Only a more rigorous, more rational science will extricate us from the tragic down-ward spiral which characterizes America's 'development.' All the indicators, all the neglect and willful ignorance, aggravate each other, when faced with changing environmental and economic realities. They constitute a veritable vortex, as if our nation's lifeblood was pouring out onto the sand. Behind all this are errors in science, physical and social – a devilish corruption.
Many of the errors ultimately stem from not understanding what we are – species Homo Sapiens sapiens. We are all closely related, a human family. Yet the conditions under which the humans were made, are not those in which we live today. Our common ancestors lived lives much more physically rigorous than ours. They were much more emotionally tight, one with another. As for intelligence, they had to be scientists, just to survive. Our ancestors had to know a hundred things perfectly to survive. But today, one needs not know anything. And though America has some of the best schools, it also has very poor ones, not poor in money, but in understanding. It is unfortunate that the latest discoveries in archaeology, evolutionary psychology, economic history, anthropology, neuroscience, embryology, genetics, don't get the space on radio, film or TV that sports does.
Corruption is also viewed as a denying factor, aiding in decremental decline of the polity and the economy and the culture. But there are other kinds of corruption than defalcation and nepotism. When so-called experts bend science to justify a narrow, harmful, unjust policy, that is corruption of the highest order.
Since there are few jobs, younger citizens band together. Call them gangs, but they are human groups banding together for survival in this money-first society.
Huge hurricanes, monster tornadoes, floods and drought, the invasion of aggressive alien fish, plants, insects, pollution and poisons – America's decline may be driven in part by environmental factors.
Much is made of the social media, but is not the question, what will these media say? Why make media an object when it is a tool, a vehicle to channel new perspectives and fresh ideas and facts to the users. But 90% of cell phone conversations are unnecessary. Curiously, it is the minorities which main-line the social media: the TV is on for 74 hours a week in the typical minority home, vs. only 52 for whites and Asians.
Minorities of course suffered from poor self-esteem, but now, thanks to the cell phone, minority students can 'commune' with each other after school, so now, the African American kids have higher self-esteem than whites and Asians. But there's nothing behind it. It's just bluster, just socializing. Ideas have no place in these communications.
The refining of foods is an adulteration because organic substances are reduced to inorganic ones. So Americans processed foods are to be classified as drugs (inorganic) and not herbs (organic). Any drug must be administered with care; it must be given in careful, moderate doses. But processed food, food with sugar and salt and fat, is a drug that is not dosed, and the outcome is this: over half of Americans are overweight. The medical costs cannot be calculated. Most Americans do not possess a body image they can be pleased with. And we are amongst the most sedentary people ever to live on earth. See section 4, on how electrical devices substitute for nature, leaving many Americans cut off from nature, until they get sick and die. See also 'Disorientation,' coming right up.
America has the best schools, but also some of the worst. Those students in high school who choose excellence, are up against bullies and aggressive cliques. Students who put down other students is a standard of many if not most American public high schools. In some states, more money is spent on high school sports (and cheer leading) than on the sciences, or history, or civics, or the arts. The narrow, competitive model of play help license violence, reinforced by TV and films.
America sponsors and rewards, socially, several separate species of anti-intellectualism. Scientific achievements are not valued by the people; the great scientists go unknown. In many cases, US governments, under narrow ignorant interests, pursued un-scientific and often unjust policies, against the American people. The holocaust of the Native Americans, the cruel injustice of the irredentist slave-holding South, and the restoration of Southern repression under Jim Crow right up till the civil right legislation of the 1960s – and beyond, till the present – these are the great miscarriages of American democracy, bubbles of willful ignorance and crass racism, active right up till today.
Let us hope such collective delusions are in the past. But listening to the far right, who have now become mainstream in the South, the Tea Party and the Republicans, one sees the disparagement and willful neglect of both physical and social sciences. In their naked pursuit of control, the mock Republicans will ruin this nation. It is already happening. Under Reagan and then Bush the Lesser, the rich were basically given a cool trillion and exempted from taxes. Big corporations in America often pay no taxes whatsoever (e.g. GE and Exxon-Mobile)
The willful abuse of science may well break up the United States. The racial bigots in the south, never felt or feel any shame. Why? They say they are Godly but insist of their racial superiority. Why should they control the country, just as they did with their Fugitive Slave laws, and after the Civil War, where, within one year, the Confederacy had basically reversed all US Government edicts, even continuing to hold slaves. These bigots ruled the South from 1868 to the present day. Can we expect their economic or historical theories to hold any value?
Little comment is needed, as it obvious that pop media, driven by corporations interested in quick and easy profits, is a sure indicator of America's decline. All countries in the Western Hemisphere possess profound bolero or folk traditions. But these are not sponsored by the big media companies. Instead, Hispanic music features the fast, big-band mariachi style, while Country Music, is carefully managed, the sappier the better. Dumbing down music will sell more records, up to a point (short term).
Take rap, for example. First, let me remind the reader that African-American music is world class: spirituals, all the traditions of jazz and the blues, Mo-town, and the folk/ballad one as well. But rap is different. There are no melodies (which are hard to create), no need to learn to play an instrument, and no beat more complex than 4 over 4. The rhymes are all obvious, not literary. Any real genre or tradition of music can express a range of emotions, none of them boastful, in your face, self-centric, violent or angry. Yet this music was, is, sponsored, staged and propagated by corporations, for a quarter of a century.
The issue relates to the inner city. Both the artists (African-Americans) and the corporate sponsors, the Jewish executives of Warner Records, were both so highly urbanized that they forfeit a living relation to nature. A human media world is substituted for the natural one. Nature of course does not exclude the humans, but the presentation of what a human is, of what music is, is a total flop.
The USA has an amazing housing stock: even middle class people can often afford a second house, maybe a cabin in the woods. But there is, in some counties, a shortage in adequate family housing. Because abortions are restricted, some one million poor women have children each year, children they cannot support and which may suffer poverty in the form of an absent father, or a father unemployed and idle. Housing is often the first of the needs, since it is the local, the physical frame for the family or the single resident. America is woefully short affordable apartments and rooms for single people of modest means.
Federal housing programs have done wonders keeping needy vulnerable citizens healthy and happy and safe. Yet the Republicans every year threaten to end the Section Eight funding, or just reduce it so only a million are cast out on the street.
Then there is the tie-in with energy. For the rich, the houses got larger and larger, as if the country could maintain burning 20 million barrels of oil a day indefinitely. No. Already petroleum is too expensive for ordinary Americans to burn (much). While heating oil and NG have not gone up as much as diesel and gasoline, there really is no way to sustain our present system.
When people can't afford to burn refined petrol products, the links between communities snap. All the stuff brought in doesn't come: towns, suburbs, cities, rural villages, outlying farms and homes must be 'smart.' To be smart, a town must grow most of its own food and fuel, while being connected to the world wide web.
