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The new age of Reefer Madness
In 1938 the word ‘marijuana’ was introduced to Australia
by Harry Anslinger and the US Bureau of Narcotics as ‘a
new drug that maddens victims’. Marijuana was said to
come from the plant Cannabis sativa, which was said to be 20
times more potent than Cannabis indica, the source of hashish,
“well-known for its violently sex-stimulating effects.”
It was sensationally described as an ‘evil sex drug’
that caused its devotees to be satisfied with only the most
appalling of perversions.
By the 1970s, prohibitionists were arguing the complete opposite.
Now they claimed there was conclusive evidence that smoking
marihuana caused “genetic imbalance” effeminising
young men, causing them to grow long hair and become impotent.
The third Age of Reefer Madness began in the 1990s with a scare
campaign about cannabis causing schizophrenia. That decade saw
the start of a moral panic about “skunk”, a new
kind of cannabis said to be thirty times stronger than earlier
cannabis, which sent people mad. This “Reefer Madness
II” had many similarities to Anslinger’s “Reefer
Madness” of the 1930s, including the claim that there
was a new kind of cannabis that was many times stronger than
previous forms of cannabis.
There was, once again, a “new drug that maddens victims”.
The newspapers were saying, smoking even one joint could send
you mad. Governments funded researchers who gave this nonsense
the veneer of science in dubious papers, which inevitably ending
by recommending that more research needed to be done. Harry
Anslinger had reincarnated as an academic industry.
This “Reefer Madness II” research was disputed by
other research, which showed that the whole moral panic about
cannabis and psychosis was a furphy. The incidence of psychotic
disorder in the Australian community has remained steady through
the past four decades, even though cannabis use became a rite-of-passage
for Australian teenagers in those forty years.
This held not just for Australia but for the whole world.
Nearly every western country has seen an explosion in cannabis
use since the 1960s and nowhere has there been a corresponding
madness plague.
The claim that cannabis use had increased the risk of psychotic
outcomes in the UK, made in numerous British tabloids, was investigated
in Frisher et al. 2009 who examined trends in the annual prevalence
and incidence of schizophrenia and psychoses in the UK from
1996 to 2005. The study found no evidence of increasing schizophrenia
or psychoses in the general population. Despite moral panics
about skunk and cannabis psychosis, the incidence and prevalence
of schizophrenia and psychosis were either stable or declining
in the UK between 1996 and 2005.
By the 2000s, cannabis found itself part of the Culture Wars.
As the environmental crisis worsened, environmentalism was “blamed”
on cannabis use. According to Andrew Bolt and co., those who
claimed we were destroying the planet had simply been smoking
too much pot.
Under Howard, the ABC and the Commonwealth Department of Health
pushed the Reefer Madness agenda. The Commonwealth Health Department
funded the extremist group, Drug Free Australia, to commission
a study on cannabis and schizophrenia. After a scare campaign
by the Courier Mail, their alarmist report called Cannabis,
Schizophrenia, Suicide and Other Ill-effects (CSSOI) was presented
to Queensland Parliament, where a Parliamentary committee is
currently investigating the matter, using the research paper
commissioned by Drug Free Australia, with a series of recommendation
(also from Drug Free Australia), recommending that their misinformed
and hysterical views on cannabis be taught in schools, and be
followed by treatment professionals, and by every level of government.
They want school children to be drug-tested, drivers to be drug-tested,
penalties increased (of course) and they want regular Operation
Noah style blitzes every three months! And they want the Cancer
Council to promote the message that cannabis causes cancer,
despite emerging evidence of the beneficial effects of cannabis
on certain forms of cancer!
While it is important to keep putting the information out about
cannabis’s amazing properties as a medicine, satire might
prove a useful weapon as well.
One of the great achievements of the early cannabis movement
was to laugh “Reefer Madness” to death. Once again
laughter might prove our best ally. Prohibitionists tend to
be grim, humourless characters, ideal for comedy and satire.
All the humourists and satirists out there, who are friends
of the genus cannabis, might consider the remedy to Reefer Madness
II.
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Dr John Jiggens will be talking on “The three ages of
Reefer Madness” at the Nimbin Mardi Grass on Saturday
at 5pm in the Nimbin Town Hall.
Dr John Jiggens is a writer and journalist who has published
several books including The killer cop and the murder of Donald
Mackay and, with Jack Herer, the Australian version of The Emperor
Wears No Clothes.
His Ph.D was 'Marijuana Australiana: Cannabis Use, Popular Culture
and the Americanisation of Drugs Policy in Australia 1938 -
1988'.