Terribly And Systemically Misled: The Great Re-Think

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

I had to laugh when I read this sentence, from the Sky portion of Friday’s Planet Waves edition: “A lot came out in the wash when Mercury stationed direct on July 21, as if deeper layers of emotional and mental reality suddenly opened up in a downpour.” Truer words were seldom spoken, and on any number of levels: emotional, mental AND material.

Here in the Pea Patch we’re experiencing another day of pounding rain, with the current storm system stalled over the state for more than a week and not projected to move any time soon. The county is on continual alert from flash flooding, and people have died here in Missouri as well as other spots in the Midwest. The unexpected intensity of the region’s traditional “summer showers” has created an emergency situation; property damage is significant, and seasonal activities that bring needed income to resort areas have been considerably dampened, no pun intended.

On a personal note, the dogs are bored and restless from being so long inside, the lake is filling too fast, endangering the docks, and my little garden is awash. I’ve had to prop up my tomato plants, already staked, to keep them from toppling in the drenched soil. Coming on late due to a too hot, then too cold, spring, the few tomatoes ripe enough to pick have split skin, plumped by an excess of water. I read recently that crops in Florida and across the south have similar issues and are either ruined or tasteless, which will impact produce prices across the nation.

Meanwhile, praying for just a few blessed hours of the downpour assaulting the Midwest, 6,000 people have been driven from their homes by the Silver wildfire in California. Caused by lightning, this wind-driven blaze signals a particularly dangerous fire season in the tinder-dry western states. I suspect that the thousands of firefighters battling the flames are mindful of their 19 fallen comrades in an Arizona wildfire earlier this season, and I hope they’re bringing an abundance of caution to their duties. If there is an upside to all this extreme weather, it’s that very few people deny climate change any longer, and the ones that do are considered hopelessly delusional.

In fact, signs of awakening — and not just on the issue of climate — are everywhere. I appreciated a conversation between CNN’s Don Lemon and Dr. Sanjay Gupta today, one that, to me, signals a turn-around not just on the topic of medical marijuana but on the larger view of taking information at face value. This week, Gupta apologized to the nation for not having investigated medical marijuana with an open mind, a stance he hopes to reverse with a documentary, Weed, airing this Sunday night (CNN, 8 pm Eastern.)

As you may know, Gupta is CNN’s chief medical correspondent, a multiple Emmy award winner. He’s also an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Emory University School of Medicine and associate chief of the neurosurgery service at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. I cite his bona fides because in the public mind he is a credible expert on (at minimum) Western medicine. His name was proposed for Surgeon General in 2009, although he withdrew from consideration, and according to Wikipedia, Forbes magazine named him one of the 20 most influential celebrities in 2011.

Gupta told Piers Morgan this week, “I have apologized for some of the earlier reporting because I think, you know, we’ve been terribly and systematically misled in this country for some time,” he said. “And I did part of that misleading.” Reversing his blanket rejection of medical marijuana, he was even more specific about why he was blindsided in a CNN opinion piece, in which he wrote:

I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have “no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse.”

They didn’t have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true. It doesn’t have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works.

I don’t think it’s too dramatic to consider this pronouncement a potential shockwave. Some of you may remember when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop came out against smoking in the 1980s, bucking the status quo that supported the industry. Something of a maverick, the conservative Koop also refused to promote his personal disapproval of abortion, calling it a moral stand as opposed to a matter of public health.

Resisting political pressure, Koop refused to issue a report requested by the Reagan administration, suggesting that abortion was psychologically damaging to women. Instead, he fostered a long-range study that included both pros and cons. Then, to his credit, when Reagan tried to stonewall a reasoned course of action for the AIDS epidemic, Koop mailed information to every household about the necessity of condom use, despite howls from the conservative and religious mainstream.

Unrelentingly conservative, Koop was accused of being sexist and gay-bashing, and, within the context of his belief system and assertions, he was. He was also, however, a man for whom scientific truth superseded opinion, for whom integrity came before ideology. Koop, who died this year at age 96, had impact beyond his station. His detailed information crusade about the addictive effects of tobacco use, especially among the nation’s youth, became a game-changer that rattled the tobacco industry and skewered both advertising and public relations nation-wide, while sounding a necessary public health alert.

Perhaps Gupta can do the same here, and not just with his reversal of position on the dangers of pot. Much as Koop signaled that multi-million dollar corporations were more concerned about their profit margin than about public health, Gupta has exposed the dark underbelly of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Perhaps that will lead to an investigation of the cynical, punitive decisions made in the 1970s by the Nixon administration, when their political ambitions were rocked by a young anti-war generation happy to be flying high. Nobody was more disapproving of hippies than Tricky Dick, unless it was St. Ronnie the Reagan, who likened them all to Cheetah the chimp.

As Gupta asserts, it wasn’t scientific information about cannabis, previously approved for medicinal use, that got it declared a dangerous substance, so we can assume that the decision was entirely political. The tentacles of that early pronouncement — mundanely opportunistic and self-serving, as “evil” always is — have filled our prisons, shattered our families and scattered the ashes of a generation and more. The explosion of prison sentences in this nation since the Nixon years can be explained with statistics: almost half of the people in federal prison are serving time for drug charges.

Now, we’re not talking about Afghanistan here, the CIA or poppy crops (although that’s surely relevant to this story). We’re talking about weed, MJ, grass, and, credit due CNN anchor Don Lemon and Dr. Gupta, who appropriately named it a false equivalency between substances that can kill as opposed to those that make you run for the refrigerator, if you can stop zoning on the saltwater tank or cartoon channel long enough.

Still, much like Koop’s outing of corporations as self-interested money-grubbers, Gupta is shearing off the top of an iceberg in corporate complicity that involves drugs and the social fabric in the 21st century. If we follow those dots we run into staggering facts few of us care to visit: cynical policing policy, privatization of prisons for profit, slave labor in prison population, the seizure of personal property for mere suspicion of drugs, and a growing denial of Constitutional rights.

These aren’t topics we can any longer avoid, and with Illinois becoming the 21st state to sanction medicinal marijuana, the Department of Justice is under pressure to back off from its aggressive pursuit of offenders. Stopping short of approving medicinal weed, AG Eric Holder has suggested that reforms to drug sentencing will soon be on the table. Said Holder in a recent NPR interview, “I think there are too many people in jail for too long, and for not necessarily good reasons… The war on drugs is now 30, 40 years old, there have been a lot of unintended consequences.”

It would be welcome policy change and a star in Obama’s crown if he could shift the direction of what can only be called a systemic determination to create a privatized culture of imprisonment and police control. Gupta’s revelation is, after all, confirmation of the growing public awareness of the drug war’s abject failure and of the growing misuse of police authority.

Economics is on the side of the users, as well. Economists predict the government would save over $13 billion in enforcement costs, a billion of which goes to incarcerate prisoners on marijuana-related charges. If we consider the possibility of legalization along with potential tax revenues, the earliest estimates suggest we’re losing out on over $41 billion annually. California’s economy, for instance, has been augmented by billions — positively impacting individual communities as well as state programs — thanks to legalization and regulation.

I don’t have a dog in this hunt. I don’t smoke. Weed was never my drug of choice, but its evident that humankind is suffering from stress-related maladies, untreated except by toxic method and I’ve always considered herbal remedies preferable to pharmaceutical. I trust Big Pharma not at all, and that’s where Sanjay Gupta’s change of mind, based on his further study and experience, takes the conversation.

To deny those suffering a chronic health problem a reliable treatment for political reasons — or, similarly, cost, like the cancer treatments that aren’t available simply because there aren’t enough patients to make manufacture profitable — isn’t just cynical, it’s unethical. And there is no rationale for pharmaceutical manufacturers to steer away from cannabis as a possible medication except a political one, which puts Big Pharma and the the Drug Enforcement Agency is bed together, along with the government that approves both.

To wit: we have been — on levels we are just beginning to explore — terribly and systemically misled. And not just on drugs, of course, but on so many social and political issues, many of which we’ve addressed here on Planet Waves and will continue to. We have been misled not just by politicians and by government, we’ve been misled by churches and teachers and policing agencies, parents, friends and lovers, A to Z.

A few decades of consciousness-raising have given us a glimpse of our own human nature, our flawed assumptions and ego posturing, and the good news is that our ability to analyze and learn from it shows our maturity as a species; we’re just kinda new at this, still focused on what’s wrong rather than on the progress we’ve made.

Today, Obama rolled out a response to those who are critical of the various NSA programs collecting information about the public. His recent appearance with Jay Leno has led to a moment of cognitive dissonance on the topic of information harvesting, leading Huffy to carry the headline, “Is He Lying?” Tackling the PR head-on, Obama has suggested an array of “mends” for this problem. We should see quickly enough if there is political will to erect them and/or if they prove to be enough to sooth the nation.

His argument — that what we have learned about are the possibilities for abuse rather than the actuality of it — is logical enough, although given the level of trust in government, propped up by the steady drip-drip-drip of past abuses of authority, like the naming and demonizing of marijuana as a schedule 1 narcotic when there is no proof of same, leaves us all skeptical.

And believe me, that’s new business, this growing ability to connect dots and discover the holes in the argument. What I think we’re beginning to see is an amalgam of liberal and libertarian disenchantment with the system, some of which meets the definition of bipartisan dovetail and some of which — certainly not all — is no longer ideological. At the base of this is the long-standing meme that those who oppose authority are social misfits and outliers — mentally ill, if you read the Republican playbook — which is beginning to fall back as so many of us no longer trust the authority in power. That can only amp during a transformative period orchestrated by a Uranus/Pluto transit.

We’re re-thinking the harm or harmlessness of marijuana use these days, which seems just a drill, as polls show that the nation has already made up its mind about medicinal use. I don’t see how legalization can be postponed much longer, and that’s a strike at the heart of the patriarchal powerbase keeping the serfs in line, of continuing corporate authority to mishandle the Department of Justice for its own devices, and of the moralistas that would make judgment about human worthiness; in other words, the old paradigm. In each instance, decades of well-oiled machinery continue to turn, and will keep turning until a monkey wrench is thrown to stop it. We’re seeking the monkey wrench as we speak.

Yes, we were misled by American mythology, raised on it like mother’s milk, but in most ways we wanted to be. We wanted to be the infallible superpower leading the world, the squeaky clean, rosy-cheeked American middle class with God, Mom and apple pie at the center of our family dynamic. We liked thinking of ourselves in Disneyesque terms, can-do Americans standing straight and tall. Enter the re-think of a shifting era. Looking at ourselves realistically is one of those welcome signs of maturity that pushes back the tribalism of an old age.

Sanjay Gupta had the grace and nerve to apologize to the nation for leading it astray, which should be a teaching moment for the rest of us who hesitate to come forward with our own little piece of truth, unwilling to risk ruffling the feathers of authority. But clearly, signs of awakening on so many levels — in relationships, in businesses, in politics — are offering us a new slate to write on, a new way to think about things if we are willing to let go of worn out rules that no longer work for the whole of us. We can, if we wish, not just leave the old behind, but clear the decks, no harm, no foul, for what is new.

Yes, “A lot came out in the wash when Mercury stationed direct on July 21,” and a lot more is due, now that the dam has broken. Seeing more clearly now, most of us are ready for that new way of being, just within reach if we stretch. All it takes is a willingness to re-think, and that’s where we’re going — for some of us, that’s where we are.