Rents are way too high. It is not unusual for an American to spend over 50% of his/her discretionary income on rent or mortgage. So housing actually is impoverishing folks, be they home-owners or renters. Landlords must pay because the rich companies and families and ex-CEOs fail to pay their fair share, so the federal government is not able to help the towns (like they used to, before Bush), forcing them to charge higher taxes, which the landlords simply pass on to renters.
The economist David Ricardo often mentioned and examined renting, and concluded that investing in house or property is not best, optimal way to invest money, if you are a true investor, a capitalist out to make profits.
Of course the housing bubble bursting after such a run, triggered the larger collapse of the banks and mortgage lenders and insurance companies, which then afflicted all businesses and many home-owners. The US housing market has not recovered, and it will not, because the money to fuel another bubble, just is not there.
Drugs refer to inorganic substances, poisons, while herbs refer to much more complex organic substances, some of which are toxic. When an organic substance is reduced to an inorganic one, through fermentation, distillation, chemical synthesis and concentration, these simple substances wreak havoc on the human body. Examples of such drugs are: heroin, derived from the opium poppy; cocaine, derived from the coca plant; nicotine, derived from tobacco; LSD, derived from rye ergot; aspirin, derived from the willow; and alcohol (C2H5OH)– the reduction of a complex plant, or herb, to an aldehyde and then a simple substance which can then be used to reduce organic substances (alcoholysis).
The point is that drugs are dangerous because they're poisonous. These synthesized and reduced inorganic substances are entirely alien to human evolutionary history, except with the rise of civilization following the Neolithic. So drugs are deadly poisons. Herbs are a different story altogether. About a third of the plants are toxic to humans, but some others which are not, become a medicinal herb, sacred.
Marijuana is not a drug. It is an herb. It's not poisonous, it's not even toxic. The basic problem is an abujse of science, as cannabis is routinely grouped with heroin, cocaine, and speed, as a dangerous drug. It is neither a drug nor dangerous. It's toxicity has never been determined.
It is impossible to assess the costs and damage that this willful confusion has perpetuated. People routinely get drunk, beat their wives, terrorize their children, and no break any laws. They then go on to kill people with their cars.
Meanwhile, some 19-year old gets pulled over illegally (for his long hair, perhaps). The car is carefully searched, till, voila! - a roach. In some states, that young person's chances in life have been basically ended. If he's caught with another roach, he goes to prison. What a stupid, cruel and indeed fatal mistake this is. For I see no way some 12 states can restore solvency and meet their many obligations, without regulating, taxing cannabis.
One can identify a real solution when it solves several problems all at once.
There are some eighteen to twenty economic 'critical aspects,' ranging from high commodity prices to 'catastrophic blind spots' in the thinking of economists. Many Americans with money assume that capitalism is best studied in its American context. But no: The US economic system is energy-intensive, based on cheap oil from the Middle East (and elsewhere). It marginalizes some 30% of its population. No one should imitate America's system, even if it is hyper-productive. But as an economic historian and legal anthropologist, I know there are many other kinds of capitalism. The word just refers to money or credit that is carefully accumulated and then invested, spent in projects or for tools and materials. (See the author's “Twelve Capitalisms” on line)
American people with money talk of the 'market' - Wall Street – but of course there exist hundreds of discrete markets. Lacking knowledge of the octave, modern economists are at sea in talking about economic realities, because they have no frame by which to carefully discover and assess the synergies and mutual aggravations leading to cascades of profits or losses. While physicist swear by the laws of octave, American social scientists do not know how to apply it social and economic issues.
All the categories of decline listed here bear some relation to economy and economic thinking. When you look at the category, apply its relation to the various economies. These are (in their order in the octave): home, family maintenance (the original meaning of economy); the village; the town; regional economies; urban, national and international markets.
Energy is the elephant in the room, and the USA will not be ready when refined petrol products are two expensive for ordinary people to burn or use. That time is here, or soon to come. And what happens is that all the links that connect communities, towns, villages, snap, one by one. So the task clear: make every town and village, suburb and urban zone, be 'smart.' Being smart means simply that the community can produce most of its food and fuel, while being wired into the world wide web.
Of course, the economists working for money interests have no idea on how create 'smart towns.' The dominant social process over the past two or three centuries, is, of course, rural flight and the cancerous growth of the cities. The only way to staunch this hemorrhaging is to create regional hubs, smart towns, between the rural and the urban.
Money is a rather recent innovation and of course has immeasurable advantages over barter. No body is at fault for the fact that the average wage and income in the city might be nine or twelve times that of a laborer in the countryside. It just happens, because of the concentration of energies in a city. In any country you can see that cities concentrate, monopolize, information, knowledge, money, imports, industry and bureaucratic offices.
Money is not simply an instrument, a technology; it is a symbolic system whose value is agreed upon, that is, a consensual arrangement. It is advisable that communities coin their own monies – simple ways by which families and single folk can be paid for essential work but never recognized by the big money economists: babysitting, care-giving, home maintenance, carpooling, and all transactions by ordinary people who have excluded from capital or credit.
Since the War of 1812, the government of the USA has often been subverted by groups bent their narrow corporate interests. The South managed to legalize slavery in all states – the Fugitive Slave Act – which ordered all authorities, at all levels, everywhere in the US, to return escaped slaves. Again, the South re-gained control just some 20 months after their defeat at Appomattox – abused (i.e. killed) American citizens, both white and black, maintaining Jim Crow right through the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Now they've organized again, commandeering the Republican party, and threaten to impose their wretched self-serving agenda onto the people of the United States. They want to cut government support for the poor, the elderly, the disabled. Having looted America's wealth (under Bush the Lesser), and now trying to get the little given to poor, the sick, these rich men, for some dark reason, want to take the little that the US government gives to the retired, the sick, the disabled, and the destitute. They now hope to balance the budget by cutting aid to the poor, and that includes cutting foreign assistance as well.
The Democrats are not so innocent. They have bought into the same mistakes, allowing the rich and big corporations to go tax free. They use the same twisted statistics – “unemployment is 9.1%.” Of course, those who are unemployed, under-employed or hate their jobs, constitute just about one half the population.
Government does many things well. The US gov. is not particularly large. Nor is it debt to other nations, firms and individuals, particularly large. US debt in 2011 is some $14.2 trillion, but the debt of the British gov. was, is, some $9 trillion. Such debt can be re-paid quickly, were the US gov. willing to cut its bloated defense establishment, tax corporations and the privileged, and rationalize its drug policies, and health expenditures.
It may be that the US will once again succumb to the self-serving southern rich, but it will not go down easily: people will take to the streets, and the much-vaunted union will be no more. There are nine nations in North America, all of them with large regional economies, all of them diverging.
Unemployment is a big issue, requiring government intervention, but the Republican camarilla will not sponsor gov. job-creating. I am thinking of Pres. John son's CETA program, which was highly successful.
Having taken the nation's money, the Republicans now guarantee the broken contract (that if you educate yourself and obey the law, you'd get a job). God knows there is much that needs to be done.
Failure of US policies overseas must be balanced by its success: the Arabs may have vilified and humiliated by US policy (a knee-jerk support of Israel), but they want 'North American style democracy.'
