Protecting Children from Drugs

The sponsors of a medical cannabis initiative appearing on South Dakota’s ballot in November are suing the state Attorney General over his misleading summary of the initiative, apparently designed to encourage a negative reaction in voters. The AG must write a neutral summary of each state ballot initiative. In this case, his first act was to rename the measure.
"An act to provide safe access to medical marijuana for certain qualified persons," became "An Initiative to authorize marijuana use for adults and children with specified medical conditions."
August 2006 (source)

It’s curious that the greatest - or at least the loudest - love for children is proclaimed by those who display a general distrust of progress and freedom.
Groups seeking to control individual behaviour, undermine civil rights or impose a moral code on society will frequently broadcast their own sincere desire to protect young folk from real or imaginary threats, habitually invoking ‘the children’ to justify each new restriction.
If the safety of children is at stake, who could possibly object to laws that curtail privacy, individual choice and basic liberty?

The need to protect the young is biological, a basic principle of survival seen in most animals. In people, the instinct is more refined; it applies to our species in general and is not limited to our own children. Because it is a rational decision based on a powerful unconscious imperative, the protective urge can be irrational in its expression and has a long and unfortunate tradition of being used to manipulate people.

As cannabis becomes more tolerated, propaganda has shifted from its traditional attack on the plant to a coordinated attempt to defend prohibition. Naturally, ‘protecting the children’ is the central theme of efforts to justify the unjustifiable.

- Dope-smoking dads double risk of cot death
- Marijuana may cause pregnancies to fail
- Why teenagers should steer clear of cannabis
- Alarming rise in number of child cannabis victims

It’s tempting to see this as a tactic of last resort – a laughable ploy to demonise cannabis and “re-brand” it as specifically threatening to children. Perhaps the campaign to scare adults about their own use of cannabis has finally been abandoned, as it is clearly contradicted by reality?

Even so, the tactic of shifting the focus to ‘the children’ and playing on parents’ anxieties is abhorrent. It exploits children for propaganda and is effective in distracting attention from more significant threats to the health of young people.

One example is the disturbing push to control children’s mood and behaviour with powerful psychiatric drugs such as Prozac and other SSRIs, which are designed to alter levels of serotonin in the brain.
This trend endangers young people as much as it enriches drug manufacturers and its scope is unprecedented – the numbers of children being medicated, the absurdly young ages at which they’re diagnosed as depressed or mentally unbalanced and the potency of the psychotropic drugs they’re prescribed.

European doctors have received strong warnings against prescribing SSRIs to children, but the practice has not been banned. In the US, the country with most strident anti-cannabis propaganda and the loudest devotion to protecting ‘the children’, the practice of drugging the young in order to regulate their behaviour is both an industry and an epidemic.

Currently, 2% of US children aged 6-16 are taking SSRIs and up to 10% are on stimulants such as Ritalin. Despite the FDA ordering "black boxes " for SSRI packaging - the most severe class of safety warnings - around 9 million prescriptions were written for US children in 2005, with under-fives the fastest-growing segment of children using antidepressants.
An estimated 17 million children worldwide are prescribed some form of behaviour-modifying drug. Worldwide sales of antidepressants to all age-groups reached more than $19.5 billion in 2002.

For one example of media misdirection regarding children, drugs and mental health, consider the following facts:

1. Cannabis is a powerful, effective, low-risk medicine that provides relief for an enormous range of conditions and improves quality of life for millions of people. It has an unparalleled safety record, having been used safely for thousands of years. Cannabis is effective in its natural form and can grow virtually anywhere with minimal effort, making it potentially free for anyone.

2. Conversely, the trend of medicating the young with powerful psychiatric drugs is highly profitable and unique in history. The idea of moderating children’s mood or behaviour with pharmaceuticals would have been unthinkable a generation ago, yet today it is presented as a normal solution by large sections of the media.
Rather than a hypothetical and unproven risk of altering brain chemistry in sensitive individuals, as is said of cannabis, SSRIs are specifically designed to change brain chemistry in order to modify mood and behaviour.

3. The sudden increase in prohibitionist propaganda associating cannabis with danger to children amounts to a co-ordinated media campaign. The obvious intention is to heighten fears that cannabis may cause schizophrenia, depression, suicidal thoughts or general unspecified mental illness in children, despite the usual lack of evidence. The fragile, developing chemical structure of young brains is frequently mentioned, as are false claims about massive increases in cannabis potency.
‘Adolescents are at highest risk for marijuana addiction … marijuana use has been linked with depression and suicidal thoughts, in addition to schizophrenia…marijuana use among teens doubles the risk of developing depression and triples the incidence of suicidal thoughts’
- DEA Website -


4. SSRIs have repeatedly been found to pose significant risks to the mental and physical health of children.

• 2005 – The European Medicines Agency concluded SSRIs should not be used in children and adolescents … suicide-related behaviour (suicide attempt and suicidal thoughts), and hostility (aggression and anger) were more frequently observed in children and adolescents treated with SSRIs.

• The FDA has admitted that children who use SSRIs are 180 percent more likely to have suicidal tendencies.

• British Journal of Psychiatry reports that Prozac creates "the highest risk of deliberate self-harm."

A century of attempting to prove the dangers of cannabis has yielded no results but vague hypotheses with no relation to the real world. Whatever alarming conclusions are suggested, cannabis is very widely used in most countries and causes few discernable health problems. Within a few years of their introduction, SSRIs have raised serious concerns all over the world.
Yet cannabis is relentlessly presented as a major threat to the mental health of children, while psychoactive drugs designed to change brain function are promoted as a solution.

Any sane person will agree that children should not take drugs, whether legal or illegal, but, in the mainstream media, the principle does not seem to apply to drugs made by certain powerful interests.

It is not surprising that prohibitionists exploit the need to protect children. What is unbelievable is that dire warnings about the effect of ‘drugs’ on developing brains can coexist in the media with the promotion of mind-altering pharmaceuticals for those same sacred children. This demonstrates either an enormous logical disconnect or an effective and coordinated campaign of diversion and misinformation.

Good cop - Bad cop

Anyone who enjoys even a casual relationship with our favourite plant must be aware of the vast gulf between the official portrayal of cannabis and their own real-world understanding of it.

With only a little personal experience of the recreational uses of cannabis or a brief outline of its medicinal and industrial applications, the average person can see that the images of cannabis given by the mass media display a stark and worrying divergence from reality.

It doesn’t require extensive knowledge of the long history and numerous applications of cannabis to realise that the official portrayal of this plant as a force for evil (a story that’s varied only slightly since the beginning of the 20th Century) is not only incorrect, but is the polar opposite of the simple, observable facts.
Cannabis is an immensely valuable resource with countless positive benefits - a truth that remains unchanged since the dawn of civilisation.

Many of us who are dedicated to spreading that truth have been forced to accept another, less palatable reality: that the main forces behind cannabis prohibition are politics and economics. Thus, the combined weight of science, medicine, evidence and logic may still be trumped by the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces.

As activists, we may have to accept that making changes on the macro-level will take time, plus that most important of political tools - economic muscle.

Even at the individual level, as we continue to spread knowledge and inform our fellow citizens, there are barriers to communication and subtle, powerful influences working against us.

The relentless marketing campaign aimed at demonising cannabis has been in effect for almost a century. Its effectiveness has ebbed and flowed over the years but it has succeeded in one important aspect. In every country, generation after generation of people have been fed variations on the same emotive lies about cannabis – dangers to sanity, harm to children, damage to the very fabric of society. With such diligent repetition, even the most ludicrous claims can gain the status of dogma.

It’s absurd that an artificial sense of morality has been attached to a plant (of all things!). When a plant can be irrationally, yet effectively labelled as a sin, popular images of cannabis begin to resemble articles of faith – sustained by unquestioning acceptance, not by reasoned argument.

To use marketing jargon (forgive me) the ‘brand positioning’ of cannabis has been effectively shifted to the sinister side of the collective consciousness.

One unfortunate result of this positioning is the pervasive and destructive stereotype of the ‘stupid stoner’.

When group stereotypes are reinforced by the mass media – whether the stereotypes are of racial, religious, political or social groups – the purpose is never the advancement of understanding. Stereotypes are, at best, an easy joke. At their worst, they are perpetuated in order to misinform the majority and to marginalise, even de-humanise the minority that is being caricatured.

Cannabis is portrayed by the mass media as a drug that numbs, stupefies and impairs judgement (rather like alcohol, when you think about it…). Unsurprisingly, it follows that people who enjoy cannabis may be labelled as numb, stupid or impaired.
Considered neutrally, the stereotype of the idiot stoner seems more likely to be a product of media indoctrination than a result of sudden exposure to powerful, soporific or ‘stoney’ commercial plants.

