Weed with Roots in Hell

A link to this story on the Cannabist website floated across my FB page a couple of days ago.  Given the source, I thought I should check it out to make sure the authors were not peddling some drug-fueled paranoid fantasy.  They weren’t.

     The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has published its 2016 National Drug Threat Assessment.  The report devotes 22 pages to the discussion of marijuana, more than any other drug except heroin (at 24 pages).  It should come as no surprise that this discussion is chock full of misleading statements and bad reasoning.  There is the usual skepticism about the medical benefits of marijuana, despite growing mounds of evidence.  The report asserts that the DEA supports research on the medical uses of marijuana, and it soft-pedals the near impossibility of getting a permit for such research.  There is the usual failure to recognize the difference between problems caused by drugs and problems caused by the war thereon.  And there is the use of vague and misleading terms like “marijuana admissions.”  If I understand this notion correctly (which, given its vagueness, is by no means certain), any time someone admitted to the hospital admits to using marijuana, it becomes a “marijuana admission,” whatever the actual medical problem may be.  And so on.

     Of more interest is the report’s discussion of environmental concerns—especially water and energy consumption, and the use of pesticides—linked to marijuana.  Of course, these issues are in no way unique to marijuana cultivation.  But I think this effort to link marijuana to environmental concerns reveals the DEA’s increasing desperation to ensure the continuation of the war on drugs.  The report points out that marijuana is the most widely used of the nine categories of drugs that fall under the DEA’s purview.  Indeed, it is used by about twice as many people as all the other eight together.  (And I think it is very likely that the DEA underestimates marijuana use by a significant factor.)  If we end the war on pot smokers, there just isn’t going to be much left of the war on drugs.

     And that might well be an existential crisis for the DEA.  The agency might get folded into some other agency, with a really serious loss of influence.  Or it might actually be disbanded, and its remaining functions distributed amongst other government agencies.  At the very least, legalization of marijuana would likely cause a serious reduction in “quality of life” for the drug warriors at the DEA.  A reduced war effort would mean fewer resources for high-tech weapons and equipment, fewer resources for international adventuring, fewer opportunities for drug fueled sex parties at the expense of the cartels the DEA is supposed to police.

     Organizations are not (living) organisms, but they will often act in the same way.  Faced with an existential threat, an organism or an organization will do whatever it can to preserve itself.  As more and more states legalize marijuana, it will become very difficult for those states that lag behind to enforce their laws.  And the position of the DEA will become more and more tenuous.  Even if the federal government does not legalize marijuana, there is likely to be decreasing support for vigorous enforcement.  

     And the DEA is not the only “victim” of legalization.  Local police forces rely on the money the feds give them as a reward for vigorous prosecution of the drug war to finance their military hardware and the SWAT units they deploy to make even more arrests of nonviolent drug users.  The firearms industry profits from arming law enforcement and the cartels.  Legal marijuana competes directly with the liquor and pharmaceutical industries.  Not to mention the interests of the private prison industry.  There is a lot of money and influence at stake.  The industries and organizations that profit from the war on pot smokers aren’t likely to just give up.   

     Meanwhile, for those who wish to be informed about this issue, here is a link to the first educational film to tell the truth about the weed with roots in Hell.