The ideology of free trade may look sound, but the implementation of tariff-free 'global markets' has proven deleterious to America's poor. Poor American farmers should not compete with under-paid serfs in other countries. And American manufacturers should not have to compete with firms from nations that give subsidies to those firms, or keep wages so much lower than those American's earn.
Immigration is an international issue. The computer now permits a more precise immigration policies, where a representative from a foreign country, say a small farmer representing his village, might come to the USA to take courses or serve as an intern, to then return to his village, and upgrade its agriculture.
Yes, the character and culture of the USA has been altered by mass immigration. Approximately 25 million immigrants arrived just in the past 10 years. Poor black, Native and white people now cannot find jobs: they go to immigrants.
It was of course the rich right industry captains (incl. Big farms) who opened up the gates for the poorest territorials to flood in, along with of millions of poor from other nations, in order to cut wages down to survival levels.
We missed a few indicators and causes: the role of religion, political decisiveness and grid lock. “One must not bear false witness against another” might be the best prescription for US governance. The same people who do defame and distort their political adversaries, also call themselves, loudly, to be Christians. I smell a rat. Christ did not champion the rich against the poor, quite the opposite: “If you care to follow me, give away your wealth.”
All these indicators bear relations, one to another, and constitute a vortex. It is the opposite of synergy: it is a set of mutually-aggravating factors. The question is not whether the US is in decline, but whether such decline is terminal.
The author is a web publisher who also moderates the on-line discussion group on Islamic civilization, for graduate-school (GSAS) alumni, Harvard University. Check out his two blogs re America: speculumusa.blogspot.com, and thehumanpreservationproject.blogspot.com.
Is the Decline Terminal? Assessing Indicators to Isolate Causes behind America's Decline
Only a more rigorous, more rational science will extricate us from the tragic down-ward spiral which characterizes America's 'development.' All the indicators, all the neglect and willful ignorance, aggravate each other, when faced with changing environmental and economic realities. They constitute a veritable vortex, as if our nation's lifeblood was pouring out onto the sand. Behind all this are errors in science, physical and social – a devilish corruption.
Many of the errors ultimately stem from not understanding what we are – species Homo Sapiens sapiens. We are all closely related, a human family. Yet the conditions under which the humans were made, are not those in which we live today. Our common ancestors lived lives much more physically rigorous than ours. They were much more emotionally tight, one with another. As for intelligence, they had to be scientists, just to survive. Our ancestors had to know a hundred things perfectly to survive. But today, one needs not know anything. And though America has some of the best schools, it also has very poor ones, not poor in money, but in understanding. It is unfortunate that the latest discoveries in archaeology, evolutionary psychology, economic history, anthropology, neuroscience, embryology, genetics, don't get the space on radio, film or TV that sports does.
Corruption is also viewed as a denying factor, aiding in decremental decline of the polity and the economy and the culture. But there are other kinds of corruption than defalcation and nepotism. When so-called experts bend science to justify a narrow, harmful, unjust policy, that is corruption of the highest order.
A Broken Social Contract:
Such is the anti-intellectualism in the USA, that citizens seeking advanced degrees become impoverished, which is the main reason why our graduate schools now teach mainly foreigners. The country does not value knowledge, and those who seek, quite often get penalized. For example, human resource departments. just did not like people who work overseas, especially outside of Western Europe. Meanwhile, as the firm goes under, the CEOs cry out for people with foreign language skills and experience abroad. One consequence: US companies only account for 25% of their potential, if only they could market overseas.
Since there are few jobs, younger citizens band together. Call them gangs, but they are human groups banding together for survival in this money-first society.
Environmental and Climatic Changes:
Huge hurricanes, monster tornadoes, floods and drought, the invasion of aggressive alien fish, plants, insects, pollution and poisons – America's decline may be driven in part by environmental factors.
3. Energy: cheap oil from the Middle East or the Gulf is a thing of the past. This new high price for gasoline, diesel, home heating oil and jet fuel, means that companies, foundations, and social services, just cannot make it. Their decline may be sudden or it may be gradual. Many Americans can no longer commute to work.
4. Electricity: Power may bring light to the home at night, but in America, about one half the population is glued every night to the Television. Only 5% watch educational programming (including classical drama and concerts), so 45% are watching TV some 10-12 hours a day, mostly spectator sports, dopey cartoons, sex-silly soaps. Spanish-language TV and BET exhibit a corporate dumbing down, just like one can find in Anglo TV.
Much is made of the social media, but is not the question, what will these media say? Why make media an object when it is a tool, a vehicle to channel new perspectives and fresh ideas and facts to the users. But 90% of cell phone conversations are unnecessary. Curiously, it is the minorities which main-line the social media: the TV is on for 74 hours a week in the typical minority home, vs. only 52 for whites and Asians.
Minorities of course suffered from poor self-esteem, but now, thanks to the cell phone, minority students can 'commune' with each other after school, so now, the African American kids have higher self-esteem than whites and Asians. But there's nothing behind it. It's just bluster, just socializing. Ideas have no place in these communications.
5. Food
The refining of foods is an adulteration because organic substances are reduced to inorganic ones. So Americans processed foods are to be classified as drugs (inorganic) and not herbs (organic). Any drug must be administered with care; it must be given in careful, moderate doses. But processed food, food with sugar and salt and fat, is a drug that is not dosed, and the outcome is this: over half of Americans are overweight. The medical costs cannot be calculated. Most Americans do not possess a body image they can be pleased with. And we are amongst the most sedentary people ever to live on earth. See section 4, on how electrical devices substitute for nature, leaving many Americans cut off from nature, until they get sick and die. See also 'Disorientation,' coming right up.
6. Poor Education, Disorientation, Closed Off from Nature
America has the best schools, but also some of the worst. Those students in high school who choose excellence, are up against bullies and aggressive cliques. Students who put down other students is a standard of many if not most American public high schools. In some states, more money is spent on high school sports (and cheer leading) than on the sciences, or history, or civics, or the arts. The narrow, competitive model of play help license violence, reinforced by TV and films.
America sponsors and rewards, socially, several separate species of anti-intellectualism. Scientific achievements are not valued by the people; the great scientists go unknown. In many cases, US governments, under narrow ignorant interests, pursued un-scientific and often unjust policies, against the American people. The holocaust of the Native Americans, the cruel injustice of the irredentist slave-holding South, and the restoration of Southern repression under Jim Crow right up till the civil right legislation of the 1960s – and beyond, till the present – these are the great miscarriages of American democracy, bubbles of willful ignorance and crass racism, active right up till today.
Let us hope such collective delusions are in the past. But listening to the far right, who have now become mainstream in the South, the Tea Party and the Republicans, one sees the disparagement and willful neglect of both physical and social sciences. In their naked pursuit of control, the mock Republicans will ruin this nation. It is already happening. Under Reagan and then Bush the Lesser, the rich were basically given a cool trillion and exempted from taxes. Big corporations in America often pay no taxes whatsoever (e.g. GE and Exxon-Mobile)
The willful abuse of science may well break up the United States. The racial bigots in the south, never felt or feel any shame. Why? They say they are Godly but insist of their racial superiority. Why should they control the country, just as they did with their Fugitive Slave laws, and after the Civil War, where, within one year, the Confederacy had basically reversed all US Government edicts, even continuing to hold slaves. These bigots ruled the South from 1868 to the present day. Can we expect their economic or historical theories to hold any value?
