Pubdate: Sat, 24 May 2014
Source: Montreal Gazette (CN QU)
Copyright: 2014 Postmedia Network Inc.
Contact:  http://www.montrealgazette.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/274
Author: Allen Abel
Page: A23

TRUE CONFESSIONS OF A NON-TOKER

As Marijuana Is Being Decriminalized and Destigmatized, a Drug-Free 
Life Is Examined

More than 22 million people have visited a travelling exhibition 
sponsored by the Drug Enforcement Administration of the U.S. 
Department of Justice and entitled "TARGET AMERICA: Opening Eyes to 
the Damage Drugs Cause" since it opened in 2002.

Now add one lone non-pothead to the list.

The display currently is at the Maryland Science Center on 
Baltimore's Inner Harbor. At the entrance, I am confronted by the 
wreckage of a 1994 Thunderbird whose driver, "a 43-year-old male who 
tested positive for marijuana, cocaine, benzodiazepines and opiates," 
killed a 31-year-old mother of three in a fiery Ohio crash.

"What is left are these," reads a placard near the twisted debris. 
"The crumpled car, the accident, the stolen goods, the lost dreams . 
. . the children and the families, the spoiled land, the bills we 
pay, the price."

Thus jolted, I move along to "an actual South American jungle coca 
processing lab," then "a re-created Afghan heroin factory," and then 
walls of posters and racks of handouts proclaiming the equal and 
inimical menace of Cannabis sativa.

"Heavy marijuana use in the teen years has been shown to cause a loss 
of several IQ points," a poster says, explaining my undiminished brilliance.

"MYTH: It won't hurt you, it's just a plant, a natural herb," we read 
further on.

"FACT: Marijuana can impair your JUDGMENT causing you to do things 
you might REGRET."

"Isn't smoking marijuana less dangerous than smoking cigarettes?" 
asks a brochure called Tips for Teens.

"No. It's even worse," the flyer insists. "Five joints a day can be 
as harmful as 20 cigarettes a day."

I am reading all this in a state that last month reduced the crime of 
being busted with 10 grams of weed from a criminal to a civil offence 
punishable by a fine of $100 or less.

"Decriminalizing possession of marijuana is an acknowledgement of the 
low priority our courts, prosecutors & police attach to this issue," 
was the proud Tweet from Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, a likely 
candidate for the U.S. presidency in 2016 should Hillary Clinton be 
too buzzed out of her mind to succeed the Honolulu stoner who runs 
the White House now.

Which brings me - at my editor's insistence - to me.

Spending an hour touring TARGET AMERICA makes me even more 
self-satisfied than usual that I never have sucked on a crack pipe, 
shot up with heroin, freebased cocaine, brewed crystal meth in a 
motel room, dropped a tab of LSD, popped a handful of uppers, raved 
on Ecstasy, partied with Molly, gulped Oxycontin like Skittles, or 
worn nasal strips like California Chrome.

Neither have I ever smoked marijuana in my entire 
six-and-a-half-decade lifetime.

"You're practically the only boomer who has never tried pot, and your 
observations, coming from a culture where it's being completely 
destigmatized, are of interest," my boss inveigles in an email. "Pot 
is so common, why have you never smoked?"

The accusation is true. I never have fired up a joint, or eaten one 
of those hemp-filled brownies that my psych-o-delic college roommates 
used to bake in the Sixties. (They also put mescaline in their 
Jell-O.) I was in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in 1968, but I left 
my companions in line at the Fillmore West and took a bus across the 
bay to watch the Oakland A's play a doubleheader.

I've never even seen Reefer Madness.

But "common" and "destigmatized" are powerful words, loaded with 
personal histories, political biases, and the presumption that any 
citizen is free to choose which laws to obey and which to flount, or 
that someone else can decide for you what is and isn't cool.

Even without marijuana, my life has not been short of impaired 
JUDGMENT, and deeds that I REGRET. Nor would I ever indict my friends 
as felons because long ago, or still today, they enjoyed whatever 
feeling issues from drawing that acrid smoke down into their souls.

By the time my nine-year-old daughter is in university, marijuana 
will be legal everywhere on this continent. TARGET AMERICA and the 
Drug Enforcement Administration lost that war to Cheech and Chong and 
Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg a long time ago. But knowing that I'd be 
a Dad 36 years in the future wasn't why I didn't go to Woodstock with 
the rest of my friends, back in the summer of '69. It just wasn't my 
scene. Sorry, it still isn't.

"We need to teach our kids how to deal with peer pressure, how to 
feel good about themselves," a woman named Susan Fox from the DEA 
tells me as I walk through the museum. If that is a strength that my 
parents left me, I thank them.

Maybe getting high is the greatest show on earth, and I've made a 
mistake by missing it. Maybe I'll need cannabis as medicine in the 
coming years. We will see.

Then again, caffe latte has been legal for my entire lifetime, and 
I've never tried that, either.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom