Provocations: Legalized marijuana snake oil
Say what you will about the hustlers of legalized marijuana. One thing you can’t say is that they’re un-American.
They’re every bit as American as hotdogs and the Fourth of July.
More to the point, they’re every bit as American as those old hornswogglers who hustled miracle-cure snake-oil potions from the earliest days of our colorful history.
The fast-talkin’ snake-oil hustlers of yesteryear used to clatter up to the town square and hawk their bottled panaceas right out of their wagons.
Credulous yokels crowded around and pressed forward with their money when the peddlers wrapped up their pitch.
But the carnival-barker pitchmen with their straw bowlers and flamboyant haberdashery have given way to more soothingly drab corporate cogs with political connections. There’s real money to be vacuumed up in legalizing marijuana.
Time for the professionals to step in. Real players like Acreage Holdings.
Acreage Holdings aspires to become to cannabis what Henry Ford came to be to cars: Big. No, make that humongous.
Acreage Holdings has added to its board, among other notables, former Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner, a Republican who, as such, is surely well schooled in the ways of shilling for business.
Nowadays the snake-oil salesmen of legalized marijuana drop in not on the town squares or carnival midways but state capitals. There they hustle their miracle wares at legislative hearings.
There they herald the amazing healing powers of legalized grass and its miracle ingredient, THC.
Ah yes, THC! Tetrahydrocannabinol. The substance that cures warts, rheumatism, chemo-treatment nausea and — best of all — budget deficits!
Yes, indeed, ladies and gentlemen, tax collections from legalized weed will make those perennial billion-dollar fiscal shortfalls vanish as quick as it’ll cure your lumbago!
So profit-grabbing businessmen and revenue-grubbing politicians are now working hand in hand to legalize weed. What could possibly go amiss with these two in cahoots?
Pie-eyed Zonker Harrises once constituted the legalized-pot salesforce, and an inept salesforce it was, too, as you’d expect. But no longer. The Zonker community has been pretty much eased aside by the pros — the corporate investors and their lobbying forces.
The “medicinal” legalization of marijuana, and now the “recreational” legalization are a political prairie fire spreading across America. And this is not the achievement of mere amateurs.
Legalization of weed and its promised multiple wonders — it’ll cure gout, it’ll lower law-enforcement costs, it’ll fill the treasury with over-flowing tax dollars! — is selling like …. well, like the Kilmer Bros’. Swamp Root cure did back in the day. Or like Nevada Ned’s Kickapoo Indian Medicine once did.
One retailer of legalized marijuana, Sensi Kush, hypes its product as the cure for muscle spasms, insomnia, even “chronic disease.”
The snake-oil game is a welltrod, trampled-down path in the annals of American free-enterprise hustling.
Bottled stuff bearing labels with the brand name “Doc” this or “Doc” that have fetched hustlers fat wads of foldin’ money.
Strictly for medicinal purposes, mind you! The bottled cures were a way for henpecked men to sneak a belt of alcohol back during the days when temperance biddies were on the rampage.
And for the fairer sex there was Doc Warden’s Female Pills. They were billed as the cure for “Troubles Peculiar to Women’s Delicate Systems.”
Folks of a certain advanced age may remember the cure-all, “Hadacol.” Hadacol was a pioneer of saturation advertising in television’s early days of tiny black-and-white screens and rabbit-ear antennae.
A principal Hadacol ingredient was an unidentified “preservative,” actually, um, alcohol. Hadacol claimed to be the answer for “stomach disturbances,” “certain nervous disorders” and assorted other ailments.
A popular joke at the time went like this: “Why did they call it Hadacol?”
Answer: “They hadda call it something.” (Ba-da-boom.)
Actually, the name came from “Happy Days Co. LeBlanc.”
LeBlanc, that was Dudley J. LeBlanc, Lousiana State Senator. Wouldn’t you know it, a politician behind the snake oil!
Groucho Marx once asked LeBlanc what Hadacol is good for. LeBlanc answered: “Last year it was good for $5 million.” So the story goes, anyway.
The snake-oil products of olden days were mostly harmless, consisting as they typically did of a couple of herbs and a finger or two of alcohol thrown in.
This is where the old-fashion snake oils depart from today’s snake oil of legalized marijuana.
That marijuana is a harmless, even medicinally valuable substance is hooey the media have gladly whispered down the lane for decades — ignoring, or poohpoohing, reams of respectable research to the contrary.
A guy named Berenson, Alex Berenson, has written a book chronicling the massive compilation of this ignored research.
The book is titled “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence.” It ought to be required reading not just for parents but for every politician who occupies a governor’s office or a legislative seat.
No nutty alarmist, Berenson covered the pharmaceutical industry for the New York Times. One day his wife, a psychiatrist who has evaluated countless numbers of mentally ill criminals for New York State, mentioned in an off-hand way the prevalence of pot-smoking in those cases. She also mentioned the mounting studies showing a cannabis link to mental disorders.
Berenson writes that his first reaction was an inclination to scoff at her remarks as “Reefer Madness,” a reference to the campy anti-marijuana propaganda film of 1936, a cult favorite among today’s pothead Zonker community.
Well, the studies are out there, said Berenson’s wife.
“You should read them.”
So he did. And he wound up writing “Tell Your Children.”
His book cites study after study after study concluding that marijuana, far from being a miracle cure for what ails you, is in fact risky stuff. It’s also far stronger stuff than it used to be, approaching one-quarter THC, not merely 2 percent or so as was once the case.
Contrary to what you’ve been told over and over, it is not a preposterous assertion that marijuana is a gateway drug to cocaine, heroin, meth and such. Not everybody who smokes marijuana graduates to harder narcotics, true. But most of those who do go on to the harder stuff start off with weed.
The pot proselytizers have long argued that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol. Well, forest fires may be less harmful than hurricanes. But does that make forest fires then okay? In fact, many boozers also indulge in weed. Marijuana hardly serves as a substitute for alcohol. It’s an in-addition-to intoxicant.
Plus, pot smokers are more inclined toward heavy cannabis consumption than drinkers are inclined toward heavy alcohol consumption, say the studies cited by Berenson.
Among those studies, he cites a 2017, 468-page research report from the National Academy of Medicine, “The Health Effect of Cannabis and Cannabinols.” This research found strong evidence that pot-smoking aggravates bipolar, depression and anxiety disorder — and that it has frightening links to schizophrenia.
The 16 medical doctors and academics who conducted the study concluded: “Cannabis use is likely to increase the risk of developing schizophrenia and other psychoses; the higher the use, the greater the risk.”
Other studies in Denmark and Finland also show rising diagnoses of schizophrenia accompanying increased use of marijuana.
Berenson also reports a 2018 Swiss study indicating a propensity to violence among those hovering on the margins of mental stability who smoke weed. The author comments: “Most people will never have a psychotic episode while using marijuana .... But an unlucky minority will develop full-blown schizophrenia.”
Be wary, then, of fast-talkers hustling wonder potions like Swamp Root, Kickapoo Indian Medicine, Hadacol …. or legalized marijuana.
Be especially wary of snakeoil peddlers with the title “governor” or “legislator” in front of their name.