When you think of the many problems plaguing Mississippians —especially, those highly recognizable in Laurel-Jones County linked to drug and alcohol abuse; increased distribution and use of heroin and other dangerously addictive drugs; destruction of the Black family; rampant teen pregnancy; premature out-of-wedlock births with congenital mental and physical retardation; increased child and spousal abuse; drug-induced health problems; juvenile delinquency; increasing school dropout rates among Blacks; Blacks’ high level of “unemployability,” unemployment/underemployment; mounting crimes, violence, murder, vagrancy and other sociological, psychological, criminal and otherwise problems indicative of ANOMIE — the writer, therefore, thinks the “push” for marijuana legalization worsens these existing growing problems. And a “Black man” leading the charge is tantamount to treason.
As an indigenous Laurelite, the writer reflects on the days in Laurel-Jones County prior to Aug. 6, 1966. At the time, the writer was at Da Nang Air Base, Vietnam, when the Armed Forces Radio Station announced that Mississippi had legalized liquor.
The first legal liquor store in Mississippi was in Greenville. The store was named the “Jigger and Jug.” In Laurel, following legalization, on the corner of Cook Avenue and East First Street, former LPD Officer Dick Kennedy operated a store that stocked “White Port” and “Mad Dog (‘MD 20-20’)” wines. For many consumers of “Pop Whiskey,” i.e., illegal corn liquor, upon legalization, White Port and MD 20-20 — cheapest and most intoxicating on the shelf, per penny-cost — became their beverages of choice.
Later, another store opened on the corner of Custom Avenue and Central — adjacent to Pitts’ Used Furniture Store, to where Blacks flocked like thirsty cattle to water. Black drunkards — losing all dignity, drinking from bottles in brown bags — became a common scene, as you see today. The compunction to not drink in public eroded.
Fifty years ago, this new legal access to “the devil’s brew,” as the late, former Mississippi Legislator Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat called it in 1952 — beginning in 1966 in Laurel-Jones County — worsened all of the things with Blacks that “Soggy” said it would do: “The poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.” As seen in sectors of Laurel-Jones County, on corners, in the streets, sitting on porches and in yards, this “dry-half” of “Soggy’s” view pans out. His “wet-half” is a non sequitur.
Of liquor, you see what “it” does for Black communities. Because “it” is legal, does not mean “it” is not insidiously harmful. “It” is detrimental to Black communities. You see growing numbers of alcoholics and derelicts therefrom, while patients of tobacco use grow amongst Blacks.
The “it” now is marijuana, of which a “push for the legalization” is under way in Laurel-Jones County by “Steven B. Griffin, director of the Mississippi Cannabis Freedom fund.” Griffin, familiar in the area, recently appeared before Laurel City Council and Jones County Board of Supervisors — apprising officials of his legalization “push.”
Going back to days when the writer was in the Air Force at Hamilton AFB, Calif. — during the heyday of “Haight-Ashbury” in San Francisco, and, the “Ark” (the popular name for the old ferry boat Van Damme, a club and performance venue in the 1960s) in nearby Sausalito — when Hippies reigned with “free love and peace,” and, “illegal pot” was “king and catalyst” — many baby boomers blew their minds on LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) via the gateway of pot.
Based upon the gateway hypothesis, according to Hamburg, Kraemer, & Jahnke, 1975; Kandel, 1975: “There is a progressive and hierarchical sequence of stages of drug use that begins with tobacco or alcohol, two classes of drugs that are legal, and proceeds to marijuana, and from marijuana to other illicit drugs, such as cocaine, methamphetamines, and heroin.
“In the early 1980s, the term ‘gateway drug’ began to be used to refer to alcohol and cigarettes, the drugs that are used prior to the use of illicit drugs. Soon, the usage was extended to include the use of marijuana as a precursor to the use of other illicit drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, and … even to cocaine as a precursor to heroin” — now a growing problem in Laurel-Jones County as seen on the front page of the Feb. 12 LL-C.
According to Jeffrey DeSimone, Eastern Economic Journal, Yale University, spring 1998, “Marijuana is by far the most widely-used illicit drug … The primary cause for concern about marijuana use may be that it potentially leads to the use of more hazardous illegal drugs such as cocaine. This prem- ise arises from evidence that the overwhelming majority of adolescent and young adult cocaine users have previously used marijuana … Since the use of cocaine is associated with problems such as crime, child poverty, poor neonatal health and the spread of HIV, a gateway effect of marijuana on cocaine could signify a sizable social cost of marijuana use.”
Moreover, Dr. Howard Samuels, psychotherapist, “legally blind,” opposes legalizing marijuana. He states, “I, for one, am absolutely against legalization of marijuana. There isn’t an argument in the world that will change the fact that psychoactive substances produce emotionally crippled adults. We are living in a country where young people everywhere are actively seeking out new and creative ways to self-medicate. These are young people who are at a place where they should be learning how to process their emotions, not sublimate or suppress them. What we are winding up with is a generation of burgeoning adults who have no idea why they have so much anxiety (when they aren’t high) or why it is practically impossible for them to relate to other people (unless they’re high).”
Dr. Samuels adds, “The psychoactive ingredient in marijuana is tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). It’s what gets you high.” But, there is “a strain of marijuana that is rich in cannabidiol (CBD) and low in THC, which has its own miraculous medicinal qualities.” This new strain of marijuana is “28 percent CBD and about 1 percent THC.”
Dr. Samuels argues, “The mad rush is for the THC-rich marijuana and not the (actual) medicinal marijuana.” Because of the “the effects of THC-rich marijuana on young forming brains … it is our responsibility to regulate this narcotic.” He poses a very salient question: “Is our job, as a society, to promote drugs that would get people high or to promote drugs that help people with physical and mental illnesses?”
For pot is not that “rabbit tobacco” (pseudognaphlium obtusifolium) that the writer and his friends gathered in the woods, crumbled, rolled in pieces of newspaper or brown grocery bags, lit up and puffed like little “cowboys.” Even then, smoking rabbit tobacco was taboo and would get your butt torn up, if Mama and Daddy knew.
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