Gore Vidal, New York Times, 1970

[RainDog]

www.msu.edu/~jdowell/135/VidalOnDrugs.html"

New York Times, September 26, 1970

from Drugs, by Gore Vidal:

Along with exhortation and warning, it might be good for our citizens to recall (or learn for the first time) that the United States was the creation of men who believed that each man has the right to do what he wants with his own life as long as he does not interfere with his neighbor's pursuit of happiness (that his neighbor's idea of happiness is persecuting others does confuse matters a bit).

This is a startling notion to the current generation of Americans. They reflect a system of public education which has made the Bill of Rights, literally, unacceptable to a majority of high school graduates (see the annual Purdue reports) who now form the "silent majority" - a phrase which that underestimated wit Richard Nixon took from Homer who used it to describe the dead.

Is everyone reasonably sane? No. Some people will always become drug addicts just as some people will always become alcoholics, and it is just too bad. Every man, however, has the power (and should have the legal right) to kill himself if he chooses. But since most men don't, they won't be mainliners either. Nevertheless, forbidding people things they like or think they might enjoy only makes them want those things all the more. This psychological insight is, for some mysterious reason, perennially denied our governors.

It is a lucky thing for the American moralist that our country has always existed in a kind of time-vacuum: we have no public memory of anything that happened before last Tuesday. No one in Washington today recalls what happened during the years alcohol was forbidden to the people by a Congress that thought it had a divine mission to stamp out Demon Rum - launching, in the process, the greatest crime wave in the country's history, causing thousands of deaths from bad alcohol, and creating a general (and persisting) contempt among the citizenry for the laws of the United States.

This article was written before last Tuesday.

[BrklynLiberal]

1. " Is everyone reasonably sane? No." That about sums it up...perfectly

[RainDog]

2. I've been trying to keep track of some of the current mj issues

this is current, and yet... same old same old from the "dead."

in any case, I don't want to spam this forum, but I do want to move some things here to keep track and make them accessible for anyone here who might benefit from links, etc.

[zeemike]

3. What Vidal sees as a travesty of justice and just plain stupid

Others see as a great opportunity to make a whole lot of money off of fighting this problem.
And so we have an industry devoted to it, and they are too big to ever stop.

[RainDog]

4. we may be at a tipping point. I think so - and hope so

the reality of the necessity to invest in alternative energy sources makes the issue of "marijuana," the high thc cannabis, secondary to the need to legalize hemp.

In times of crisis, this nation has always turned to hemp production - during the Revolution, during WWII - and with climate and energy issues becoming too important to pretend they don't exist - propping up one or two industries at the expense of another may not have the same value as opening a new market, developing hemp products to replace petrol ones, research into the uses of cannabis as medicine...

This is the future.

[saltpoint]

5. RainDog, good for you to put this up for us on the

boards.

The piece addresses the fairly early hysteria over "drugs," suggesting that "drugs" are destroying our youth and thereby our nation's future, blah blah blah, forgetting that as the era of the 50s and 60s ended and Vidal sat down to type this out in draft form, U.S. Americans saw their standard of living soar and simultaneously, the use of sedatives and tranquilizers rise to match.

The drug war was long lost before it ever took hold as a "war" in the public perception, and it's stayed totally lost now.

I like Vidal's theme (and it's fairly constant with him over many years) that U.S. Americans are dolts when it comes to their history and heritage, and this handicaps their ability to make decision about their future.

This is what a discussion board is for -- to read and react to the long view as it applies to right now and forever.

:thumbsup: