Drivel from NORML, as Usual. (Very long entry (c. 3,600 words), but important. Read at your leisure.) AOL had the irresponsible stupidity to hilite a December 18th report that included lunatic, invented statistics from the marijuana lobby.

U.S. growers produce nearly $35 billion worth of marijuana annually, making the illegal drug the country's largest cash crop, bigger than corn and wheat combined, an advocate of medical marijuana use said in a study released on Monday.

The report, conducted by Jon Gettman, a public policy analyst and former head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, also concluded that five U.S. states produce more than $1 billion worth of marijuana apiece: California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Hawaii and Washington.

That "statistic" is a complete fabrication, an invention, snatched from the clear blue sky by an advocate not of "medical marijuana" but of full and unconditional legalization of that supposedly 'harmless' drug. There are in reality NO reliable statistics on marijuana production because marijuana is illegal, and producers of illegal substances do not publish their production logs. Every statistic on illegal drug production and use is, at very best, a wild-eyed guesstimate.

Tom Riley, a spokesman for the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, said he could not confirm the report's conclusions on the size of the country's marijuana crop. But he said the government estimated overall U.S. illegal drug use at $200 billion annually.

In short, this country has a very big drug problem. Exactly how big, no one knows. Alas, instead of declining, the Nation's drug problem seems to be getting worse, as media trivialize drug use and celebrity after celebrity goes into rehab and comes out proclaiming how easy it is to get over drug addiction if only you want to.

Gettman said the 10-fold increase in U.S. marijuana production, from 1,000 metric tons in 1981 to 10,000 metric tons in 2006, showed the country was failing to control marijuana by making its cultivation and use illegal.

That's because we play pattycake with drug pushers. If we had the laws that Singapore and Indonesia have, we wouldn't have a drug problem.
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The marijuana lobby has been so successful that a large portion of the U.S. population has bought the lie that marijuana is absolutely harmless, so should be fully legalized. The AOL story had an accompanying poll, with these results:

Should the government just legalize and tax the drug?
Yes 88%
No 12%
Total Votes: 28,450

Idiots. These results do not accord with random-sampled polls, which show much lower levels of public support for legalization of marijuana. Presumably, the druggies among us made a point to vote on each and every one of their seven AOL screennames, and alerted their druggie friends to do the same. But even legitimate polls have shown an inclination by an appallingly large proportion of the population to legalize marijuana, first "medically" — as tho marijuana has any legitimate medical use — and then for all purposes. Such people just don't know what they're talking about.
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Let me tell you something about drugs that the very young, and very stupid and self-indulgent, don't want to believe. Drugs were outlawed not because legislators had nothing to do the day that anti-drug legislation came up for a vote, but because drugs are hugely destructive.
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I am part of a minority that has suffered catastrophically (and there is in that word not the tiniest bit of exaggeration) from drug use. Hundreds of thousands of gay men in this country have died from drugs or had very large portions of their lives taken from them by drug addiction. The gay world in the late 1970s was soaked in drugs, and in the early 1980s immediately thereafter gay men by the thousands started to die from AIDS, which, despite the lies you hear from the Federal Government, is a drug injury produced by years of heavy use of multiple hard drugs.
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I personally was hassled endlessly by gay men who wanted me to join them in using drugs, and tried to make me feel "uncool" and "out of it" if I resisted. I refused all but two or three tries of marijuana, which I am glad did nothing for me. I couldn't understand why anyone would risk trouble with the law for something that had far less impact than a single beer, in a city (New York) where we could buy beer any time of day or nite. Because I did not become a druggie and did not fall into the subculture of heavy drug use within the gay community, I am alive today, and none of my friends — not one — died from AIDS. We even had sex with some of the guys from the drug subculture who went on to die from AIDS. But we never got AIDS ourselves. Because AIDS has nothing to do with sex but everything to do with the chemicals in hard drugs, especially the uncountable combinations and permutations of multiple drugs used in different doses by different people on different nites.
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There is no other explanation for why I and my friends, all of whom had lots and lots of sex, with hundreds and hundreds of gay men, including later AIDS sufferers, in New York City, which is at the very top of AIDS statistics, are alive while hundreds of thousands of gay men who soaked themselves in drugs are dead from AIDS. No other explanation, Government nonsense about HIV to the contrary notwithstanding.
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The only thing you might be able to trust the Government on, as regards AIDS, is statistics: The cumulative number of AIDS cases in the United States through 2005 is 988,376. The CDC's statistics intrude notions of causation into categories, so in trying to establish how many gay men developed AIDS, you have to discount the assertions of 'causation' to get to the numbers of gay men affected. Gay men are broken out into two categories, "Male-to-male sexual contact" (454,106) and "Male-to-male sexual contact and injection drug use" (66,081), for a total of 520,187. On a base of 988,376 total cases thru year-end 2005, that means that gay/"bisexual" men comprise 53% of all AIDS cases in this country — as the CDC defines AIDS, which is very much open to dispute. Yet gay men are said to be no more than 10% of the total male population, and thus less than 5% of the total national population. Indeed, some Rightwingers want to pretend that gay men are at most 1% of the male population and thus less than ½ of 1% of the total population. How can so small a percentage of the population account for 53% of all the Nation's AIDS cases?
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What about gender? One source says:

