HIGH ON SCIENCE

Canadian scientists refuse to be swayed by U.S. propaganda when it comes
to researching the possible benefits of pot

My favourite news bump of the past couple of months started in one of my
favourite Canadian cities: Saskatoon. Researchers there at the University
of Saskatchewan recently demonstrated that marijuana rejuvenates cells in
the hippocampus, an area of the brain associated with learning and
memory. Neuroscientist Xia Zhang and his team injected rats with a
superpotent chemical synthesized to resemble a chemical found in a typical
puff of pot. And, under the influence of this mega-marijuana, the rats
started growing new brain cells.

Please tell me this means that all those annoying American PSAs with
Rachael Leigh Cook smashing things and talking about "your brain on drugs"
will have to be rethought--or possibly just erased from the
nation's cultural memory. Then again, with all those new brain cells
we'll be growing, it might be hard for us to forget.

I don't want to jump on the I-told-you-so bandwagon about this, because
the U of S study comes with all the usual disclaimers: Rats aren't the
same as people; the drug the rats took wasn't exactly the same
as marijuana; the drug was administered in ultradoses; don't do this at
home; et cetera. But it's still hard not to dance around a little when I
find a good, solid scientific study that doesn't just reiterate all
the old propaganda about how pot rots your brain and turns you into a zombie.

There are a lot of weird historical reasons for that propaganda, not the
least of which is racism. Alcohol, a drug that is arguably more
debilitating and socially destructive than pot, is a European vice. Pot,
on the other hand, was used by Natives across the Americas. It was
outlawed in the United States during the 1930s--roughly around the same
time that young Natives were being rounded up and put into orphanages to
be "civilized." It was also around this time that black jazz musicians
were enjoying the weed as well.

But no group was more closely associated with marijuana than Mexicans. In
1935 a representative from a California antidrug group told the New York
Times, "Marihuana, perhaps now the most insidious of our narcotics, is a
direct by-product of unrestricted Mexican immigration." Legislators chose
to use the Mexican word for the drug to intensify this connection. And
pot regulation started in states near the Mexican border--where it was
being imported at a rapid clip--and culminated in the 1937 Marihuana Tax
Act, a federal law that made nearly all pot trafficking a crime.

None of the legislation that prohibited marijuana sales was motivated by
health concerns. In fact, the hearings leading up to the 1937 law dealt
very little with "this is your brain"-style issues: the main evidence used
to demonstrate the ill effects of marijuana (other than its connection
with Mexicans) was a few sensationalist articles from Hearst newspapers
about how pot turned upstanding citizens into criminals.

After the Marihuana Tax Act went into effect, law enforcement gradually
cracked down on all the U.S. citizens trying frantically to grow their
hippocampi. But people interested in bringing scientific fact into this
mystified kerfuffle were also there trying to remind everyone that drugs
weren't the problem.

I was reminded of this quite forcefully the other day when I picked up a
first edition of Aldous Huxley's 1946 monograph Science, Liberty, and
Peace on the street in New York City's East Village. In it, Huxley argues
that the government uses science to keep its citizens in line, thus
perverting science from its aim of enlightenment. Huxley is also the
author of another famous monograph, The Doors of Perception, a
very eloquent defense of mescaline and other banned drugs as tools for
mind expansion. As his novel Brave New World makes clear, Huxley was well
aware of the negative uses to which drugs could be put, but he still
argued that people should be free to try them, because they might also
have educational properties nobody understood yet.

The guys with stoned rats over at the U of S are scientists in the Huxley
tradition: They refuse to be cowed by propaganda that prevents us from
discovering the possible benefits of drugs. I don't know about you, but
I'm feeling kind of high on science right now. VAnnalee Newitz is a
contributing editor at Wired magazine. Her forthcoming book, Pretend We're
Dead (Duke University Press), is about monster movies and capitalism.

Reprinted with permission from Featurewell.com.