By I love drugs!There, I said it. I’m addicted to at least one drug, and take great enjoyment in a couple others. Luckily for me, my drugs are all legal. I can drink as much coffee as I damn well please, and no one passes moral judgement when I end up with a blistering headache because I didn’t have my morning dose of caffeine and ended up with withdrawal symptoms. A more likely reaction is that someone fetches me some dark roast. I also very much enjoy the mind-altering effects of a nice, spicy, (unoaked, thank you very much) Shiraz, particularly when I am entertaining some of my husband’s colleagues. Boring, pedantic pinheads are transformed into charming, eloquent companions with the correct application of alcohol. If I wanted to, I could imbibe nicotine in a variety of ways, all perfectly legal. I could hop myself up on amphetamines and psychotropics, like so many middle class white women do, with one quick visit to the medical clinic.
And because I am in Canada, where medical use is legal, I could get a prescription for marijuana.
I’m not a fan of pot because its principle effect on me is to make it seem perfectly reasonable to follow up eating an entire large pizza with a box of donuts and two bags of Doritos. I can consume an entire week’s worth of calories in one sitting, if the pot is any good. And I won’t throw up, either. I’ll feel like absolute shit for a solid week, but all those calories will be processed and stored efficiently on my ass until such time as they are needed. This is wonderful for people suffering from decreased appetite because of chemotherapy or other medical treatments/conditions, but not so great for aging women whose metabolism is slowing down naturally.
The last time I smoked marijuana was more than a decade ago, and it was not legal under any circumstances. It was during undergrad, at a toga party. A bunch of us, all women I seem to recall, and all white, ducked into an alley behind a student apartment building, wearing our togas and passing a blunt around. And down the alley came a diligent police officer, on his bike. There was no point scattering, so we just stood there. He told us to take our party inside.
No arrests, no threats, no aggression, just a “take it inside, ladies”.
Still, I decided it would be clever to throw some attitude at him.
“What are you gonna do? Double us to the station?”
At this point the officer freaked out, grabbed me by the toga, smashed my face into the ground, put his full weight on my chest and cuffed me.
Oh, wait. No he didn’t. He pointed to his radio and said “No, I’m gonna call a car to come and pick you up. Inside, ladies!”
#WhiteGirlPrivilege
My experience with illegal drugs, questionable attire and the police is the perfect example of the privileges affluent (or soon to be) white women enjoy in our culture. Even if the officer had cited me, he would not have roughed me up, despite the fact I was mouthy. And the odds of me being convicted, let alone sentenced to anything like jail time were exceptionally remote. It was true then, and it’s still true now. This means that no matter what your personal feelings about the legalization of marijuana, whether you support it or not, men are being penalized for using specifically because they are men. Heaven help you if you are foolish enough to commit the sins of being poor and Black while being a man. You are going down.
One of the arguments against the legalization of marijuana is that the potency of the drug has increased dramatically over the past twenty years, but to me, that’s an argument strongly in favor of government regulation, not against it. Consider alcohol, which arguably causes just as much social harm as marijuana might. Two king cans of beer at 5% concentration of alcohol by volume will give me a nice buzz. Two king cans of wine at 12% concentration will make me throw up. Two king cans of vodka at 40% concentration will put me in the hospital. If there were no regulations on the concentration of alcohol permitted, and any can could be 5%, 12% or 40% and it came down to the luck of the draw, I wouldn’t ever drink alcohol.
I’m risk averse.
Allowing people to choose the potency of their weed has a lot of good things going for it, IMO. Sure, there will be a black market of weed that breaks the rules, just as there is a black market for alcohol that breaks the rules. This is why I don’t drink homemade wine – I have many Italian neighbors who are enthusiastic wine-makers and love to share and that stuff is lethal! I pass it on to a friend who is 6’5 and 300 lbs. He enjoys the punch of homebrew. Calls it “porch-crawler”. And he’s welcome to it.
Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that keeping marijuana illegal is the correct decision. We are still left with a number of troubling issues that affect men disproportionately, and men of color even more so. You cannot stamp out marijuana use, so you will have violent gangs and waste millions of dollars on policing those gangs, not to mention the property damages that will inevitably ensue. Most of those gangs are populated by men, particularly inner city men with little other prospects for earning an income. You will spend tax revenues, and generate none, and those revenues are provided principally by taxpaying men. You will end up having to pay the housing, food and medical costs (jail) for violators, also mostly men. Those men will be released eventually into a system that further penalizes them, creating cycle that is almost impossible to escape.
It’s difficult for me to understand how this is a good idea. It’s expensive, it destroys the lives of men, it doesn’t work and it penalizes men of color in particular.
A harm reduction strategy, much like we have for alcohol and tobacco is far more sensible. Let the government regulate the provision of marijuana and let citizens decide for themselves how they wish to use it. I am not at all in favor of the government becoming a producer – that tends to create bloated, inefficient bureaucracies that suck money and bleed useless paperwork. Let capitalists take care of production and the government can take care of regulation and enforcement.
Marijuana is a men’s rights issue for another important reason that is just now coming into public consciousness. Full disclosure: I am on the masthead at A Voice for Men and I am far from objective when it comes to the mission there: to advocate for men and boys. Our most recent activism is focused on men’s mental health, and we have amassed a formidable group of qualified mental health professionals including psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors and coaches, with the intention of providing counseling services for men that begins with the very basic assumption that men are not required to meet, and are often harmed by the demand that they support and value women’s lives and feelings more than their own. An important topic centers on anxiety, and specifically the anxiety men experience as a result of not meeting, or fearing they will not meet the demand that they provide for women. In the most simple form, this is the anxiety a man experiences when facing the possibility of a job loss: not an anxiety about what will happen to him, but anxiety over what will happen to the women and children he is expected to support. Women have largely escaped mandatory gender roles (although most women still freely choose traditional gender roles), and men have not.
That anxiety can be addressed in a number of ways, and for any men interested, I strongly encourage you to visit www.anearformen.com to consider the possibilities, but one of the avenues showing a great deal of promise when it comes to helping men understand, process and ultimately conquer anxiety is the use of medical marijuana. Prohibitions on the medical use of marijuana affect men disproportionately once again.
A Voice for Men, and men’s rights in general are an unstoppable cultural force, greatly aided by the rapidly disintegrating feminist movement. It’s almost amusing that writers at Salon and Alternet have now pretty much given up attempting to slander AVfM and men’s rights and instead focus solely on Pick Up Artists, claiming they are representative of MRAs in general. They can write, unironically, one assumes, sentences like this:
So, obviously he decided to kill her — that’s the logical course of action to take against someone who feels targeted and harassed and says something about it, right? Well, yes, according to several men’s rights activists at the Roosh V forum, an online community of pick-up artists who rushed to defend Kozak’s actions on Monday.…completely oblivious to the fact that PUAs and men’s rights have a small overlap of common concerns, but are generally two completely separate domains, much in the way that libertarians are generally supportive of men’s rights issues, but cannot be held up as emblematic of the MHRM. Confirming that Roosh is not an MRA is as simple as clicking the About tab on his website, but that’s an unreasonable level of journalistic rigor to demand from feminist/progressive publications. These are people who use David Futrelle for source for material, after all.
When the media isn’t busy peddling lies or refusing to even speak to actual MRAs when they write articles about MRAs, they are demanding to know just what the hell we are doing about the problems men face.
When, boy, when are you gonna get your shit together?
And our haters are going up in smoke.
Lots of love,
JB
Source
No comments:
Post a Comment