Patrick Cockburn – The Unz Review Oct 8, 2021
The singer Justin Bieber is promoting pre-rolled cannabis joints that he calls “Peaches”, the name of a song from an album. He is doing so in association with a Los Angeles-based company, Palms Partners, that specialises in selling seven-joint packs for $32 (£24) in California and Nevada. “I’m a fan of Palms and what they are doing by making cannabis approachable and helping to destigmatise it – especially for the many people who find it helpful for their mental health,” he says.
Bieber is one of a strange coalition seeking to legitimise cannabis (marijuana) for its health-giving properties or because they believe that criminalisation has failed and proved counter-productive. Online advertising for recreational cannabis in the US claims that it is an antidote for depression. Amazon, the largest delivery company in the world, is reportedly lobbying in Washington for marijuana’s legalisation at the federal level.
In Britain, the former Conservative Party leader William Hague argues in a newspaper column for a move “from seeing drug use as a criminal issue to a health issue, achieving a crucial change in culture”. He praises Portugal for reclassifying as a misdemeanour the possession and purchase of drugs for individual consumption.
Legalising and commercialising cannabis is well under way from Uruguay to Canada and in at least 10 states in the US. Paradoxically, this shift towards the toleration of cannabis as more or less harmless is taking place just as scientists conclusively prove the link between cannabis and psychosis (a less shocking word than “madness” or “insanity”, but the meaning is the same). Cause and effect is today as well established as it is between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.
LinkBookmark“Numerous prospective studies have shown that cannabis use carries an increased risk of later schizophrenic-like psychosis,” says an article by Sir Robin Murray of the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London and Wayne Hall of the National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research at the University of Queensland. They cite a study showing that, though Portugal is held up as a pioneer in dealing with drugs, the rate of hospitalisation for psychotic disorders has increased 29-fold since decriminalisation 15 years ago. Another study calculates that between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of new cases of psychosis in London and Amsterdam would not have occurred if the individual affected had not been smoking high-potency cannabis.
Personal observation confirms this: doctors in mental hospitals have told me that they scarcely bother anymore to ask patients if they have taken cannabis, but simply assume it is the case. The situation has deteriorated as the proportion of THC, the psychoactive substance in cannabis producing the “high”, has risen precipitately. Once as low as 3 per cent, it has risen to 10 to 15 per cent in Europe and North America, though in Colorado, the first state to legalise recreational use, the THC can reach as high as 70 per cent. Those taking cannabis daily, particularly if they are young, face an escalating risk of permanent mental breakdown.
But if cannabis has already had its “tobacco moment”, when the damage it does is scientifically proven, why do celebrities like Justin Bieber want to destigmatise it and persuade consumers that it will improve their mental health?
Part of the boosterism in favour of cannabis plugs into its old association with a bohemian lifestyle and “the swinging Sixties”. But it is commercial pressure that is becoming far more important in lobbying for its legalisation. Businesses see they can make money out of it: projected legal sales of cannabis will be worth $66.3bn by 2025, according to a report. Big profits will pay for advertising and lobbying campaigns lauding the drug’s virtues and seeking to put in doubt or divert attention from the harm it causes.
The cigarette industry did this a century ago, funding “independent” experts who sought to blur or discredit evidence that smoking caused cancer. Governments were seduced by high tax revenues from tobacco sales and reluctant to do anything to curtail them. Hollywood stars such as John Wayne, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy happily – and profitably – glamourised cigarettes, much as is happening to cannabis now.
Businesses seeking to emulate the tobacco companies at the height of their profitability have formed a bizarre de facto alliance with liberals and progressives, who are appalled by the disastrous mess created by government drug policy. The so-called “war on drugs” has demonstrably inflicted more misery in the US, certainly on the black community, than real military conflicts.
But an overreaction to government failure, provoking a dash in the opposite direction, has equal dangers. Those in favour of greater tolerance towards drugs are almost invariably thinking of cannabis as much less nasty than heroin and cocaine. But I have met psychiatrists, with long experience of dealing with drug victims of all sorts, who believe that cannabis is more dangerous than the other drugs because it has the potential to damage many more people.
About 3 million people take illicit drugs in England and Wales, of whom about 2.5 million consume cannabis, some 10 per cent on a daily basis in 2017-18, according to the review of drugs report by Dame Carol Black. Much of the cannabis is produced in the UK, sometimes by Vietnamese organised crime groups using slave labour. Most of the violence provoked by drugs is between the gangs who control the heroin and crack cocaine markets, which are worth about £5bn a year. Decriminalising drugs, notably cannabis, will not affect this sort of battle for territory and market share. Supply lines are very different between the different drug markets, with the heroin from Afghanistan wholesaled by Turkish and Pakistani gangs, and cocaine from Latin America controlled by Albanians.