A good example of this is that genuine, living examples of the stoner stereotype are much more common among smokers from the USA.

It is hard to believe that this is because they all smoke especially incapacitating cannabis, and it seems unfair to assert that American smokers are somehow less intelligent than those from other countries.

However, it is not unreasonable to argue that they have been carefully and deliberately miseducated about the properties of cannabis. In this way, even ganja enthusiasts can be conditioned to expect certain effects from cannabis, which then makes them more likely to experience and to act out those effects.

It’s no secret that the USA is positioned at Ground Zero of the media explosion that started in the 20th Century. The recent political history of the US clearly demonstrates that the citizens of that country are especially vulnerable to manipulation by an unscrupulous mass media that seamlessly blends and promotes government and corporate interests.

For generations, the central thesis of official US propaganda has been the claim that cannabis damages the brain. While the story of how such damage might manifest itself has varied over the years, it has retained its overall theme. At different times cannabis has been said to induce violent madness, or jazz-loving madness, or pacifist madness or anti-capitalist madness. It has been variously claimed to cause brain damage, or ‘anti-motivational syndrome’, or impaired learning and cognition, or depression, depending upon the intended audience.

Right now, we can observe the re-launch of 1930s-style ‘Reefer Madness’ propaganda – the tired claim that cannabis can actually cause schizophrenia or any number of other mental illnesses. The lie has been cosmetically enhanced for the 21st Century, with questionable new ‘evidence’ in the form of massaged statistics and projections of genetic predisposition.
The falsehood is as blatant as in the original film melodrama, but it has been given a compelling pseudo-scientific disguise in order to be sold to a modern public. After all, we are supposed to live in rational times…

On the subject of films, entertainment media is equally effective in sculpting public assumptions as news media, maybe more so.

At first glance, images of cannabis smokers in films and television seem more reasonable than in the news, less irrational and puritanical in their outlook.
However, in combination with the Official Story – if we see both portrayals as sides of the same coin – the overall effect is insidious. Considered together, the two approaches seem like a good-cop/bad-cop ruse.

The government and news-media grind out obvious propaganda that an average person possessed of a healthy degree of skepticism should be able to see through.

At the same time, mainstream entertainment media allows a very limited version of truth to be mixed in with the regular falsehoods. Films and TV may allow an image of cannabis that’s closer to our real-life experience – an enjoyable experience, a welcome inspiration, a powerful medicine – but underlying these limited concessions is the same basic message given by the government. We could call the movie version ‘propaganda-lite’.

In entertainment media, smokers are overwhelmingly depicted as losers – slow, stupid, semi-comatose, lazy and (you guessed it) slightly crazy. They may be lovable and may be the central characters of a film, but their use of cannabis is nearly always portrayed as a vice.

By the end of most movies, they have the choice of giving up weed - so as to ‘grow up’ and join the productive world - or remaining useless (but loveable!) stoners.

The third option is not given, though it’s the one practised by most adults: to consume cannabis and have a normal, productive life.

Nearly all cannabis-lovers hold their own experience-based views, and have a healthy resistance to the daily doses of propaganda. But it’s worth noticing how indoctrination can slip in under the radar.

Evolution and Intelligent Design

Apologies if the title of this piece is an obscure reference. It is taken from the recent debate in the US, about whether the science classes of public schools should teach ‘Intelligent Design’ as an alternative theory to evolution.

In that debate, the terms ‘evolution’ and ‘intelligent design’ were used to describe opposing viewpoints. However, both terms fit very well when considering our favourite plant and its history from ancient times to the present day.

The way that cannabis and those who choose to grow it have adapted to the environment of prohibition in just the last few decades is a wonderful example of both evolution and intelligent design.

In essence, the harsh legal restrictions on this plant and increased attempts to eradicate it have been a huge influence on the breeding and development of heavier, faster, more potent varieties. In the same way, the war on weed has spurred growers to develop smaller, more efficient systems and highly effective methods for for growing indoors.

In response to the use of new technology to detect indoor cannabis, growers have taken dozens of new developments in other fields and adapted them to clandestine indoor cultivation.

There are direct improvements like cooled lights, quieter fans and advanced odour-control, as well as indirect improvements, such the use of the internet as a means of spreading information to the widest possible audience and computer applications that allow a grow-room to be monitored and adjusted from a distance.

