Famous Medical Marijuana Patients?
About 100 million Americans have used marijuana at least once in their life. Some of these people have turned out to be very successful, despite the stereotype of the lazy “pot head.” Taking a “toke” is apparently not, by itself, an obstacle to achievement.
President George W. Bush smoked “pot,” but he does not want people to know that…for the sake of the children. Political men like Bush having been protecting the children in their paradoxical way since the beginning (see Socrates’ accusers). In politics, saying one thing but doing another is nothing new. For some, that is politics.
Just ask Arnold Schwarzenegger. As a body-builder he tried marijuana for “fun,” but as a Governor of the first State in the Union to decriminalize marijuana for medical use in 1996, Schwarzenegger has been AWOL on the issue, tacitly allowing the Bush Administration to usurp California’s resources to conduct Federal-led medical marijuana raids that punish people for conduct the State of California does not consider illegal.
The fact that marijuana is illegal under Federal law did not stop Justice Clarence Thomas from getting “high.” To his credit, at least Thomas dissented from the 2005 Raich decision in which a majority of the United States Supreme Court somehow found in the Constitution’s commerce clause the authority to criminalize a wholly intra-state, non-commercial activity (even though the Court could not point to any empirical evidence showing that medical marijuana had a commercial impact on interstate commerce).
Parsing the law to justify one’s personal perspective comes easy to another famous cannabis connoisseur: Bill Clinton. The former commander-in-chief “proved” his tough-on-crime credentials by allowing his administration to go after doctors who recommend medical marijuana to seriously ill patients. Clinton couldn’t inhale himself, which somehow led him to continue the precedent of trying to prevent AIDS patients, cancer patients, and others suffering chronic pain from doing what he could not.
The nonsense of Clinton must be all too familiar to Al Gore—the Vice President who could-have-been, and who may still be, has, truthfully, acknowledged youthful “experimentation” with marijuana. Perhaps his past relationship with a plant that could be used to help end America’s “addiction to oil” is what’s behind Gore’s struggle to save the planet.
Nature has a way of asserting itself, despite mankind’s best efforts to conquer it. The 75th Congress first criminalized marijuana in 1937 due to misinformation and racial animus. This pre-Brown v. Board of Education (1954) marijuana policy still remains with us to this day, despite the Constitution’s promise of equality and the obvious connection between the war on drugs and institutional racism.
In every war there are casualties. They are always the poor, uneducated people who do not have the ability to defend themselves. The “fortunate sons,” like Bush, Schwarzenegger, Thomas, Clinton, and even Gore have managed to avoid, because of their power, the criminal justice system; though they are just as “guilty” as the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people arrested for simple possession each year.
That the above politicians have succeeded in government despite having smoked marijuana shows that the plant is not the deterministic cause of evil that closed-minded skeptics like to make it out to be. Like everything subject to human will, marijuana can be abused. But that is no reason to deny people access to the plant, especially if they need it for medical purposes.
Medical marijuana by itself is not a danger to society. The true threat is politicians without the courage to publicly stand up for what they privately know to be right: A free country may not, if it wishes to consider itself “free,” seek to punish the wholly private behavior of fully informed adults that does not cause harm to others. We the People did not form a more perfect Union so that DEA officers could kick in the doors of medical marijuana patients. End prohibition now!
Kenneth Michael White is an attorney and author of “The Beginning of Today: The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937” and “Buck” (both by PublishAmerica 2004). See www.thebeginningoftoday.com for more information.
President George W. Bush smoked “pot,” but he does not want people to know that…for the sake of the children. Political men like Bush having been protecting the children in their paradoxical way since the beginning (see Socrates’ accusers). In politics, saying one thing but doing another is nothing new. For some, that is politics.
Just ask Arnold Schwarzenegger. As a body-builder he tried marijuana for “fun,” but as a Governor of the first State in the Union to decriminalize marijuana for medical use in 1996, Schwarzenegger has been AWOL on the issue, tacitly allowing the Bush Administration to usurp California’s resources to conduct Federal-led medical marijuana raids that punish people for conduct the State of California does not consider illegal.
The fact that marijuana is illegal under Federal law did not stop Justice Clarence Thomas from getting “high.” To his credit, at least Thomas dissented from the 2005 Raich decision in which a majority of the United States Supreme Court somehow found in the Constitution’s commerce clause the authority to criminalize a wholly intra-state, non-commercial activity (even though the Court could not point to any empirical evidence showing that medical marijuana had a commercial impact on interstate commerce).
Parsing the law to justify one’s personal perspective comes easy to another famous cannabis connoisseur: Bill Clinton. The former commander-in-chief “proved” his tough-on-crime credentials by allowing his administration to go after doctors who recommend medical marijuana to seriously ill patients. Clinton couldn’t inhale himself, which somehow led him to continue the precedent of trying to prevent AIDS patients, cancer patients, and others suffering chronic pain from doing what he could not.
The nonsense of Clinton must be all too familiar to Al Gore—the Vice President who could-have-been, and who may still be, has, truthfully, acknowledged youthful “experimentation” with marijuana. Perhaps his past relationship with a plant that could be used to help end America’s “addiction to oil” is what’s behind Gore’s struggle to save the planet.
Nature has a way of asserting itself, despite mankind’s best efforts to conquer it. The 75th Congress first criminalized marijuana in 1937 due to misinformation and racial animus. This pre-Brown v. Board of Education (1954) marijuana policy still remains with us to this day, despite the Constitution’s promise of equality and the obvious connection between the war on drugs and institutional racism.
In every war there are casualties. They are always the poor, uneducated people who do not have the ability to defend themselves. The “fortunate sons,” like Bush, Schwarzenegger, Thomas, Clinton, and even Gore have managed to avoid, because of their power, the criminal justice system; though they are just as “guilty” as the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people arrested for simple possession each year.
That the above politicians have succeeded in government despite having smoked marijuana shows that the plant is not the deterministic cause of evil that closed-minded skeptics like to make it out to be. Like everything subject to human will, marijuana can be abused. But that is no reason to deny people access to the plant, especially if they need it for medical purposes.
Medical marijuana by itself is not a danger to society. The true threat is politicians without the courage to publicly stand up for what they privately know to be right: A free country may not, if it wishes to consider itself “free,” seek to punish the wholly private behavior of fully informed adults that does not cause harm to others. We the People did not form a more perfect Union so that DEA officers could kick in the doors of medical marijuana patients. End prohibition now!
Kenneth Michael White is an attorney and author of “The Beginning of Today: The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937” and “Buck” (both by PublishAmerica 2004). See www.thebeginningoftoday.com for more information.
posted by Kenneth Michael White | 5:14 PM
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