7. Pop Culture: A Race to the Bottom
Little comment is needed, as it obvious that pop media, driven by corporations interested in quick and easy profits, is a sure indicator of America's decline. All countries in the Western Hemisphere possess profound bolero or folk traditions. But these are not sponsored by the big media companies. Instead, Hispanic music features the fast, big-band mariachi style, while Country Music, is carefully managed, the sappier the better. Dumbing down music will sell more records, up to a point (short term).
Take rap, for example. First, let me remind the reader that African-American music is world class: spirituals, all the traditions of jazz and the blues, Mo-town, and the folk/ballad one as well. But rap is different. There are no melodies (which are hard to create), no need to learn to play an instrument, and no beat more complex than 4 over 4. The rhymes are all obvious, not literary. Any real genre or tradition of music can express a range of emotions, none of them boastful, in your face, self-centric, violent or angry. Yet this music was, is, sponsored, staged and propagated by corporations, for a quarter of a century.
The issue relates to the inner city. Both the artists (African-Americans) and the corporate sponsors, the Jewish executives of Warner Records, were both so highly urbanized that they forfeit a living relation to nature. A human media world is substituted for the natural one. Nature of course does not exclude the humans, but the presentation of what a human is, of what music is, is a total flop.
6. Housing
The USA has an amazing housing stock: even middle class people can often afford a second house, maybe a cabin in the woods. But there is, in some counties, a shortage in adequate family housing. Because abortions are restricted, some one million poor women have children each year, children they cannot support and which may suffer poverty in the form of an absent father, or a father unemployed and idle. Housing is often the first of the needs, since it is the local, the physical frame for the family or the single resident. America is woefully short affordable apartments and rooms for single people of modest means.
Federal housing programs have done wonders keeping needy vulnerable citizens healthy and happy and safe. Yet the Republicans every year threaten to end the Section Eight funding, or just reduce it so only a million are cast out on the street.
Then there is the tie-in with energy. For the rich, the houses got larger and larger, as if the country could maintain burning 20 million barrels of oil a day indefinitely. No. Already petroleum is too expensive for ordinary Americans to burn (much). While heating oil and NG have not gone up as much as diesel and gasoline, there really is no way to sustain our present system.
When people can't afford to burn refined petrol products, the links between communities snap. All the stuff brought in doesn't come: towns, suburbs, cities, rural villages, outlying farms and homes must be 'smart.' To be smart, a town must grow most of its own food and fuel, while being connected to the world wide web.
Rents are way too high. It is not unusual for an American to spend over 50% of his/her discretionary income on rent or mortgage. So housing actually is impoverishing folks, be they home-owners or renters. Landlords must pay because the rich companies and families and ex-CEOs fail to pay their fair share, so the federal government is not able to help the towns (like they used to, before Bush), forcing them to charge higher taxes, which the landlords simply pass on to renters.
The economist David Ricardo often mentioned and examined renting, and concluded that investing in house or property is not best, optimal way to invest money, if you are a true investor, a capitalist out to make profits.
Of course the housing bubble bursting after such a run, triggered the larger collapse of the banks and mortgage lenders and insurance companies, which then afflicted all businesses and many home-owners. The US housing market has not recovered, and it will not, because the money to fuel another bubble, just is not there.
7. Drug Costs and Drug Policy
Drugs refer to inorganic substances, poisons, while herbs refer to much more complex organic substances, some of which are toxic. When an organic substance is reduced to an inorganic one, through fermentation, distillation, chemical synthesis and concentration, these simple substances wreak havoc on the human body. Examples of such drugs are: heroin, derived from the opium poppy; cocaine, derived from the coca plant; nicotine, derived from tobacco; LSD, derived from rye ergot; aspirin, derived from the willow; and alcohol (C2H5OH)– the reduction of a complex plant, or herb, to an aldehyde and then a simple substance which can then be used to reduce organic substances (alcoholysis).
The point is that drugs are dangerous because they're poisonous. These synthesized and reduced inorganic substances are entirely alien to human evolutionary history, except with the rise of civilization following the Neolithic. So drugs are deadly poisons. Herbs are a different story altogether. About a third of the plants are toxic to humans, but some others which are not, become a medicinal herb, sacred.
Marijuana is not a drug. It is an herb. It's not poisonous, it's not even toxic. The basic problem is an abujse of science, as cannabis is routinely grouped with heroin, cocaine, and speed, as a dangerous drug. It is neither a drug nor dangerous. It's toxicity has never been determined.
It is impossible to assess the costs and damage that this willful confusion has perpetuated. People routinely get drunk, beat their wives, terrorize their children, and no break any laws. They then go on to kill people with their cars.
Meanwhile, some 19-year old gets pulled over illegally (for his long hair, perhaps). The car is carefully searched, till, voila! - a roach. In some states, that young person's chances in life have been basically ended. If he's caught with another roach, he goes to prison. What a stupid, cruel and indeed fatal mistake this is. For I see no way some 12 states can restore solvency and meet their many obligations, without regulating, taxing cannabis.
One can identify a real solution when it solves several problems all at once.
Economic: Indicators and Professional Blind Spots
There are some eighteen to twenty economic 'critical aspects,' ranging from high commodity prices to 'catastrophic blind spots' in the thinking of economists. Many Americans with money assume that capitalism is best studied in its American context. But no: The US economic system is energy-intensive, based on cheap oil from the Middle East (and elsewhere). It marginalizes some 30% of its population. No one should imitate America's system, even if it is hyper-productive. But as an economic historian and legal anthropologist, I know there are many other kinds of capitalism. The word just refers to money or credit that is carefully accumulated and then invested, spent in projects or for tools and materials. (See the author's “Twelve Capitalisms” on line)
Probably the most profitable and humane capitalist system is the Muslim one. Anyone who visits a Muslim country is struck by the markets: even the poorest vendor is guaranteed a place in the market. Ordinary people hold and trade shares, in many kinds of projects, such as long-distance trade, opening a well, staffing a small store, and in real estate. According to Islamic law, a house is owned by the family. But of course today, men own the houses. The Islamic system has been isolated (see “Land-use and Land-ownership in Islamic Civilization,” on line at
www.middleeastspeculum.blogspot.com) but has long been prey to tribal dictates, corrupt actors including clergy, the secular elite and strong international factors.
American people with money talk of the 'market' - Wall Street – but of course there exist hundreds of discrete markets. Lacking knowledge of the octave, modern economists are at sea in talking about economic realities, because they have no frame by which to carefully discover and assess the synergies and mutual aggravations leading to cascades of profits or losses. While physicist swear by the laws of octave, American social scientists do not know how to apply it social and economic issues.
