Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (41 page)

The verbal battle raged back and forth; hypocrisy was thick in the air. I sat quietly listening, tired and cool, just waiting. Mrs. Minudri talked for me superbly. We had agreed beforehand that the final decision would be made in a closed executive session.

After some time, the board, two lawyers, the secretary, a man from the county office, and I retired to another room downstairs where they asked me if I wouldn’t just resign. I couldn’t bear to do this, so I refused, flatly. We talked for about an hour, very pleasantly and quietly, and decided how things were to be. The assistant county superintendent of schools, who had been there all day, said, ‘I never visited a better-organized school.’ The three board members moved to a corner and made their unanimous vote to dismiss me from my duties. The lawyers then discussed how to inform the full meeting upstairs of the decision, and how to cut off all further discussion by adjourning the meeting forthwith. Of course, I told them my response would be that I would appeal the case, even to the Supreme Court, if necessary. This was accepted pleasantly.

We filed back into the room with the glaring lights and grinding machines. After a stumbling reading of the prepared statement, we adjourned. All at once, I was pounced upon (like a presidential candidate who had just lost) with seventeen microphones thrust at my face, and behind each mike, a man with a question. I merely said, ‘Of course, I shall appeal.’ Then: ‘Under the circumstances, due to the expressed feelings of the people voted for the trustees, they had no other alternative than to fire me.’

We finally maneuvered our way to the door through the downcast looks of my children’s parents. I was stopped by one mother with whom I had been very friendly. She and I used to discuss freely with great understanding the problems of her three children who had been in my classes. Now she said, ‘Oh, Garnet, please don’t hate me!’

It was late in 1949 when I first had marijuana. I was living in Monterey and was invited to visit friends in Big Sur. After dinner, sitting around the fireplace, the man rolled a marijuana cigarette. He always rolled his own tobacco, so I thought nothing of it until he handed it first to his wife, then to me.

I had been curious about marijuana for a long time but had never made the effort to get hold of any. They taught me how to smoke it and it was at once a delight. I really felt like Alice in Wonderland – when I stood up, I kept growing, my arms became long, and I felt I might be able to fly into the Pacific when I went outside. But, of course, nothing around me was abnormal and I was aware of this. The next day was fine; everything was the same. I’m not sure what I expected, but having heard some of the myths about marijuana (which I felt to be untrue), I couldn’t be sure . . .

I never used marijuana while at school, or in the morning before going to school. There was never any need for it. I did find it helpful in dealing with student problems – checking papers, making out grade cards, reports and cumulative records. I never found it necessary to write derogatory comments on files that would follow a child through life; marijuana always helped me find something good to say about the student . . .

For me, marijuana has been a fine relaxant, a beautiful cocktail before dinner, a great source of deepening perception, but I would never recommend its use for ‘mixed-up’ people or children. Kids are already ‘turned on’ if they are just allowed to be. I would never recommend its use in excess by anyone. In fact, it is difficult for most normal people to use it in excess because marijuana imposes its own limits when you have had enough. You don’t need or want any more. Yet, when you will it, you can use it without the fear that it will ever become the ‘Boss.’

In the meantime, I have received more than one hundred letters of support from all over the US, as well as three from boys in Vietnam. Only three letters, from retired, misinformed, unenlightened school teachers, were critical. The Craig Biddle Interim Congressional Committee studying Criminal Procedure invited me as a witness, and I was interviewed by Hugh Downs on his
Today Show
in Los Angeles. I have also taken part in several college panel discussions on the subject of marijuana.

Let us hope all this will lead to changes in our laws to bring them more in line with the ideals expressed in our constitution, and strengthen the guarantees protecting the freedom of speech – for all teachers. Perhaps it will also help to open the minds of people to confront our changing world with more tolerance and thoughtfulness. May we all come to truly enjoy ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.’

1967. From:
Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady: Women’s Writings on the Drug Experience
, eds Cynthia Palmer and Michael

Horowitz, 1982

O
NE SERIOUS-MINDED
work,
Indian Hemp, a Social Menace
, was published by a barrister in 1952. He quotes as a crushing indictment of the drug and its users a series of articles from the
Sunday Graphic
– a now extinct journal. They being:

In their way, the pieces are small masterpieces of mass Sunday indignation; but one feels they come to the
point d’appui
only at the end of the last article:

Drugs
, 1967

W
HEN
I
BEGAN
to study marihuana in 1967, I had no doubt that it was a very harmful drug that was unfortunately being used by more and more foolish young people who would not listen to or could not understand the warnings about its dangers. My purpose was to define scientifically the nature and degree of those dangers. In the next three years, as I reviewed the scientific, medical and lay literature, my views began to change. I came to understand that I, like so many other people in this country, had been brainwashed. My beliefs about the dangers of marihuana had little empirical foundation. By the time I completed the research that formed the basis for a book, I had become convinced that cannabis was considerably less harmful than tobacco and alcohol, the most commonly used legal drugs. The book was published in 1971; its title,
Marihuana Reconsidered
, reflected my change in view.

