GOOD DRUGS

Researchers Discovered That Chemicals From Marijuana Rejuvenate an
Area of the Brain Linked With Learning.

My favorite news bump of the past couple of months started in one of
my favorite Canadian cities: Saskatoon.

Researchers there at the University of Saskatchewan 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 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; etc. 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 US 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.