All the categories of decline listed here bear some relation to economy and economic thinking. When you look at the category, apply its relation to the various economies. These are (in their order in the octave): home, family maintenance (the original meaning of economy); the village; the town; regional economies; urban, national and international markets.
Energy is the elephant in the room, and the USA will not be ready when refined petrol products are two expensive for ordinary people to burn or use. That time is here, or soon to come. And what happens is that all the links that connect communities, towns, villages, snap, one by one. So the task clear: make every town and village, suburb and urban zone, be 'smart.' Being smart means simply that the community can produce most of its food and fuel, while being wired into the world wide web.
Of course, the economists working for money interests have no idea on how create 'smart towns.' The dominant social process over the past two or three centuries, is, of course, rural flight and the cancerous growth of the cities. The only way to staunch this hemorrhaging is to create regional hubs, smart towns, between the rural and the urban.
Money is a rather recent innovation and of course has immeasurable advantages over barter. No body is at fault for the fact that the average wage and income in the city might be nine or twelve times that of a laborer in the countryside. It just happens, because of the concentration of energies in a city. In any country you can see that cities concentrate, monopolize, information, knowledge, money, imports, industry and bureaucratic offices.
Money is not simply an instrument, a technology; it is a symbolic system whose value is agreed upon, that is, a consensual arrangement. It is advisable that communities coin their own monies – simple ways by which families and single folk can be paid for essential work but never recognized by the big money economists: babysitting, care-giving, home maintenance, carpooling, and all transactions by ordinary people who have excluded from capital or credit.
Much is made of debtz
Government Failures: Intentional or What?
Since the War of 1812, the government of the USA has often been subverted by groups bent their narrow corporate interests. The South managed to legalize slavery in all states – the Fugitive Slave Act – which ordered all authorities, at all levels, everywhere in the US, to return escaped slaves. Again, the South re-gained control just some 20 months after their defeat at Appomattox – abused (i.e. killed) American citizens, both white and black, maintaining Jim Crow right through the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Now they've organized again, commandeering the Republican party, and threaten to impose their wretched self-serving agenda onto the people of the United States. They want to cut government support for the poor, the elderly, the disabled. Having looted America's wealth, while trying to get the little given to the less fortunate, these rich men, for some reason, want to take the little that does goes to the retired, the sick, the disabled, and the destitute. They now hope to balance the budget by cutting aid to the poor, and that includes cutting foreign assistance as well.
The Democrats are not so innocent. They have bought into the same mistakes, allowing the rich and big corporations to go tax free. They use the same twisted statistics – “unemployment is 9.1%.” Of course, those who are unemployed, under-employed or hate their jobs, constitute just about one half the population.
Government does many things well. The US gov. is not particularly large. Nor is it debt to other nations, firms and individuals, particularly large. US debt in 2011 is some $14.2 trillion, but the debt of the British gov. was, is, some $9 trillion. Such debt can be re-paid quickly, were the US gov. willing to cut its bloated defense establishment, tax corporations and the privileged, and rationalize its drug policies, and health expenditures.
It may be that the US will once again succumb to the self-serving southern rich, but it will not go down easily: people will take to the streets, and the much-vaunted union will be no more. There are nine nations in North America, all of them with large regional economies, all of them diverging.
Unemployment is a big issue, requiring government intervention, but the Republican camarilla will not sponsor gov. job-creating. I am thinking of Pres. John son's CETA program, which was highly successful.
Having taken the nation's money, the Republicans now guarantee the broken contract (that if you educate yourself and obey the law, you'd get a job). God knows there is much that needs to be done.
International Dimensions -
Failure of US policies overseas must be balanced by its success: the Arabs may have vilified and humiliated by US policy (a knee-jerk support of Israel), but they want 'North American style democracy.'
The ideology of free trade may look sound, but the implementation of tariff-free 'global markets' has proven deleterious to America's poor. Poor American farmers should not compete with under-paid serfs in other countries. And American manufacturers should not have to compete with firms from nations that give subsidies to those firms, or keep wages so much lower than those American's earn.
Immigration is an international issue. The computer now permits a more precise immigration policies, where a representative from a foreign country, say a small farmer representing his village, might come to the USA to take courses or serve as an intern, to then return to his village, and upgrade its agriculture.
Yes, the character and culture of the USA has been altered by mass immigration. Approximately 25 million immigrants arrived just in the past 10 years. Poor black, Native and white people now cannot find jobs: they go to immigrants.
It was of course the rich right industry captains (incl. Big farms) who opened up the gates for the poorest territorials to flood in, along with of millions of poor from other nations, in order to cut wages down to survival levels.
The Vortex of Decremental Decline
We missed a few indicators and causes: the role of religion, political decisiveness and grid lock. “One must not bear false witness against another” might be the best prescription for US governance. The same people who do defame and distort their political adversaries, also call themselves, loudly, to be Christians. I smell a rat. Christ did not champion the rich against the poor, quite the opposite: “If you care to follow me, give away your wealth.”
All these indicators bear relations, one to another, and constitute a vortex. It is the opposite of synergy: it is a set of mutually-aggravating factors. The question is not whether the US is in decline, but whether such decline is terminal.
-John Paul Maynard
Harvard University
The author is a web publisher who also moderates the on-line discussion group on Islamic civilization, for graduate-school (GSAS) alumni, Harvard University. Check out his two blogs re America: speculumusa.blogspot.com, and thehumanpreservationproject.blogspot.com.
America in Decline: Tracking Indicators to Find Causes and Cures
Part Nine : Drugs and Drug Policy: An Appeal to Science
In our survey, we were a bit surprised to find drugs to be such a strong factor in America's decline. We tried to estimate the cost of drug abuse and the failed US drug policy, but quickly found that the costs were multiple and interdependent, and that they were so great they could not be quantified.
Here we appeal for scientific truth - a return to basic scientific principles.
RATIONALIZING DRUG POLICIES IN THE UNITED STATES
It was Muhammad Qurayshi who, more than anyone, initiated modern medicine when he said, publicly: “Every disease has a cause and a cure.” That ended all the superstition and all the quackery relating to ignorance. The Qur'an picked up the medical theme, saying “Do not think disease and disability are punishments from God.”
Amongst their many achievements in medicine, the Muslim scientists (who included Armenians, Jews, Persians, Turks and others) initiated a pharmacopeia consisting of some 700 inorganic substances – drugs. Each was dispensed in a calculated dose, for a given term.
It was the Swiss doctor Paracelsus (d. 1541) who, some 800 years later, brought pharmacology to Europe – against great resistance. His initial, cardinal axiom was, is: “Every substance is poisonous.”
Drug is a Dutch word. It came into England on the same wave that the stock market did. A drug is an inorganic substance. But another meaning of the word evolved: any substance ingested which alters the health or in particular, the consciousness of the subject. For example, food is a drug. Even good food becomes poisonous if taken in excess of the lawful dose.
Quite correctly, the meaning of the Dutch word 'drug' has expanded to include other cravings and addictions: TV as a drug, religion as opium, war as a drug, and so forth. This meaning is indeed backed up by neuroscience: all rewards use, play on, the same mid-brain system, with its pathways through the limbic system.
