The Purple Brain: America's New Reefer Madness

[Al B. Fuct]

Author: Marsha Rosenbaum and Paul Armentano

Date: June 23, 2007

Source: http://www.alternet.org/story/54977/

Copyright: © 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

 

 

The Purple Brain: America's New Reefer Madness

By Marsha Rosenbaum and Paul Armentano, AlterNet

Posted on June 23, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/54977/

 

More than 70 years in the making, the long-awaited sequel to the notorious 1936 film, Reefer Madness has arrived. It's called The Purple Brain, and just like its unintentionally campy predecessor, its purpose is to frighten Americans about marijuana.

 

The particular target audience for the Feds' new production is the millions of parents who may have, without incident, experimented with marijuana in the 1970s, when they were about the same age as their children are today.

 

The plot is as follows: Sure, the pot you and your 40-something peers once enjoyed may have been innocuous, but that's only because it bears no resemblance to the super-potent weed of today -- strains with such foreboding names as "Train wreck," "AK-47," and "The Purple." As proclaimed by Drug Czar John Walters recently, "[W]e are no longer talking about the drug of the 1960s and 1970s -- this is [in computer parlance] Pot 2.0."

 

To top off this frightening message, unsubstantiated claims of "brain damage" resulting from the use of this super-pot are new buzzwords in today's Prevention circles.

 

If ever there was an attention-getting script for scaring the hell out of parents, this is it.

 

Fortunately, while the headlines are grabbing, the story lacks credibility.

 

Growers in the business of selling marijuana have always attached pet names to selected strains of pot. In the 1970s, popular varieties included "Acapulco Gold" and "Maui Wowie." Today, as in the past, most of these labels are little more than clever marketing gimmicks devised by producers and sellers to distinguish their particular product in a highly competitive marketplace.

 

While a handful of potent strains may be available in limited quantities today, these varieties compose only a minute percentage of the overall marketplace -- at a price tag that is cost-prohibitive to anyone but the most wealthy of aficionados. For others, marijuana remains essentially the same plant it has always been, with its relatively mild rise in average potency akin to the difference between beer and wine.

 

Unlike alcohol -- or even aspirin, -- today's marijuana still poses no risk of fatal overdose, regardless of the strength of its primary psychoactive ingredient,

THC

. Moreover, cannabis consumers readily distinguish between low and high potency marijuana and moderate their use accordingly.

 

Finally, despite claims that marijuana alters the brain, it is important to note that

THC

-- regardless of its potency -- is surprisingly non-toxic to the adult as well as the teenage brain. Recently scientists at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research reported that they could find "no ... evidence of cerebral atrophy or loss of white matter integrity" attributable to cannabis use in the brains of frequent adolescent marijuana users (compared to non-using controls) after performing MRI scans and other advanced imaging technology. Separate studies assessing the cognitive skills of long-term marijuana smokers have also reported no demonstrable deficits.

 

Of course, marijuana is an intoxicant that should be avoided until and unless an individual has reached an age of mental and physical maturity, and this might be well into his or her twenties.

 

But as we urge adolescents to abstain or at least delay, let's not forget the lessons we've learned after two decades of drug education that has failed to convince students to "just say no." When teens ultimately learn the truth, exaggerated campaigns like "The Purple Brain" do little more than create skepticism about anything adults tell them about drugs, not to mention fueling their natural curiosity.

 

What's really frightening is that when teens realize they've been deceived about marijuana, they tend to disregard warnings about the very real dangers of hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. It's this latter scenario that ultimately trumps The Purple Brain as the real horror show.

 

Marsha Rosenbaum is the Director of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance and the author of Safety First: A Reality-Based Approach to Teens and Drugs. Paul Armentano is the Senior Policy Analyst for NORML and the NORML Foundation in Washington, DC.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at:

http://www.alternet.org/story/54977/

Edited July 2, 2007 by Al B. Fuct

[Al B. Fuct]

Rosenbaum gets the 'Not Your Father's Marijuana' myth somewhat under control in this piece, but she doesn't really pin it down.

 

Lots of anti-drugs campaigners make claims that cannabis is 10-20-100-1000x stronger than it was in the 1960s and 70s. The hype multiplication figure rises in direct correlation with how far right on the political spectrum the claimant happens to be.

 

Where it all gets really amusing is if cannabis once had 7% THC and it's now 10x stronger, it'd be 70% THC, keeping in mind that THC only comprises a small part of the resin on a plant. Such super-plants would have to be a glob of resin on a stem. If someone works out how to do this, let us all know quicksmart, mmmmkay?

 

There's a grain of truth in every myth. The DEA did measure an increase in the THC by weight of seized cannabis over the years. However, this isn't due to any 'super weed' or magical hydroponic intervention. It's because during the 1980s and 90s, buyers started asking for buds only instead of bags of schwag with leaf, seed & stems. 95% of the THC is in the buds. Take the useless, almost inert leaf, seed and stem weight out of a bag from 1969 and the THC% will be within single digit % of 'modern' weed.

