Drug Crazy - Prescription for Sanity - Page 186

central focus the image of the Drug User as Vampire. As long as these wretched monsters could be completely stigmatized—like the Jews in Nazi Germany—anything was possible.^[6] You could confiscate their property without due process, put them in concentration camps, and conduct medical experiments on them against their will.  And since they never numbered more than a tiny fraction of the population, they could be fearlessly blamed for everything.

But by demanding that cannabis be included in the sweep of absolute prohibition, the drug enforcers may have overreached their grasp. They are now confronted with a huge segment of the electorate that has had direct experience with marijuana. Over 70 million Americans have taken at least a few drags, and while some of them may not have inhaled, most of them did. When they failed to experience the instant insanity that the authorities had promised, it was for many an epiphany more powerful than the drug itself—the realization that the government makes things up.

No doubt the Anslinger-inspired exaggerations about marijuana sprang from the highest motives, but when you’re caught red-handed in a total fabrication, it dents your credibility. What’s more, the Woodstock generation was also the generation of The Wall, citizens who came to know first hand that the noble crusades of the government can be grounded in illusion.

To bring these skeptics on board the war on drugs, it was necessary to convince them that the basic facts about marijuana had changed dramatically. Drug czar William Bennett was among the first to break the bad news: the children of the Boomers were facing a far more powerful form of cannabis than the stuff their parents experimented with in the ‘60s. The amount of psychoactive THC in the new plants was said to be forty times greater.

But once again, close inspection revealed a flaw in the official tale. It seems the base-line samples from the 1970s were not properly preserved, so there’s really no way to tell what their original THC content was. On top of that, the government’s own long-term study of marijuana potency at the University of