Simple pure inorganic substances are not natural or customary to the humans. They played no part in human evolution, except maybe salt. The humans got high on plants. Almost all human communities used some plant or plant concoction to explore their quite peculiar (semi-) consciousness; or to relieve pain. Pain of course is not just physical pain, but emotional as well.
Having re-stated the key axioms and corollaries, let us approach North America. The Canadians and the Americans use the most drugs, though other nations are not far behind.
One constant to civilization was, is, the fermentation of plants into liquor and beer. It is the reduction of an organic substance to an inorganic one. Alcohol is a drug because organic substances are distilled to make very simple inorganic alcohol.
All these potent alien substances, alien to humans, must be used under a doctor's supervision, by prescription, that is, carefully dosed for a given term. And that doctor today in North America is now a pharmacologist, because drugs are so dangerous – not just in their incisive affects and effects, but because they can interact, fatally.
Plants contain, of course, much more complicated molecules. Many plants are toxic. (Poisons are inorganic substances). About one third of plant species are toxic to animals. Bacteria are generally poisonous, because their waste consists of inorganic molecules. The social insects have evolved deadly venoms, as have the older snakes, some ancient lizards, fish, and octopus. But most plant toxins are not venoms. Some are alkaloids, originally designed to ward off insects and fungi.
The largest, most complex molecules in nature are snake venom: molecules so large and complex that scientists have rightly concluded they might also have benefits, unique benefits, for people in certain situations. Acute hypertension, acute chronic pain, are two disorders now being treated with the toxins of deadly snakes. Or the synthesis of such toxins.
My point is simply that there is an experiential dialogue going in our bodies between organic toxins and inorganic poisons. For example, drinking alcohol does not go well with cannabis, and the population is divided into these two groups.
Bear with me, dear reader: I am trying to get to the bottom of the drug issue, by summoning first principles and accurate data re drugs, herbs and human physiology. Careful attention to terms is requisite and pertinent. Drugs refer to inorganic substances, while herbs feature organic molecules. Drugs are entirely alien to the humans. Exploring herbs and plants was normal. This is backed up by modern neuroscience, which has located wide-spread cannabinoid receptors throughout the brain.
Those receptors probably developed independent of cannabis, but, as of this date, this huge number of tiny receptors, found in every region of the brain, only responds to cannabis. This presents three problems: first, I doubt the relationship between cannabis and humans was that intimate, that prevalent and that old, to influence evolution. But I could be wrong. Cannabis entered Africa at any early date, so early we cannot be sure that the plant was not carried into Africa, from Central Asia. Some modern humans left Africa some 200,000 years ago. And 200,000 years ago is just enough time for the quickly-changing brain to develop tiny receptors, receptors responding only to cannabis.
The second problem is this: since the brain is primed for pot, the user can become dependent on it. It can be too good.
The third problem is this: the toxicity of cannabis has never been determined. This goes against our core principles, 'that every substance is poisonous.' As potheads know, you can't get sick on it, no matter how much you smoke. And potheads also know that you don't get any higher if you keep smoking the stuff.
Before we turn to look at the United States, let me reiterate that drugs are alien to human evolutionary experience, while plants were always used all through evolution, to produce psychotropic and therapeutic effects.
The great danger is the synthesis of plant materials into inorganic chemicals. Alcohol, cocaine, heroin, LSD, synthesized mescaline, amphetamines, caffeine - these are all derived from plants, but carefully isolated, 'distilled,' and then, synthesized. As inorganic substances, they cut through the delicate biological complexity and balance, drastically – and mechanically – altering consciousness.
Organic substances derived from plants (and fungi) function very differently – a much more complex and organic process - locking into preexisting receptors in the brain, and elsewhere. Those who use herbs to heal know well the gentle, slow, deep, effects and affects, as befitting an organic substance acting in and upon an organism.
I want to turn now to examine drugs in American society, noting their costs, and laying out a proper course for government policies. But I do not want to lose our scientific rigor. Sadly, this rigor has been lacking in American approach to drugs.
Obviously, any intelligent society would rationalize its toxins and its poisons. By that, I simply mean ordering and listing drugs and herbs in order of their danger, their toxicity and their damage to peoples' lives and society in general. That is such an obvious thing to do. But the USA government, and state and municipal governments, do not do that. Their list is not scientific. The damage can be traced to this lapse in science. Marijuana is not a drug but an herb.
In America you can get drunk every day of the week, slap your wife, cut her up verbally, rape her in a drunken stupor, yell at the kids (or withdrawal in shame and stupor), kick the dog – and not break any laws.
Yet if a man or woman gets stopped and searched 'on suspicion of illegal use of a dangerous drug,' - and a single little pot roach is found (after lengthy police search of the vehicle), that individual, usually a young man, will be prosecuted with a vengeance, convicted, fined, sentenced often to jail. And when that individual comes out of prison, he will find that he can no longer get a job, support a family, access public housing – for the rest of his life.
Why on earth is America so vindictive? Is it 'pharmacological Calvinism'? If so, it is not good Calvinism. Because if you read the writings of John Calvin, you'll see he calls humans 'weak' and 'flawed' and would not support for a moment cannabis over alcohol, if he knew the facts.
No, one cannot quantify the damage inflicted by so-called 'law enforcement.' Let us try. Some 830,000 Americans are arrested for marijuana each year in the USA, a steady statistic going back forty years. That's roughly 34 million people, over half of whom will be treated as criminals and deprived of rights and the chance to support a family.
How could such a travesty happen? Are we not scientific? Are we not just? Why does the law permit people to freely damage themselves and even kill others using legal alcohol, and processed food, while an entirely innocent and harmless behavior – experimenting with a non-toxic plant – can land you in prison for life (for dealing), ruin any chance of life outside prison, and condemn the individual to a life-long marginalization? But this is the American way, in most states, even at this late date.
The fact that this scientific society cannot rationalize its toxins and its poisons does not augur well for either the people or the government. Many of the costs relating to drugs stem from this strange refusal to rationalize toxins and poisons.
Both culture and politics are responsible. The cultural mistakes are made by so-called experts who keep proving to the public, just how foolish and biased and mean they are. Still today, one can still hear authority figures, doctors who do not practice, often in pay of narrow interests, speaking of heroin, cocaine, and cannabis in one sentence, as if they could be equated. And they do this with a straight face!
So one can see why it is an emergency situation. Once again the truth has been subverted, and millions are suffering grievously. Some are suffering from the hard drugs they use (i.e., alcohol, speed) while others suffer from being criminally prosecuted for using a (basically) harmless herb “to put a little buzz on.”
When I first tried cannabis, I wondered what all the fuss was about. It was not intoxicating. It seemed to increase, not decrease, the accuracy and speed of reflexes, and thoughts (which are reflexes) in my case. But it was just “a little buzz.” And of course it is non-toxic, and that is very good news. Because it is the herb of choice by the discriminating.