[WantDaChronic]

There's a grain of truth in every myth. The DEA did measure an increase in the THC by weight of seized cannabis over the years. However, this isn't due to any 'super weed' or magical hydroponic intervention. It's because during the 1980s and 90s, buyers started asking for buds only instead of bags of schwag with leaf, seed & stems. 95% of the THC is in the buds. Take the useless, almost inert leaf, seed and stem weight out of a bag from 1969 and the THC% will be within single digit % of 'modern' weed.

yeah the dea are lying bastards who think that a 0.1% thc sample from the 60s represented the average quality of the day while even a 5% thc strain of today which is only considered average at best is 50x stronger and i think you're right about buyers requesting less leaf, stems, etc. and therefor ending up with only buds which have a much higher thc concentration.

[Al Fish]

Short Biographical Synopsis

 

"There's a grain of truth in ever myth."

 

My mother weaned me off of her breast with a bong. Apparently my first word was “Heroin!”, but mum held off of giving me heroin until I started kindergarten, so that I could corrupt the other kids into addiction. My life was ruined by Mary Jane before it really began.

 

Whilst still in pre-school I was selling myself to American G.I.s on R&R in Kings Cross just so as they’d give me that magic Sativa from Vietnam. Then I drifted towards reefer-induced Satanism at the same time I became Australia’s uncrowned child-porn star of the early 1970s.

 

Coming into my teenage years I was smoking so much shit I found myself drafting political tracts for Neo-Nazi Skin-Head groups. “What Would Hitler Cook?” remains to this day an underground classic: the only nutritional pamphlet based on National Socialist principles. But I was killing people who wouldn’t or couldn’t help me to score. I must have killed at least two people a day for fifteen years straight – maybe!

 

In primary school I was moonlighting as one of Idi Amin’s top-secret advisors and he was flying to me, under diplomatic cover, Ugandan heads – grown in elephant shit. Then Pol Pot was getting me to be his man on the ground in Australia and arranging visits from young women with briefcases full of Cambodian Hash. They had some exotic ways of rolling joints long before Monica the Doughnut Girl.

 

And that was my existence until I found god and gave up drugs! And now I’m completely neurotic.

[mull]

 

geez Al you're a tough act to follow...

 

 

Just wanted to highlight what was alluded to toward the end of that article.

The ol favourite 'Gateway theory' - is likely better used to describe lying about cannabis.

 

The gateway is telling mistruthes to kids, losing their trust, and thro the gate they go, trying everything you told them was bad... although some things really are bad... not cannabis.

[Al Fish]

Mullaway,

 

I loved your post. The older I get the more I struggle to appreciate the mendacity upon which we try to fool ourselves: individually, as families, self-isolated groupings groping at societies as alien as themselves!

 

All I meant was that, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

 

You want to know about society? John Cooper Clarke sang the zip slang anthems of an adverse age.

 

Beasley Street changed my life when I was young and impressionable.

 

Evidently Chickentown is most of what I know of life.

 

Please enjoy. JCC was and will remain a huge revelation.

 

Al

[Al B. Fuct]

My mother weaned me off of her breast with a bong. Apparently my first word was “Heroin!”, but mum held off of giving me heroin until I started kindergarten, so that I could corrupt the other kids into addiction. My life was ruined by Mary Jane before it really began.

 

Yeah, should have started with the smack. My old lady had needles for nipples and she bled Robitussin Plus with Codeine. I was high before they cut the cord and was in handcuffs for nicking S4 drugs before mum even got me out of the hospital. I was raised by a swarm of kindly bees after being swapped for half a kilo of Afghani opium when the old cow was jonesin; I was 6. Months.

 

I knew that children were the future- of drug marketing, so I got a gig as a primary school teacher and became a Jamaican Dollar millionaire flogging coke and smoke to 3rd & 4th graders- man, that's where the money is these days... tweens. Whoooo. Not many don't have chauffeurs anymore. Rich twats.

 

Thank fuck I never gave up drugs. I'd never be able to face the living hell that drugs have made for me and millions of others swarming around the miasmic black hole of chaos and depression that envelops even people who know people who have met me once or twice. I am Bummer, the depresser of worlds.

 

True!

[LoveMeBucket]

you should write books al.. heheheheee

 

and P.S- are we by any chance related?? ..

 

peace

[Nooby]

OK then, so if "Sure, the pot you and your 40-something peers once enjoyed may have been innocuous," it seems to me that they are admitting that the pot of the 70's was pretty harmless. Yet back in the seventies they were still preaching how bad it was. So if they were lying back then why should I trust that they are not lying now?

[Al B. Fuct]

you should write books al.. heheheheee

 

Which Al? We're infested with 'em today.

 

and P.S- are we by any chance related?? ..

 

Unlikely, but I do know there's one or two Buckets in the Fuct family, like my sister-in-law, the famous and very voluptuous pole dancer, Emanuelle Fuct-Bucket.