By James Wilson
Credence Clearwater Revival sang of it in the sixties. Marijuana use is today legal in twenty-three states and the District of Columbia. Nineteen have okayed pot for medical use while Alaska and Oregon become states three and four to lift all restrictions on the drug. Proud Mary – the band’s name for weed, grass, wacky weed and a host of other names – is rollin’ on the river and it just keeps on burnin’ its way into the hearts of those looking for a quick and cool means of self medication. Trouble is it is one of the biggest scams to come down the pike.
The new wave of pot popularity – the current push to legitimate its use – is rooted in the scientific discoveries of real medical properties in its active ingredient. THC does ease symptoms and relieve pain in a number of conditions. My cousin used it with good effect when he fought his last battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. But Bruce used THC in tablet form – available by prescription. These have been available for many years. The benefits are real, but there is no reason whatever to smoke, toke, or dope. No reason unless we want to line the pockets of drug lords.
Make no mistake. California’s pot grows are a thriving business enterprise from the rental houses near Sacramento with indoor growing lights and stolen electricity to the farms in counties where law enforcement goes only when they have enough firepower to protect themselves and ordinary citizens take a walk in the woods at their own risk. Some of the grows are small businesses but many belong to the cartels and virtually all feature guards who shoot first and ask questions later. When the drug was legalized in Colorado one of the prime arguments was that legalization would trump the cartels; in fact the cartels showed up the day the law took effect and jumped to the front of the line.
A townhall meeting west of my city recently discussed marijuana and the economy. Local growers told townsfolk how they were improving the economy by providing jobs and taking themselves off welfare rolls. The truth is they divert streams and pollute land and water for their purposes. They frighten legitimate entrepreneurs away with the drug culture they inspire, not to mention their guns. They bring economic and social havoc wherever they go. And they produce a product that is destructive to users on many levels. This is not opinion; science has long since weighed in.
Newsweek columnist Ben Smith reports former federal drug czar William Bennett and former Assistant US Attorney Robert White have published a book titled, Going to Pot: Why the Rush to Legalize Marijuana is Harming America. The authors document psychoactive potency of marijuana more than doubled since the 1970s. Some dispensaries sell product six times as potent as in the old days. Marijuana is known – the experimental results are long since in – to suppress the dopamine receptors in the brain. (It takes more and more to get the same high over time, just like other drugs.) It does not wear off like alcohol and it causes a serious drop in IQ with continuous usage. Users with a family history of mental disorders are between two and five times as likely to develop mental illness of their own. It increases the chances of heart attack and is known to be at least ten times as carcinogenic – cancer causing – as tobacco products. States with any form of legalization see usage by children between twelve and seventeen rising by about fifty per cent. This rate holds for the eighteen to twenty-five-year-old population, a time when the brain is in a critical phase of development.
Asked if marijuana is a bigger problem than alcohol Bennett admits it’s not – both are serious – but wonders why one health crisis justifies another. God’s Word is more direct. He writes in Ephesians 5:18 that it is a really bad idea to become intoxicated on spirits and a really good idea to become intoxicated with His Holy Spirit. Nowhere in the scriptures is anyone ranting against medicine – conventional or not – but that exhortation to intoxication on the Holy Spirit alone is shot through and through the New Testament.
Legalized marijuana – medicinal or recreational – is a crazily destructive scam. I hope it fails even to get enough signatures to appear on California’s 2016 ballot. But my prayer is that thousands of Californians and tens of thousands of other Americans will try some of that really good wine Jesus brought out first at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. The record indicates it was worth waiting for.
James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships and The Holy Spirit and the End Times – available at local bookstores or by e-mailing him at
praynorthstate@charter.net
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