As I just tried to explain, drugs, that is, inorganic synthesized chemicals, are much more damaging than (non-toxic) herbs. True, plants can be toxic but, oddly, the toxicity of marijuana has never been established. That is an anomaly.
With all of our science and education, with our talk of freedom and rights, the USA seems unable to view drugs and herbs accurately. And therefore fails to treat its citizens justly. Why?
When prohibition ended, the enforcement bureaucracy needed jobs so they after marijuana use amongst the African Americans and Hispanic minorities. Tens of thousands of innocent minorities were convicted and sentenced to hard labor in chain gangs: slavery.
Today, the government and so-called anti-drug lobbyists constitute an industry and a tax-paid bureaucracy which, again, insists on listing marijuana as a dangerous drug. It is neither dangerous or a drug.
Then there are the bureaucrats and officers and staff who all depend on prosecutions, busts. It is easy to hide heroin and cocaine or tabs of LSD, MDA, speed or illegal prescription drugs. Marijuana is of course much bulkier. So pot busts have always been the easiest, and many a cop has won his stars by busting innocent citizens for tiny roaches. The police get their little gold stars, while the busted American can no longer get a job. That is evil corruption that should have been halted in 1970. But it is still going on in most of the states.
Then there is corporate corruption. The liquor industry does not want people going off drink and onto pot. So they work behind the scenes, funding lobbyists and certain 'experts' who then testify before congressional sub-committees, that pot is the most dangerous of them all. That's evil corruption.
Repeatedly, in the history of the United States, industries have dictated inimical and unjust policies. The most obvious example is the sorry history of the cigarette, which in America, is an extremely most toxic substance because it is adulterated. American cigarettes are sugar cured, which is carcinogenic in itself. Then American industry puts into cigarettes some 500 different chemicals, including fiberglass and saltpeter. Under combustion, those chemical become deadly.
Because foods have been so refined in the US, many foods pass from being organic substances into inorganic ones. Eating a piece of white bread, for example, throws as much sugar into the system as a piece of cake or a dish of ice cream. The pancreases of most Americans are like a yo-yos, being constantly summoned to produce and secrete insulin. No wonder the diabetes epidemic.
But the pancreas is just one organ that suffers when food becomes, literally, chemically, a drug. The obesity epidemic is most pronounced in the USA, and there is no mystery why this is so. Our super-refined foods are all drugs, potentially poisonous if not dosed, activating the exact same reward system triggered by the drugs heroin, cocaine and alcohol.
The adulteration of food in the USA is, of course, legendary, and needs little comment. Let me just say that the pure food movement in the US has deep roots. It began in the 1820s in Northampton , Massachusetts, when Sylvester Graham decided to move against white bleached flour: he advised eating bran. But he was legally harassed by bakers, some of whom plotted to kill him. He did a little science and found that it was a regular practice of bakers to pour into white bleached flour, 'filler' – plaster, lime, white lead paint, and sawdust and floor sweepings, including dried dung from rats. Even before the railroads, Graham established some 100 chapters throughout the East, traveling relentlessly. Nabisco popularized the 'Graham Cracker' but, today, it is an over-refined sterile white flour cake with sugar and a little cinnamon.
Red meat is known to be poisonous, yet the cattle industry wants all Americans to eat beef eight times a week – and are willing and able to corrupt the courts to enforce this. Anybody who speaks against red meat, in any public medium, is liable to be destroyed.
The drug issue is just one of some eight or ten reasons the US is going down. Focusing on pot is to the point. Because pot is bulky, and can be detected by smell, police miss the dangerous drugs, but still get their golden stars. It has distracted them.
Our research validates the findings in early June 2011 of the very special Global Commission on Drugs. But we are going to go one step further and show how the US government can use the “a-legalization” of cannabis, to cut in half the hard drugs coming into the USA, and the number of victims who use these dangerous drugs.
PRESCRIPTIONS:
Now, suppose the governments said to the street: “If you deal or possess hard and dangerous drugs, we will prosecute you, sentencing you to prison. But if you deal in herbs, we will view that as a-legal.” This message would be repeated and delivered to the Caribbean, to South America and Mexico, to the farmers of Afghanistan, as well as the many thousands of gangs in the USA. Meanwhile, border police would focus on preventing hard drugs from entering the country, and preventing guns and ammo flowing into Mexico. If enough cannabis gets through, or is grown, then, of course, the price comes right down, thereby rendering the gangs irrelevant, since they can no longer pay their men and women.
What do you think will happen?
If I am not mistaken, we will cut the dangerous drugs coming into the US by at least half, and hard-drug consumption by Americans by even more, as the years go by. Many alcoholics and heroin/cocaine/speed victims, say they would have stayed with pot, if was easy to get. Even alcoholics say that. No one can calculate the benefits of such an intelligent substitution.
If we found the right solution, it would solve many problems at once. For example, I see no way many of the American states can restore solvency without legalizing marijuana. And since pot is so widely used, it stands to reason that the government should tax and regulate it.
Here is a read out of the benefits of a-legalizing marijuana:
-cut in half the dangerous drugs coming into America
-provide a non-toxic substitute for dangerous inorganic substances (alcohol, drugs)
-drive the gangs out of business, because of competition, the price of cannabis comes down.
-assist hard drug addicts and users to switch to cannabis
-provide Americans with a valuable non-toxic medicine to treat a variety of ailments. Need I name them?
- allow states and local municipalities to make the money, money they desperatly need. They will not get unless they tax reefer.
-prevent the ruining of peoples' lives because of some cannabis conviction on their record, and reverse the unjust convictions thereby restoring some 15 million American lives.
As an anthropologist, I know that almost all societies use plants to alter their consciousness. So experimentation with herbs is not an aberration for the humans.
The need is to reduce the harm. Top priority: rationalize the toxins, that is, order drugs according to their costs, their damage: alcohol, heroin, cocaine, prescription drugs, amphetamines, ecstasy – we need to reduce all these dangerous substances – now!
People can become dependent on marijuana, but people become dependent on all sorts of things. One way to cure the alcohol, nicotine fiend is to just give him all he or she wants – make him drink, make him smoke. Pot smokers know they don't get any higher if they keep smoking, so they desist, then learn to go without it, by not valuing it so much. Since it no longer costly and illegal, cannabis loses its cache.
Younger people do need to know about themselves. Instead of driving them into beer, liquor, cigarettes, and hard drugs, let them substitute their poisons for a little marijuana. The Chinese used cannabis to treat senility, and it does seem that those who can most benefit, are the middle aged and elderly. But the Chinese prescribed cannabis as a regular, long-term therapy. I doubt they gave it to patients with severe neuro-degenerative disorders, or anyone not of sound mind.
The anti-marijuana 'expert' in the pay of companies or the government, will point to marijuana's “proven” effect on killing motivation, especially amongst teenagers.” Well, the lack of motivation inevitably comes from another source. Maybe the family watches TV instead of discussing issues. That's enough to thoroughly de-motivate and demoralize an intelligent teenager. Some high schools are fine, but others feature bullying (even by teachers), vapid curriculum, and reward system that rewards athletes over scientists. All our efforts have failed to change these schools. Do we blame all these students who are looking for more, more inclusion and better ideas? Why kill the freaks?
