Marijuana and Apathy

I have been a physician for 61 years, during which time I directed many drug-abuse councils and worked with thousands of addicted/habituated young people as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and later as a practitioner of Chinese medicine.

I have been opposed to the “war on drugs” as misguided and doomed to fail to assess, define, and control the drug plague of the 20th and 21st century. I am in favor of medical marijuana under medical supervision. I am against police action and for education, however slow.

Nevertheless, I wish to register my experience with marijuana over these years as a substance extremely functionally, if subtly, destructive to people.

Subtly destructive, how?

Marijuana allows people to make extensive and sometimes unrealistic, even grandiose, plans for their lives, and robs them of the ability to realize these plans. They are left often with lives sometimes filled with excellent designs and without the will or energy to execute, to make decisions and follow through.

Among so many people, clients, friends and acquaintances I have seen lives lived in fantasy and futility in many degrees of severity with endless energy depleting maneuvers to hide their failure from others and themselves. Somewhere deep inside each loss is registered if not faced.

The reason is fear; fear of the emotions that would otherwise lead them to encounter struggle. Fear of their own anger and that of others was most often shared in the 1960s. A deep need to avoid confrontation and disapproval was most often cited.

This country, the richest in the world, is number 37 in the world in education and 27th in health care. We are not facing what is happening to our youth and our future. Creating generations of people who cannot cope with the endurance of pain for gain; generations of people who feel entitled to have what they should actually struggle for.

Marijuana has been a silent destroyer of the ability for 50 years, 3 generations, of our young people, to tolerate the inter- and intrapersonal frustration inherent to difficult long-term tasks. And now one of these generations is no longer young. Today not a few of these are introducing this drug to their children, actually and not infrequently.

During this period a narcoticized working class, middle and lower, has lost its earning ability and its capacity to have fought to keep it.

Western medical studies are long since quoted saying that marijuana is physiologically harmless. Of course people vary in their ability to detoxify it. According to Chinese medical studies, the story is different, a story that rests on a diagnostic methodology little understood and less accepted by a medical establishment largely and arrogantly ignorant of it.

Marijuana, according to Chinese herbal medicine, thousands of years old, is what is known as a “cold” herb draining the essential energy called “yang” primarily from the liver rendering it unable to perform its functions of physical and mental energy and containing it for when it is needed. The result is that when it is time to “move” on plans there is no coherent energy to do it.¹

This, my thesis, is based on clinical experience with thousands of people over the past 50 years, experience that questions the value of “evidence-based” statistical biochemistry to correctly evaluate the mental and physical depredations of marijuana.

America, the human race, wake up: marijuana and the narcoticizing and simulating stable of substances, is devastating you as it soothes you into a permanent deep slumber and vulnerability.

Leon I. Hammer, MD

President

Dragon Rises College of Oriental Medicine

1000 NE 16th Ave. Building F

Gainesville, FL 32601

352-371-2833; fax: 352-244-0003

leonhammer@mac.com

www.dragonrises.edu; www.dragonrises.org

Notes

1. Hammer LI. The liver in Chinese medicine. Med Acupunct. September 2009;21(3):173–178.