The legalisation of cannabis will do nothing to hurt organised crime groups, but it will make the drug much more widely available. The idea by proponents of legalisation that the government will tightly regulate its quality and sale is naive. If the authorities cannot control it when it is illegal, they will be even less able to do so when it is legal. But legalisation – and even limited decriminalisation – will send a message that taking cannabis is a benign activity and does not do you or anybody else much harm. The deterrent effect of illegality will evaporate and the drug becomes no different than alcohol and tobacco.
Once commercially available, all the old persuasive tools formerly used by the cigarette industry swing into action as is happening unstoppably in the US. Celebrities like Justin Bieber will “destigmatise” the drug and give it the gloss of youth and fashion. Once, the victims of the tobacco companies coughed up their lungs unnoticed by the wider community, and this time round the victims of cannabis will disappear into mental hospitals without anybody taking much notice.
(Republished from The Independent by permission of author or representative)
Same as beer, fellow.
The dose makes the poison, as Sherlock Holmes told Watson.
Loosen up at the end of the day with a joint, fine. Blow weed all day and you’re going to lose brain cells fast. But just because you can’t be sane about it, stop preaching to those of us who have a bit of discipline.
as always, it’s all about money.
if you want to stop people taking ‘recreational’ drugs you have to remove their need to do so by improving their lives – then the ‘bad’ guys lose their market. to improve people’s lives the rich have to give some of their money up – and that’s what will never happen.
High potency GMO marijuana, carries the same hazards as GMO food.
last night i dreamed settled CHEMTRAILS
drifted through the city streets and i dont
use any drugs !
Cannabis helps to ease nogwog into Whitey’s place.
Henry & Mr. Cockburn, as SWIM, one who’s done ’em all say, the answer is simple. Legalize them ALL!
R.C.
If it’s all about the Benjamins, then “all things in moderation”. Experts are still saying that a glass of wine per day is very good for you.
One could write a book on this, or there’s one joint in a lid.
I trust the nuthouse doctors as much as the covid ones.
The Zionist-Communist State legalized marijuana as a tool to further weaken the whites. Along with the ethics of Christianity, this would prevent any organized resistance against the millions of coloreds invading their nations, for marijuana creates a population of apathetic moronic druggies…
I must be a rule breaker.
I have used cannabis for more than 50 years, for most of it, daily.
If brain cells were lost by daily smoking, I should be in a permanent vegetative state by now.
Perhaps I am in a vegetative stupor, but then you are too, if you’re reading and comprehending my words.
When will Reefer Madness take over the world? I don’t know, but can’t wait for the calm, level headed insightfulness with which it is associated.
@ Mark Duggan
I agree.
Psychiatry, Voodoo Science and the Invasion of Our Minds https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/tlb-special-psychiatry-voodoo-science-and-the-invasion-of-our-minds/
Is psychology a voodoo science? https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2015/12/psychology-voodoo-science
Board-certified psychiatrist witnessed hundreds of REAL “demonic possessions”
https://dcdirtylaundry.com/board-certified-psychiatrist-witnessed-hundreds-of-real-demonic-possessions/
It is much more damaging to juveniles & certain genotypes? I know 30+ killed themselves, all heavy Pot smokers. Broadoak mental health @ broadgreen hospital is 99% Pot smokers in for psychosis treatments. It creates none breeders, another tool to kill off whitey. Psychosis has hit every age group I know. 2 friends both killed both parents through this deadly poison. Horrific murders too! (Decapitated)
I smoke only in the evening, only what I grow, only the ‘old stuff’. If I touch the new crap, now legal in ComminuCanada, I get couch lock, brain fog and many other negative symptoms. Two things required –
1 Discipline
2 keep away from the commercial stuff that had Zionist hands in its hybridization. Included here are “Durban Poison” and many of the various “Kush’s”
Psychosis is very real for those who purchase the legal poison. I know many people first hand who are young and have no idea what they are getting into. And I’ve personally seen many lives ruined over it.
When you are young (teenager) if you use a lot of cannabis, it can lead to permanent problems with memory. Once you are past your teenage years, there is no problem. Most if not all of the problems caused by using excessive cannabis after your teenage years will go away once you stop or reduce your intake. And the best way to use hashish, if you haven’t tried it, is to eat it without heating it and combined with some beer or wine. The two work really well together. The heat changes the THC. If you eat eat the hashish without having heated it, the results are much more dreamy and laid back and prolonged. If you heat it first (cooking or smoking), it is much more intense and much less dreamy. Try eating hashish with some beer or wine if you haven’t, you will love it. The leaf form of cannabis needs heating first (cooking in food or smoking), to activate the THC, but hashish doesn’t. I lived several years in Spain with its proximity to Morocco, and then nearly 20 years in Belgium with its proximity to Amsterdam. I used a lot before getting married. It’s good to do all these things when young and carefree !!!!!!!!!!
The lower orders doped up. Easier to control and eventually to exterminate. Aldous Huxley – Brave New World.
I agree with Franz, the dose makes the poison, as with alcohol. Millions of people have just a glass of wine or a shot of whisky each night, which improves their lives. While a few become alcoholics.