At that time I naively believed that once people understood that marihuana was much less harmful than drugs that were already legal, they would come to favor legalization. In 1971, I confidently predicted that cannabis would be legalized for adults within the decade. I had not yet learned that there is something very special about illicit drugs. If they don’t always make the drug user behave irrationally, they certainly cause many non-users to behave that way. Instead of making marihuana legally available to adults, we have continued to criminalize many millions of Americans. About 300,000 mostly young people are arrested on marihuana charges each year, and the political climate has now deteriorated so severely that it has become difficult to discuss marihuana openly and freely. It could almost be said that there is a climate of psychopharmacological McCarthyism.

One indication of this climate is the rise in mandatory drug testing, which is analogous to the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era. Hardly anyone believed that forced loyalty oaths would enhance national security, but people who refused to take such oaths risked loss of their jobs and reputations. Today we are witnessing the imposition of a chemical loyalty oath. Mandatory, often random testing of urine samples for the presence of illicit drugs is increasingly demanded as a condition of employment. People who test positive may be fired or, if they wish to keep their jobs, may be involuntarily assigned to drug counseling or ‘employee assistance’ programs.

All this is of little use in preventing or treating drug abuse. In the case of cannabis, urine testing can easily be defeated by chemical alteration of the urine or substitution of someone else’s urine. Even if the urine sample has not been altered, the available tests are far from perfect. The cheaper ones are seriously inaccurate, and even the more expensive and accurate ones are fallible because of laboratory error and passive exposure to marihuana smoke. But even an infallible test would be of little use in preventing or treating drug abuse. Marihuana ‘metabolites’ (breakdown products) remain in the urine for days after a single exposure and for weeks after a long-term user stops. Their presence bears no established relationship to drug effects on the brain. It tells little about when the drug was used, how much was used, or what effects it had or has. Like loyalty oaths imposed on government employees, urine testing for marihuana is useless for its ostensible purpose. It is little more than shotgun harassment designed to impose outward conformity.

Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine
, 1993

William Blake

I am a member of a very small, very fortunate and very select group – the first survivors of the previously incurable cancer, abdominal mesothelioma. Our treatment involved a carefully balanced mixture of all three standard modalities – surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Not pleasant, to be sure, but consider the alternative.

Any cancer survivor of such intensive treatment – indeed anyone who has endured aggressive medical battles against any disease – knows first-hand the enormous importance of the ‘psychological factor.’ Now I am an old-fashioned rationalist of the most unreconstructed sort. I brook no mysticism, no romantic southern-California nonsense about the power of mind and spirit. I assume that positive attitudes and optimism have salutary effects because mental states can feed back upon the body through the immune system. In any case, I think that everyone would grant an important role to the maintenance of spirit through adversity; when the mind gives up, the body too often follows. (And if cure is not the ultimate outcome, quality of remaining life becomes, if anything, even more important.)

Nothing is more discouraging, more destructive of the possibility of such a positive attitude – and I do speak from personal experience here – than the serious side effects induced by so many treatments. Radiation and chemotherapy are often accompanied by long periods of intense and uncontrollable nausea. The mind begins to associate the agent of potential cure with the very worst aspect of the disease – for the pain and suffering of the side effects is often worse than the distress induced by the tumor itself. Once this happens, the possibility for an essential psychological boost and comfort may disappear – for the treatment seems worse than the disease itself. In other words, I am trying to say that the control of severe and long-lasting side effects in cancer treatment is not merely a question of comfort (though Lord only knows that comfort to the suffering is enough of a rationale), but an absolutely essential ingredient in the possibility of cure.

I had surgery, followed by a month of radiation, chemotherapy, more surgery, and a subsequent year of additional chemotherapy. I found that I could control the less severe nausea of radiation by conventional medicines. But when I started intravenous chemotherapy (Adriamycin(r)), absolutely nothing in the available arsenal of antiemetics worked at all. I was miserable and came to dread the frequent treatments with an almost perverse intensity.

I had heard that marihuana often worked well against nausea. I was reluctant to try it because I have never smoked any substance habitually (and didn’t even know how to inhale). Moreover, I had tried marihuana twice (in the usual context of growing up in the sixties) and had hated it. (I am something of a Puritan on the subject of substances that, in any way, dull or alter mental states – for I value my rational mind with an academician’s overweening arrogance. I do not drink alcohol at all, and have never used drugs in any ‘recreational’ sense.) But anything to avoid nausea and the perverse wish it induces for an end of treatment.