As of December 2003, nearly 50 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide were women. In the United States, about 25 percent of people with HIV/AIDS are women.

But if we stick to AIDS and put aside HIV, we see the statistic is actually 182,822 women out of 988,376 total cases, or 19%. 19%. Is the assertion that 25% of cases are among women an innocent error, or an attempt to worry American women by exaggerating their risk? — and trying to bring U.S. numbers more in line with worldwide numbers? Realize that a 6% discrepancy on a base of 19% is a 32% exaggeration. And realize as well that "world" figures include U.S. figures, so figures outside the U.S. are even a bit higher than 50% of all AIDS cases being found in women!
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Figures for AIDS in Africa in particular are hard to get to, because HIV is constantly thrown up as a substitute for AIDS, as in this quotation from an Africa-oriented webpage, which claims to cite a United Nations report:

Three-quarters of all Africans between the ages of 15 and 24 who are HIV-positive are women. That astonishing figure, just released by UNAIDS, highlights the growing concern of international agencies, African governments and AIDS activists over the 'gendered' impact of AIDS in Africa. It also has spurred the beginnings of a campaign to help young African women counter the disease.

That assertion is mirrored elsewhere:

In much of the world, HIV/AIDS has for a long time been seen as a problem that affects men, specifically gay men, and as a result of this preconception, the harm that it does to women around the world has been largely overlooked. Yet today nearly half of all adults living with HIV around the world are women.

Just under two-thirds of all people living with HIV are in sub-Saharan Africa, as are 76% of infected women. Among young people living with HIV in this region, around three in four are female.

In the U.S., only 19% of AIDS cases are female. In Africa, well over half, and maybe 3/4 are female? How can there be such a discrepancy between continents? If AIDS is a virus, then surely the numbers among women here should be much, much higher:

Physically, women are more susceptible than men to HIV infection through heterosexual sex, and this fact alone means that special attention must be paid to protecting them if they are not to be disproportionately affected by the epidemic.

Information drawn from different studies shows that during heterosexual sex, women are about twice as likely to become infected with HIV from men as men are from women.

In the U.S., AIDS (as distinct from HIV) is still an overwhelmingly male phenomenon. Yet, "AIDS does not discriminate." That's what public (dis)service announcements have told us, and AIDS in Africa is supposedly spread widely across society without stark differences between men and women, straight and gay. How, then, is it that 53% of all cases in this country developed among gay men and 81% among men more generally? Hm.
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There are similar absurdities as to race. Here are the statistics as regards race and AIDS, cumulative cases to the end of 2005.
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White, not Hispanic: 386,552 (39%)

Black, not Hispanic: 399,637 (40%)

Hispanic: 156,026* (16%)

Asian/Pacific Islander: 7,739 (0.8%)

American Indian/Alaska Native: 3,251 (0.3%)
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* Curiously, the figure for Hispanics dropped between reports for 2003 and 2005, from 177,164 to 156,026. Why? And how much trust can we put in CDC statistics when figures for any category from one report are lower for cumulative cases for year-end 2005 than for cumulative cases at year-end 2003 in another report? This is the kind of crap that people who want to know what is really going on with AIDS encounter all the time. Monkey business from the Government.
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The 67.4% of the Nation that is non-Hispanic white, including the majority of gay men who developed AIDS, has less AIDS in absolute numbers than the 12.8% of the Nation's population that is black! The 14.1% Hispanic minority (which includes every race) has almost half (47%) as many AIDS cases as the non-Hispanic white majority.
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The racial disparity is even more dramatic among women than among men:

Of the 123,405 women living with HIV/AIDS, 64% were African American, 19% were white, 15% were Hispanic, less than 1% were Asians and Pacific Islanders, and less than 1% were American Indians and Alaska Natives.