I’m very old and yet do quite mentally difficult work (computer programmer/analyst) so I take less than the joint that he mentions, just one long puff from a percolated water pipe at the start of the day. Or a nibble from a medicated toffee. Anything more would make me take a LOT longer to get work done due to being easily distracted by music, internet articles etc.
And it has the opposite effect on my mental health. I go from being blah about life and not caring if I lived or died to finding life interesting, I feel affection for my friends and my wife, my co-workers even for random people I meet during the day.
So psychosis for a few users has to be weighed against improvements in mental health for millions.
On the negative side, may be different for others, it lowers my immunity to bacterial sinus infections. But overall I have excellent health, maybe due to exercise and not being fat.
Also some corrections to the article:
-THC percentage hasn’t risen from 3%..to 70%. Nowadays THC percentages in the US for pot are in the 20 to 28% range. That 70% figure is strictly for ‘concentrates’.
-Re. “Businesses see they can make money out of it”, it is not just businesses also state governments – a recreational user buying pot in the US, pays 40% or more in taxes!
-Also the part about gangs, slave labor etc. is rubbish. That was true only in the previous era when pot was illegal.
Nowadays it is grown in pristine, industrial type factory setting, with strict quality control. See any number of YouTube videos that give you tours of those huge marijuana plantations.
I don’t know if this is good or bad, GMO might be already being used to get those high THC percentages.
@ NICO X
the CIA is the worlwide bigest hard drugs
(cocain+heroin) dealer in background, in
the streets he has its african + islamic
dealers earning the money to buy arms
for their diferent groups under his thumb .
so, every junky is a arms suporter of
political terror groups. all secret services
are involved andlocal politicans know
abouit the source of the problem and
all are traitors doing nothing about !
Cannabis causes psychosis. (lol)
Look at the covid psycho’s walking around in masks and complain about cannabis. Too funny.
Patrick Cockburn only proves that if psychosis does exist in individuals, he might be one of the primary sufferers out there ranting.
Most of humanity, once it goes all in on a massive, blind orwellian inversion of reality, is essentially crazy. That’s one thing Lennon got right. So just remember all you fearful anti weed, anti sixties propagandists out there subliminally frontrunning your toxic booze, pills, injections, gigs, fake religions, relationships with hags, yourselves and worse, and various delusional beliefs, Cannabis has no toxicity or lethal dose, and it fights cancer, stroke, and seizures. God grows it from the Himalayas to Iowa, wild. It remediates the ecology. Herb’s a proven medicine which is why it is listed under Schedule 1 in the most inverted culture ever to exist run by total maniacs.
Where indeed do you stand then, inside or outside the asylum?
Herb unfortunately has no natural barrier of entry to ‘weed out’ crazy people from using it. The CIA used guns, cars, computers, nylon, food, water, and energy to commit their serial crimes. If you want to blame all of that because some crazies got into the good stuff, fine, do without all that and show us how holy you are, but I’m calling fake on this assertion that associating herb with crazy people is a valid scientific methodology. Plus, MKUltra evaluated herb and found it was the only truth serum they ever looked at.
All the losers hanging with ‘burned cock’ in this new failed Reefer Madness hysteria already totally lost the drug war; it’s past your time to get over it. Your holier than thou slimeball icons began this failed war at the same time they took the dollar off any real backing and trashed the American standard of living beyond repair. Look up the synchronicity and you will realize how changes in culture begin with changes in reality, and changes in symbolism (money being number one) change your whole reality to counterfeit.
Yall have no grounds to be talking smack about insanity in a non toxic herb during an era of genocidal big lies, if that is your best gambit now that criminal pharma is totalling, or trying to total by injection, all of injectable humanity. That’s what happens when you set ablaze the cultural eras that scare you shitless because they are too true for you to stomach in your delusional costume and the only role you ever played was virtue signalling.
Most people today don’t do any manual labor if they can help it. Unless they sweat physically fully engaged on MJ they have no way at all to evaluate whether Cannabis is a demotivator or performance enhancer. This subject was actually studied anyway in Jamaica. Time for all the idiots afraid of herb to just STFU and learn about reality instead of making up ‘anecdotal science’ based on “I know someone who believes” methodology. Especially when the “someone” habitually prescribes tranks, Adderall and downers.
Unz is getting really lame lately, but then again, I never actually followed the crap from Cockburn as far back as decades ago.
When the injectable crazies stroke out they might be wishing they had some of that THC hippie dope ‘running amok in their blood’ instead of trillions of spike proteins clotting their brains up.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.118.023587
A poem.
The man who couldn’t finish things
Nearly finished this,
If only he hadn’t drunk the wine
And smoked that enormous spli
And as if alcohol and tobacco are not just as harmful as Cannabis.
Get off your great high horse, Preacher Man!
And Mr Preacher Man, who was it rushed out to get their Covid Vax, just because they just couldn’t bar the thought of not going down the pub to watch the football on a Saturday afternoon?
And who are the ones so keen to get their apartheid vax passports so they can go to nightclubs and drink their stupid heads senseless?
All medecines have side effects
gay