A Pothead's Defense of Frum
Last week, David Frum took a lot of criticism for pointing out the connection between cannabis and schizophrenia. Take it from me though: he was right.
I’m a reader of FrumForum, and I smoke pot. Last weekend, David Frum posted in this space about the connection between cannabis and schizophrenia. Those words prompted this jibe Jan. 11 from the Huffington Post.
It is an impossibly funny thing to picture Mr. Frum rolling a joint, lighting up to enjoy a few huffs and puffs with the single malt before executing a piece in a perspicacious search for answers as to the apparent ills of marijuana, how it might tie in to Jared Lee Loughner and recent events in Tucson. And this really is the reason for the Huffington Post coming out against Mr Frum (the conservative who brought us the "axis of evil") discussing something that is the bodywork of the left. How dare you even mention the kind Mr. Frum.
Take it from me, a pothead who carries a gaggle of undiagnosed mental health issues (OCD the defining one) and who enjoys a few puffs after a couple of pints to enhance the experience of escape: pot plays a huge part in the day to day management of undiagnosed mental proclivities and the harnessing of them. There are millions of us and we salute the hypothesis of Mr. Frum (that takes guts). I happen to think he is right.
But to smoke a reefer and go nuts is not the issue: It’s the OCD, dummy!
Over the past decade I’ve watched OCD go mainstream. The stigma has come slightly unstuck thanks to chaps like Howie Mandel and various other celebs. Its slipped from the silent shadows where mental illness lives in perpetuity in the era of the perfect to the point where previously silent sufferers are announcing themselves left, right and center in the form of books, interviews and TV specials - and various other means.
But again our culture misses the point as it too suffers much from mental illness, in a constant state of denial as to the remedy. This means that those who suffer from OCD suffer silently still, as is the nature of all mental illness. A self-manufactured defensive reality tells us not to participate - to withdraw and deal with being different in the pain of removal in the era of the perfect.
Most people who suffer from OCD are highly intelligent and understand our culture for what it is and want no part of it. Who can blame them? But apparently we do.
Now, I don’t purport to know anything about Jared Lee Loughner, or what might have been racing through his mind, but from what I have read I know a pot smoking crackhead when I meet one (if only on the page) and to my eyes that's who this fellow is. A pot smoking loner has many connotations but what can be deduced - and not past the reasonable - is perhaps a previous dabble with crack cocaine.
Now before readers lose it please indulge me as this hypothesis as to why. Let’s say, as friends have gone on the record and said, that Jared Lee Loughner was a pot smoking loner. Let’s take it another step and say he dabbled in the ultimate loner statement: crack cocaine (he has the MO and it needs to be said). Totally conceivable as to live the life of lonely youth (in not just the USA, but in many countries throughout the world) is to dabble in crack cocaine as to be young these days is to experiment like never before, to experience the highs and lows of life in one fast inhale. The romanticism of drug abuse in 2011 is totally out of hand; people feeling like never before. So out of hand it’s actually conceivable that a life abused by drugs is to be celebrated in death by a book deal and movie by those who watched the show - and now cash out.
To live free and die as today’s crack is not the crack of old - this is a whole new concoction. Since 9/11 there has been a huge crackdown on ether, a previous major proponent in the cooking of cocaine, as ether is highly explosive and a ready ingredient in bomb making (ether is the ingredient in crack that makes it brown, the dirtier a rock the better it is). These days a lot of the rocks on our streets are white as ether has been replaced with chemically god knows what (use your imagination) and these replacement ingredients are pushing people previously on the precipice of sanity into the abyss of insanity (just ask your local crackhead).
So if Jared Lee Loughner had even dabbled in this post 9/11 crack it’s totally conceivable the delicate flood gates were tricked open to allow paranoia, the mental madness of chaos flooding through to the point where his delicate grip on reality was forever lost.
In this scenario, to dip even your pinkie in the waters of post 9/11 crack experimentation is to repel in a canyon of metal mania you cannot get out of. If you have the correct mental imbalances before the puff you’re not coming back, instead forever lost in the high/low waves of what now are the exaggerated mental proclivities of old.
You put the pipe down, time passes, but now you’re more paranoid than before, you’re nervous and on edge. You meet an old friend, tell them you are engaged in the health kick life trip because you put the pipe down and now ‘just smoke pot’ which only informs your paranoia and warped world view, as if it’s one thing a pot smoker loves it’s his/her world view.
Tweet