About marijuana use

If the forecasts can be trusted (hah), then possibly there will be available for approved uses the cannabis which Arkansawyer voters legalized 2½ years previously. I hope I may be excused for my skepticism, but every conceivable obstacle and a few inconceivable ones have been strewn in the path of implementing the will of the people. The recent printing in this venue of a consideration of the results of studies suggesting a link between cannabis abuse and violence is evidence of just such efforts. These studies make unwarranted assumptions about their findings, failing to take into consideration certain “real-time” effects of cannabis use. The most important aspect of the situation is not how much you consume, but what you do when you are high.

The archaeo- and paleologic records make it clear that people have been using cannabis since we have evidence of people. Herodotus attributed its use to the people he called Scythians, in passages sounding very like 20th century accounts of use among Siberian tribes and American Indians. Marijuana does not “make” you violent. It makes you susceptible. If you get ridiculously high, then play pointlessly violent video games or bingewatch pointlessly brutal television or movies for eight to 10 hours every day, you will eventually develop a tendency to stupidly violent reaction, regardless of what any apologist tries to tell you. It’s incremental, as is everything in this plane. Every little butterfly matters to air currents, so why do people think their psyches are exempt from the brutal inroads of imagery which they allow to bombard them more and more continually? Any study of the effects of cannabis on users over a significant period of time is in my view worthless if it does not also take into consideration the cultural norms within which that use occurs and their concurrent changes.

Happy Year of the Pig in the Mud! STANLEY G. JOHNSON

Little Rock