So AIDS does discriminate — in the United States. And the patterns of AIDS in the United States are entirely different from those of the world in general, which includes the U.S. How is that possible?
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How can any of this discrimination — by race, gender, sexual orientation, even language — be if AIDS is a viral disease spread by sex and blood? It can't.
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There is too much interracial sex in this country for a viral disease to stay titely compartmentalized by race and linguistic group for a quarter century. The propaganda from Government and the AIDS Industry is that, for epidemiological purposes, 'When you have sex with anyone, you are having sex with everyone s/he has ever had sex with' — and, by extension, everyone that each and every one of those people has ever had sex with, on and on, ever outward, into a huge web of interconnected partners. So even if Matt has sex only with white women and each of the white women he has had sex with has had sex only with other white men, someone along the way, one of the men those women have had sex with (say, Juan) has indeed had sex with a black or Hispanic woman, maybe many such women, or with a white, black, or Hispanic man — or many (many) men. The more partners, the more extended partners, and thus the more certitude that racial and orientational bounds have been crossed — many, many times. It is thus not possible, in a country as diverse and interactive as this for a viral disease spread by sex to remain within racial and ethnic bounds for more than a very few years, and we are already in at least the 26th year of AIDS in the United States.
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Statistics that show that different racial and linguistic groups have startlingly different rates of AIDS make no sense for a viral disease. So either the statistics are wrong, or the premise is wrong. Which do you think it is? Which is easier to arrive at, numbers or meaning?
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I know that the premise is wrong. AIDS is not a viral disease. It is not spread by sex. It is not spread by blood. It is a chemical injury, like asbestosis or tobacco-induced lung cancer. What is called "AIDS" in Africa — tho isn't, but just a bunch of old diseases given a new name — has everything to do with immunity weakened by malnutrition and internal parasites, in the face of a sea of tropical diseases swirling thru untreated sewage and contaminated drinking water and borne by biting and bloodsucking insects, with no medical treatment available in large parts of the continent. Consider this news item:

01/07/2004 - A daily multivitamin can slow the progression of HIV and also delay the need for antiretroviral therapy, show the results of an eight-year study by Harvard researchers out today.

We need not long puzzle over all this, any more than we need puzzle over why smokers have hugely higher rates of lung cancer than nonsmokers. The reason is obvious: lung cancer is caused not by a virus, bacterium, spirochete, ameba, or any other microbe, but by the chemical substances in tobacco smoke. And AIDS is caused not by a virus, bacterium, spirochete, ameba, or any other microbe, but by the chemical substances in the various dangerous and illegal drugs used by drug-soaked minorities. That is why minorities are grossly overrepresented in AIDS, not because they have more sex with more partners — but only within their minority! — but because they use drugs. The more drug-soaked the community, the more AIDS. It's not dirty needles, because people who snort or smoke their hard drugs get AIDS too. It's the chemicals, stupid. And clean-needle programs to 'prevent AIDS' not only cannot possibly work but actually do harm by telling people they can shoot up any amount of any chemical they want and never get AIDS if only they use a clean needle each time! Legislators are ignorant morons who are doing active harm to Americans with such insane programs as needle exchange.
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Now, back to marijuana, after a long but important discursion. Is marijuana immunologically dangerous? Maybe not, in isolation. But how many pot smokers use only pot? 50%? 10%? 1%? How many, their judgment clouded by smoke (which also, by the way, entails an elevated risk of lung problems, if not even lung cancer), say, "Sh*t, man! Pot ain't dangerous. I've never had a problem with it. The Government is lying to us. And I'll bet it's lying about cocaine and heroin and meth and all those other drugs those tight-ass motherf*ckers outlawed. I don't believe for a minute that any of them can hurt me." And so they experiment, popping pills, inhaling paint thinner, then finding a connection thru which to get the standard hard drugs available on the streets mainly of the Nation's ghettos rather than on suburban streetcorners alongside manicured lawns.
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Do such militant disbelievers in the harm of illegal drugs comprise 1% of marijuana users? 10%? 50%? 90%? Whatever the ratio, and the larger the base number of users, the more will go on to hard drugs.
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Marijuana is indeed, in absolute, indisputable truth, the preeminent gateway drug, introduction to a galaxy of illegal and dangerous substances, the first rung on a ladder of ever harder and more dangerous chemicals that can ruin lives bigtime. Anyone who says it is not is at least lying to you and may well be lying to him- or herself as well.
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But even in those people who stay with marijuana, an indeterminate proportion will be ruined by it. It will prove not an occasional indulgence but a daily fix, something they just have to have to get by. Some will drive under its influence and never have an accident. Others will drive and get into serious trouble with the law. Others will kill themselves or others in losing control of a car when their perceptions of time and space are distorted. Millions will just subsist, desiring nothing from life but to be left alone in their room smoking their pot and dreaming their drug-induced dreams.
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I have a very good friend (who shall be nameless), who was for a long time a regular smoker of pot, and may be again. He has a good mind, but in his teens had some emotional tumult in his life that he medicated with marijuana. He didn't finish high school. He didn't go on to college. He didn't embark upon a career. He subsisted, living from day to day, getting one meaningless job after another. Finally, he decided he was sorry he didn't finish high school, so attended a class and got his GED, and a feeling of accomplishment. Sometime later, we were talking about this and that, and the subject of marijuana came up. He fought me over its illegal status, insisting it is harmless. I said merely, "You didn't finish high school until 30!" He has still not gone to college, still not pursued his dream of being a meteorologist on TV. He recently swore off marijuana, but has either had relapses or changed his mind to revert to regular pot use. Disgusting.
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I hate to see waste, and my friend has a fine mind he should be using for better things. Just tonite we were talking on the phone and he suggested something about my involvement in the real-estate biz that I hadn't even thought of but which could indeed be enormously valuable, at least to me, and maybe to others. What else lies in his mind when he's not besotted by pot? ("Bepotted"?)
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That's the other problem with drugs: relapses. Old habits, especially when reinforced by chemical dependence, die hard. And when things get tuf, it is all too easy to fall back into the solace of chemically induced relaxation that enables one to push problems off an arm's length. Oh, you never solve those problems, and they are there when you wake up. But for a few hours you can avoid thinking about them. The fact that they may have gotten worse in those few hours, and the other few hours, and the others and others and others that you avoided them, doesn't seem to sink in. Drug use solves nothing, but makes everything worse.
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Alas, we refuse as a society to crack down on drugs the way we need to. The United States has the world's worst drug problem, and no minor measure will do a thing to solve it. We need draconian punishments, up to and including death, for pushers of every illegal drug. Legalization is exactly the wrong thing even to think about. We need to adopt the stance of places like Singapore and Indonesia, which kill drug pushers and severely punish users. We need to pass capital-punishment legislation and put up billboards and posters all over the place, on the streets and in media, on TV, radio, and the Internet, ubiquitously and inescapably to warn everyone that:

Drugs kill. If they don't kill you themselves, we will kill you for selling them. We may even kill you for using them. We're not playing. If you can't live without drugs, we can see to it that you don't have to.

P.S. to Yesterday's Post. When I rushed out of the house to get to work yesterday after posting to this blog, the trains were not running because police were down on the tracks looking (lackadaisically) for something. They apparently found nothing, but allowed the trains to run again after a while. I got to work a half hour late. Thanks a lot. (Fortunately, I work in an industry, law, where flex-time is common.)
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When I got home, there was a message on my answering machine from my sister in Long Beach, California, wishing me a Merry Christmas. She complained that she was stuck in traffic a block from her house because of some police action with cops everywhere and helicopter overhead. I learned later that there had been a shooting at Long Beach's transit station in which two cops were seriously injured, and the police were looking for a white Nissan Pathfinder with a shattered window. Imagine that! Two police incidents at transit stations a continent apart on the same day, inconveniencing two members of the same immediate family.
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I also noted, in watching CNN Headline News, two more "Evans". It turns out that one of the Duke lacrosse players being persecuted in North Carolina is named "David Evans". And while I was waiting for sports news to end, a story about some basketball player who left an Eastern team for the Denver Nuggets came on air, and who should be in the background but a teammate with the name "Evans" on his jersey. Five Evans(es) in one day. Weird.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,965 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:32 PM