,” Silverstein said. “I think people can jump on this who are opposed will […] not pick out other literature on marijuana and say this really is a substance that makes people like [the guys] are in this book.”

According to Silverstein, marijuana wasn’t made illegal in the United States until the 20th century. Before that time, hemp was grown on plantations, including George Washington’s, ship sails were made out of hemp and some constitutional documents were written on hemp paper.

As goes along with the term “reefer madness,” Silverstein said that weed gained it’s negative appeal when American citizens opposing Mexican immigration to the states spread word that Mexicans were bringing with them this dangerous weed that would make people do terrible things and put them in a crazed sex mode.

Following the propaganda against marijuana, the Drug Enforcement Agency was formed and put on a mission to tell the public of marijuana and other drugs’ negative effects on people.

“This allowed them to get more money and increase their organization, and that eventually turned into the War on Drugs,” Silverstein said. “Which right now is a multi-billion dollar industry, and there’s so many people making money off the war that it’s hard for them to hear that marijuana is not what they think it is.”

The fight to make marijuana legal again, for whatever reason, is one with much opposition not only from organizations like the DEA or government officials but from health advocates. Prevention First, an Illinois drug prevention organization, thinks that legalizing marijuana for all purposes can have harmful effects on people’s health.

“There are people that think marijuana should be legalized completely,” said Tari Marshall, director of communications and information resources. “The total legalization for anyone and everyone, to us, would be a dangerous decision.”

While Prevention First works with young adults and children under 18 to help them make healthy drug free choices, they have no overall view on the rights and wrongs of legalization, but they do have facts on marijuana and what it does to the body.

According to facts Marshall found, the marijuana produced today is 30 times more potent than when it was produced in the ’60s due to newer methods of growing. When people are smoking marijuana instead of cigarettes, Marshall said the harm to the body is still the same.

“[Marijuana is] actually pound for pound more carcinogenic than cigarettes,” Marshall said. “People smoke marijuana; they’re just as likely to get cancer from smoking marijuana regularly as they are from cigarettes or any other substance related to these carcinogens.”

***While Marshall has a strong case for the negative effects of marijuana, Allen St. Pierre, executive director for The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said that a number of studies dedicated to marijuana constantly conflict each other. St. Pierre said that he divides the studies into two groups—the warning reports and the calming reports. The warning reports can be found on any substance, legal or not. The calming studies come out months later and deny the results of the warning reports.

St. Pierre cites organizations such as D.A.R.E. and Partnership for a Drug-Free America as the primary sources of confusion and where the majority of younger people get their information from. According to St. Pierre these organizations do not use credible statistics in the same way they use them for tobacco studies. Regardless of the different studies, St. Pierre has other thoughts on the debate between the effects of tobacco and marijuana.

“One can make the easy concession here that when you burn something and draw it into your lungs, it’s by definition not a wise health decision,” St. Pierre said. “The question though is whether it should be a criminal decision. And in our country, it is not a criminal decision in most cases if you engage in something that harms only you.”

St. Pierre and Silverstein both agree that the government and monetary issues have much to do with marijuana still being an illegal substance. Silverstein, though, sees possible benefits in the legalization of the drug, such as economic benefits. These benefits include putting the billions of dollars used on the war on drugs every year towards Chicago’s public school system, which recently announced a lack of funds will cause layoffs in the near future. Silverstein said the money could also be used toward helping the city’s homeless people, and that in his perspective the war on drugs has not lessened the use of marijuana and just “creates havoc” and corruption. Silverstein is optimistic about a possible change in the drug’s legality in the future, though he doesn’t know when that will be.

“I don’t think there’s any question that there is light there,” Silverstein said.

“In a number of European countries they have moved very forward. In the United States I still think it’s off somewhere in the indefinite future. That’s not gonna occur for awhile.”

For more information on Illinois’ marijuana laws and on substance use, visit www.norml.org or www.prevention.org.

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