Why does the Republican right wing hate marijuana? Note that the Taliban in Afghanistan do, basically the same: tolerate and encourage the poppy, but punish farmers growing cannabis. Why? In prisons overseas, where western drug/herb possessors are found, the heroin and cocaine dealers have the money to buy lawyers and protection, and bribe the guards to treat them like kings. In one prison, the guards would regularly beat the cannabis possessors, while serving tea and dinner to the heroin dealers in another room. Why? Because the US State Department pushed through an evangelical agenda. Some self-acclaimed 'Christian' priests and pastors, largely in the American south, understand full well that marijuana sometimes opens minds, and that means, they sometimes leave the Judaic-Christian tradition, to pursue Buddhism or become Pagans or secular servants of the Goddess of Mercy – and all this is intolerable to the mean uneducated American clerics and politicians. Is the USA similar to Iran?
Obviously the American people should be informed of a rational list of dangerous drugs, while placing their herbs in their
proper category.
That these mean, self-serving self-appointing 'representatives of God,' should set and determine US government policy, augurs poorly for a safe, just, democratic and financially solvent America.
Regarding morality, we speak of 'moral,' 'immoral,' and 'amoral.' Legally, there exists a third category as well: legal, illegal and a-legal. We don't have to legalize marijuana. We just need to deploy our limited resources more accurately to catch the dangerous drugs. Some 20 American states are looking at steep debts and insolvency; people are already perishing. It just stands to reason that the three levels of government exploit the situation, tax reefer, and get back to solvency. That's only rationale.
These are not my opinions: I've insisted on scientific rigor. In addition we've presented a scheme, a plan, whereby hard, dangerous, addictive drugs, like alcohol, speed, cocaine and heroin, can be drastically cut. If the a-legalization of marijuana turns out not to work, it can easily be rescinded. Why cannot our policies be flexible?
As I explained, cannabis is not a drug: it is an herb. And a noble one. The uses of hemp are too numerous to list. If the US does not start to grow hemp, it forces a high resource consumption of petroleum-dependent 'second bests.' I'm talking about paper, cardboard, plywood (which is poisonous), clothing and textiles of all kind, shoe leather, fiber board, heating fuel, and more. Hemp seeds and oil also have many good uses.
To solve this issue, to rationalize toxins and poisons, we must return to science and insist that science be the basis of our drug policies. This is a Class A civil rights issue. One can trace the error back to errors in science. The government bent science to enforce an unjust policy. They based their views on non-practicing physicians, none of whom studied herbs. Because plants are so complex, doctors just do not study herbs – not in school and not in their practice.
Science has reduced living organisms to just bundles of chemicals, simple molecules undergoing simple predictable mechanical reactions. The 'miracle' of modern bio-chemistry is still limited to simple organic molecules, featuring the geometric hexagonal carbon 'ring.' All this chemistry happens totally mechanically – or so they think. But cells are highly intelligent, and quickly adaptive: they are little cities, even more complex, because these micro-cities are basically factories. Inter-cellular life is even more amazing.
Science scoffs and says there is no 'life force.' There, their investigation stops. But the simple atom, is set up in a vibratory harmony that does obey the Law of the Seven and the Law of Three.
Up to now we have paid close attention to correcting obvious mistakes and confusions. Toxins and poisons are very different, and the most damage comes from taking a plant, then reducing it to 'active substances' synthesize then insert into the body. It is these refined and distilled products that constitute the most damage to the human, both biologically and socially (as a cost). It can be seen in the processing, the “refining' of food. It is seen in the deadly effects of liquor, heroin and cocaine and amphetamines. And ion prescription drugs as well. Such inorganic poisons often prove fatal .
But herbs are different. If inorganic drugs prove so poisonous and destructive, then their plant precursors might have other curative abilities, as herbs. Heroin may be highly dangerous, but a little pellet of fresh opium can (and will) save the life of a child with diarrhea. Red wine may be healthy but it is the plant material, not the alcohol, that confers the benefit. All liquors retain an essential plant component, and only wretches drink alcohol straight – a deadly mistake.
Powdered cocaine is highly dangerous, but chewing coca leaves is not even addictive. Chewing on a willow sprig provides a purer and safer relief than aspirin, which can be destructive to the stomach. Herbs are not studied by doctors because herbs are complex and sometimes slow-acting:'not effective immediately.' But history tells a different tale: Those herbal witch-doctors caused more help than harm, while Western 'medicine' was more harmful than good, until the 20th Century.
Our conclusions were confirmed by the Global Commission on Drugs, which released their finding in early June (2011). Marijuana should be decriminalized. It's just an herb with mild effects on the head – a little buzz – with no toxicity. While every human society may have experimented with plants, most plants they used for psychotropic effects and affects, were toxic. We are lucky that many Americans have eschewed liquor and hard drugs and some expensive prescription drugs, in preference to smoking a little pot, which is not toxic. Cannabis is an unusually noble weed, long in use, not just by the Central Asian tribes, but in sacred temples in Africa, Greece and Israel as well.
Is marijuana completely harmless? No. It seems to enhance whatever state the user is in – while pacifying it, a bit. It can induce psychosis, rarely, in people who are unaware of what is happening, or who are so rigid in their views or so habituated they cannot cope with the enhanced perceptions and a vivid interior. Teenagers will experiment with mind-altering drugs – but cannabis is an herb, and should be classified as such.
Many 'experts' believe pot-smoking inhibits motivation. But if you look carefully into cases, they all exhibit other reasons why a young person may not be motivated. Some of our American communities are actually sterile places: the inner city, the anonymous suburbs and their ridiculous uniformity, and in the rural areas as well, amongst the poor.
Now why would a young person not be motivated in America? Is he distracted by the media – too much TV and cell phone use? Or is his family toxic? Almost certainly, that pot-smoking high school drop-out failed to be acknowledged or recognized and appreciated by his immediate superiors. Is the recourse of these American children to cannabis dangerous? Not really. They might need an herbal medication, against boredom if nothing else. Why pump them full of drugs?
It used to be that a young person might expect that, should she educate herself, not break the law, he or she would find, eventually, a job that would use her/his hard-won competencies. That is not what is happening. Only 1/3 of those winning graduate degrees ever got a job in his or her field. Now, it is much worse. Less than one in 5 are finding any relevant work (over a 5 year period).
Now, how do you pay these people for the failure of a weak and bewildered government? You don't harm them, take away their rights, put them in prison. Don't you think these citizens might deserve a little smoke, just to calm them down?
Yes, marijuana is just compensation for many millions of Americans who have been effectively denied a place in this rapacious oil-heavy corporate capitalist economy. Because of its waste and anomie, its marginalization of most citizens, and its aggressive harming to its poor, the American form of capitalism is not even listed amongst the 12 kinds of capitalism we have isolated and studied. It's too wasteful. No other people should imitate it. And it is short lived.
-John Paul Maynard
