When Policy is Based on Bull****

There was a period when Europeans and, later Americans thought tomatoes were poisonous. Scientists wrote about the horrors of the plant and its fruit. According to an online snippet from a book entitled, In Praise of Tomatoes: Tasty Recipes, Garden Secrets, Legends & Lore, the first published reference to the tomato in Europe was by an Italian herbalist, Pietro Andrae Matthioli, who classified the tomato with mandrake plants.  Mandrakes had long been considered to be aphrodisiacs and the tomato got a nickname, “love apple.” Somewhere along the line, an aphrodisiac became a deadly fruit to be avoided.  Elsewhere, I read that the thing that got tomatoes pegged as poisonous was the fact that aristocrats used pewter plates which, when acidic tomato were placed on them, leached out the lead in the pewter and made the aristocrats sick.

If you know how I write, you probably know this post isn’t about tomatoes, don’t you?  You probably haven’t guessed that it’s about marijuana, though. But it is.  But not for long, as this will be a relatively brief post.

A conversation with a friend yesterday brought this topic to mind. I think it’s high time (pardon the pun) that marijuana be legalized in all the states and by the federal government. From what I’ve read, it isn’t any more addictive than grapes and isn’t as harmful as grapes after they’ve been fermented.  I might be able to understand and accept some sort of regulation about driving under the influence, but generally, not much else. Like the tomato, I think marijuana has been given a bad rap, both by scientists and by society, neither of which has had any business proclaiming the horrors of the plant and its many uses.

My experiences with marijuana are few. A couple of times while I was in college and once a number of years later at a party. So I cannot speak from much experience about its effects on me.  But from what I’ve read and from what I’ve learned from people who have far more experience with the “devil weed” than I, it’s not the monster we were taught it was. We were fed a line of BS based not on facts, but on fantasy, much like the maligned tomato of sixteenth century Europe through eighteenth century America.

At this point in my life, I’d like to be able to try it again without fear of being arrested and imprisoned.  I doubt it’s widely available where I live; given the fact that Arkansas is an exceptionally conservative (look up the meaning of understatement) state, even if it were, I’d probably be turned in if people smelled the stuff burning in my house, anyway. It ought not be illegal, dammit. I may have to go to Colorado to experience, without fear, what I experienced (with fear) when I was younger.

And that’s what I have to say about that.

About John Swinburn

"Love not what you are but what you may become."― Miguel de Cervantes
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