Pot debate finally reaching a high point

By Rosa Harris-Adler, Special to Times Colonist

 

Forget Reefer Madness. What we're experiencing across North America these days is Reefer Sanity. In an Angus-Reid poll conducted last year, more than half of those Canadians asked said possession of marijuana should be legalized. And in the U.S., California voters will soon determine that very issue.

 

Reefer Madness was the name of a 1936 cautionary "documentary." Originally called Tell Your Children, it was financed by a small fundamentalist church group in the U.S. whose intent was to frighten the beejezus out of parents regarding the dangers of marijuana use among their children. Ostensibly narrated by a high school principal whose hands-on experience with his charges made him an expert, it depicted scenes of teenagers smoking pot, playing "evil" jazz music and descending into insanity and murder lickety-split.

 

Then a far-thinking American producer, one Dwain Esper, bought the rights to the film and recognized a gold mine disguised as a morality tale. With some judicious cutting and pasting, he edited in a few campily sexy scenes of little Lolitas vamping under the influence of killer weed, risking honour and virtue while high.

 

Reefer Madness became a classic, finding a new audience among young boomers with dime bags in the late 1960s who would toke up in university bathrooms and giggle at screenings. Then they would go out on cue and en masse, murdering and plundering while babbling madly and enjoying carnal knowledge of one another in public. I made up most of that last part.

 

Certainly, our parents freaked, to use the vernacular of the era. In their minds, pot was grouped with highly addictive drugs such as heroin or speed and indistinguishable from LSD.

 

The Canadian solution, inevitably, was to throw a royal commission at the problem. In the early 1970s, articulate dropouts who didn't want to panhandle for their daily bread made a handsome per diem testifying before Gerald Le Dain, the man given the task of conducting a study on the state of drug use in the country. Excerpts from the report are instructive, if somewhat innocent-sounding, today.

 

"Modern drug use," the commission concluded, while estimating that over a quarter of a million Canadian young people were turning on back then, "would definitely seem to be related in some measure to the collapse of religious values -- the ability to find a religious meaning of life.

 

"The positive values that young people claim to find in the drug experience bear a striking similarity to traditional religious values. [These include] concern with the soul, or inner self, the spirit of renunciation, the emphasis on openness and the closely knit community ... but there is definitely the sense of identification with something larger, something to which one belongs as part of the human race.

 

"It may be an exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the manifestations of a genuine religious revival, but there does appear to be a definite revival of interest in the religious or spiritual attitude towards life. As one drug user put it: 'The whole culture is saying: Where is God? I don't believe in your institutions, but now I know [He's] there someplace.'"

 

Those were the days of Reefer Fantasies -- offering a no-more-realistic account of the effects of cannabis than Reefer Madness provided. It was sheer naivete to think that anyone could find a value system, let alone the Supreme Being, in a sliver of hashish.

 

It took 40 years, but it now seems we're finally entering the era of Reefer Sanity, with the debate about decriminalizing pot reaching a high point, as it were.

 

As we boomers move into our dotage, many of us have taken a philosophical approach to the use of the so-far illegal substance. By now, we've worried our way through our kids' teenaged angst, when we debated how much to tell them about our own misadventures as youths. Some of us confessed wryly; others remained mum.

 

A few of us -- be honest -- still indulge in a toke or two from time to time. But we have no illusions about its spiritual effects. Most us have found our God or our values in the usual ways.

 

The bottom line: You can't legislate morality, any more than you can derive morality out of a hit of weed. Sanity at last.