If there’s one thing recreational pot smokers have known all their adult lives, it’s that the federal government isn’t always right.
The Cannabis Times has a story today with the tag line “The U.S. government told an outrageous lie in 1972, the health industry internalized it, and we’re all struggling with the consequences.”
Turns out President Richard Nixon had assembled this thing called the Shafer Commission, and he had stacked the deck to demonize weed. The CT tells the story better than I can:
“In the end, the Shafer Commission, stacked by Nixon, surprised everyone, especially Nixon, with its conclusion that the “possession of marihuana [sic] for personal use … no longer be an offense, [and that the] casual distribution of small amounts of marihuana for no remuneration, or insignificant remuneration not involving profit, no longer be an offense.”
“Nixon ignored the recommendation, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) maintained cannabis as a schedule 1 drug with no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.
“Nixon’s lie about marijuana, which became the government’s lie, never became politically significant, although the lie continued as a sideshow through the Reagan years and up through Jeff Sessions’ term as attorney general.”
So even the medical people cherry picked by Tricky Dick to demonize pot had to admit that, even though they couldn’t spell it correctly, marijuana isn’t bad for you.
We’re only now beginning to learn the full extent of marijuana’s medicinal properties, because the federal government wouldn’t fund research of weed. And they would arrest anyone who tried to research it. All while waving through opiods and encouraging the health care system to create opiod addicts.
At 20/20 Growth, our primary goal is to create a platform where all interested parties can come together to discuss and shape important policies like these in a common sense manner. It’s possible. Our home state, Colorado, while not perfect, has been a good model for how to legalize weed responsibly. Sure, they probably went a little too far. (Is moldy weed really a problem? Haven’t all long-time users like yours truly been smoking some level of mold in their weed for decades now?) But it was new and there was no playbook. We all get it. I rarely meet anyone upset that Colorado put in a number of measures to keep the industry clean (background checks and cameras everywhere being two high profile examples).
Good government policies keep us safer. Bad government policies hold us back.
At 20/20 Growth, we create conferences designed to guide everyone to a healthy balance.
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