Depending on your point of view and sense of optimism, we may currently be experiencing a cannabis Renaissance – with knowledge and freedom on the rise – or we may be on the verge of yet another backlash against cannabis – with misinformation and persecution increasing.

It probably won’t be clear whether the situation here in the early 21st Century is getting better or worse until we can look back at this time from the vantage point of the future.

If we look back over the 20th Century, we can see the ebb and flow of cannabis prohibition in the West.The USA gives us an interesting summary of the fluid attitude towards cannabis.

At the turn of the last century, popular interest in cannabis was increasing in Europe and North America – along with interest in many other now-acceptable topics that were then considered weird or subversive, such as jazz, vegetarianism and Naturism.

Anti-cannabis forces began to gain national and global strength in the 1930s. Not coincidentally, this was the period when nationalist and fascist movements were reaching their peak, and hostility to decadent or ‘foreign’ influence was widespread.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that acceptance and appreciation of cannabis reached ‘pop culture’ status. Many years of propaganda were undone when a generation of people were able to try cannabis and contrast their positive experience with the misinformation offered by official sources. The future seemed bright. Under Jimmy Carter, even the USA, home of Prohibition, decriminalised cannabis possession.

Hopes for real change were swept away in the 1980s, with the declaration of the War on Drugs, This war soon spread world-wide and was to be fought mostly against civilians – people whose views, experiences or use of certain substances contradicted the official line.

The War on Drugs has had many tragic casualties, but cannabis itself has not been one of them. The attack on the plant and its growers at the beginning of the ‘80s motivated an explosion in breeding and technology that continues to this day.
An unjust War gave rise to a popular resistance movement - breeders determined to protect the precious strains they had been collecting and refining during the brief ‘ceasefire’ of the ‘70s.

Evolution is a very fitting way to describe the events that followed – evolution, enhanced by intelligent design.

We can see this process at work in predators and prey all over the animal kingdom. The hunted adapt to better evade the hunters. The predators adapt to better catch the prey. For millions of years this process has produced new species, more specifically adapted to their circumstances.

In less than thirty years, the same relationship between growers of cannabis and enforcers of the laws that prohibit it has resulted in huge variations and improvements of both the plant and the way it is produced.

I don’t want to portray cannabis growers and breeders as timid, submissive herbivores, but we are the peaceful plant-lovers in this relationship, while the other side seems to have the monopoly on violence and the means to inflict it.

When penalties for growing cannabis became much more severe, many casual garden-growers were discouraged. Increased efforts to eradicate large-scale outdoor crops led to helicopter surveillance, infra-red detection and paramilitary police units dedicated to destroying crops.

Cannabis cultivation began to move inside as growers sought to protect themselves. At the same time, improvements in growing and feeding techniques plus new developments in lighting helped make this possible.

One problem was that indoor plants had to be smaller and faster, so the tropical Sativas that had been widely grown were limited in their potential.
In response, pioneering breeders began to work with strains from India, Afghanistan and Pakistan that were almost unknown in the West – the rich and resinous Indicas. These fast, short, heavy plants would solve the problems of indoor growing.

Classic strains such as Northern Lights, Hindu Kush, Afghani #1 and Big Bud were grown for their pure Indica qualities. These Indicas and others were combined with Sativas to make some of the wonderful early hybrids we still appreciate today – Skunk #1, Silver Pearl, Silver Haze, Northern Lights #5 x Haze.

And, as we know, individuals and companies dedicated to breeding and supplying distinct varieties of cannabis seed emerged, enabling any grower to produce something special.

Before professional seed breeders began their work, top-quality genetics were hard to obtain. The only options open to most people were contact with an experienced grower, a trip to a distant land, or good luck in growing seeds obtained from commercial cannabis.

Communication and contact between growers – and all other people who refuse to accept the injustice and illogic of cannabis prohibition – is one of the strongest assets we have in continuing our fight to end the war declared upon us. While personal security is of the highest importance for growers, it is also important not to allow the forces opposed to cannabis make us feel isolated or powerless.

Contact and support within the cannabis community strengthens and encourages us. Communication has has led to the world-wide dissemination of cannabis information and genetics. There have vast improvements in growing techniques, as countless inspired minds ponder the same issues and devise different solutions.

Most importantly, we are working to remind the world that cannabis (when free of legal harassment) is a normal, joyful and intelligent experience.